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It has been a pleasure to review this book, which collects in one volume Brenman's published papers, one new unpublished paper, The recovery of the good object relationship: The conflict with the superego, and three supervision sessions undertaken with members of the Milan Institute of Psychoanalysis. The book gives a very good idea and feel for Brenman's distinctive and important voice as a psychoanalyst in the post-Kleinian tradition. It is edited by Fornari-Spoto who gives an excellent introduction to its main themes.
I think that, in his approach to theory, Brenman raises profound issues concerning technique, and it is this that gives him his distinctive voice. He is in the tradition of writers on technique who are able to make their points without the need, explicitly or implicitly, to criticize colleagues or different traditions; and this is most welcome. His abiding concern is with how to listen to and talk with the patient and here he makes a crucial point, one that sounds obvious but is in fact often overlooked. It is that a patient needs a relationship with a good internal object to be able to hear an interpretation. The patients discussed are not those wrestling with depressive anxieties but those of the kind originally discussed by Freud and Abraham in their work on melancholia, whose capacity for love is overridden by the greed and hate of the primitive superego, that is, those patients who lack secure good internal objects. These are in the main the patients we now see in analysis.
Brenman is clear, and he conveys this vividly in his work, that what helps the patient is having the sense that the analyst really appreciates what it feels