The work of psychoanalysis: Sexuality, time and the psychoanalytic mind*

The Work of Psychoanalysis, as its subtitle suggests, addresses the interconnections of sexuality, time and the psychoanalytic mind. It especially

expresses one particular psychoanalytic mind: that of the author. The work has two faces; reflecting two aspects of the professional mind of Dana Birksted-Breen. Firstly it involves that of the psychoanalytic scholar and secondly that of the analytic practitioner. In her first role Birksted-Breen is discriminating, comprehensive and contemporary, as befits one who has been Editor of The International Journal for many years and who also previously acted as Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. She is also determined to make clear what she believes are the most significant discoveries that have arisen from practice and that have in turn, an effect on practice. The closer she comes to describing her own work the clearer it becomes which of the ideas in contemporary psychoanalysis are relevant to her views, most notably on the working of the analyst's mind in clinical practice.

Birksted-Breen has made her own original contributions to analytic theory: notably ‘Phallus, Penis and Mental Space’ (1996) a famous paper which she re-tells with more elaboration in Chapter 6. Here, in this new work she also gives her own original thought on ‘Psychoanalytic Time’: the relationship of ‘there and then’ to ‘here and now’; après coup; continuity and/or transformation. She also introduces her ideas on mental space as an aspect of time in analysis in her concept of Bi-ocularity in the mind of the analyst at work. One could apply the notion as she describes it in Chapter 11, to this book itself in the sense that she maintains an objective awareness of psychoanalytic theory (informed by her own thinking and wide reading) alongside which lies her direct day-to-day clinical experience while between these two