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Clinical psychoanalysis, at its core, concerns itself with the understanding and interpretation of anxiety and the internal conflicts that underlie it. In this book, Chris Mawson takes a closer look at the anxiety that analysts encounter in clinical practice, the components of that anxiety and the way those components are perceived and communicated about. In particular, Mawson concerns himself with what he calls ontological anxiety, anxiety less born in object relational conflict than in fears of non-being, of loss or disintegration of the self. The world of internal objects and the conflicts and phantasies concerning these objects, for Mawson, proceeds from the need to manage these more primordial anxieties about being and non-being; and these two realms of anxiety are perceived, and clinically addressed through different but complementary ways of listening to, and being with, the patient. As a theoretician, Mawson is deeply steeped in the Kleinian-Bionian tradition, and his formulations draw particularly on Bion's ideas about transformations in “K” and “O”. But he draws as well on philosophy and dramaturgy; and his ideas about anxiety and about communication in the analytic situation are embedded in his understanding of these two fields.
The book is structured as a unified argument rather than a series of stand-alone chapters, and given that Mawson draws on fields of study that many analysts will be unfamiliar with, it can be a challenging read at times. That said, Mawson leads his reader carefully through his multidisciplinary sources, providing lucid explication of those sources and making clear their relevance to the psychoanalytic areas of inquiry he is pursuing. In the end, Mawson shows us how his study of these contiguous disciplines has transformed his thinking about his work, and his vision of the psychoanalytic process.
The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Mawson traces the appearance of conceptions about ontologi