You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this collection, Edna O’Shaughnessy, a leading light in both adult and child psychoanalysis, displays the full breadth of knowledge and clinical experience that has served as a guide for generations of trainees and clinicians over her career spanning 60 years. One of the first to train as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock in the 1960s, she never lets the reader forget the presence of the infant and the child in every adult treated in analysis or psychotherapy. Following in the Kleinian tradition, O’Shaughnessy considers the work of Freud, Klein, Bion and Rosenfeld, among others. She presents the reader with her own understanding and use of difficult concepts, and develops many new ideas of her own.
This collection of papers, essays and some reviews, many originally published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, covers more themes than is possible to mention here, including a diverse range of subjects touching on the nature of psychic reality, subjectivity, the psychic limits of endurance and reparation, and the intricacies of defensive organizations of the personality; I mention those that are the most used and well known, although each chapter has stimulating and profound ideas. The introduction by the book’s editor Richard Rusbridger tackles both the depth and scope of O’Shaughnessy’s work in a clear and engaging style. O’Shaughnessy herself writes with great clarity and precision, using clinical material to highlight and explain complex issues, most notably her investigations into the pathological superego.
Many of these papers are famous in their own right. An admirable example is the first paper in the book, “The absent object”, where O’Shaughnessy describes the presence and absence of “the breast” as crucial. She explains how a good object is not always present, but has a permanent presence in the internal world that “spans presence and absence, which goes beyond the physical presence of the breast to the breast in its absence” (19).
Using the work