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In this succinct book the author sets out to show how the analyst has different superegos and ego ideals in play or in conflict within their clinical work, which may either impede understanding of the patient or sometimes guide that understanding. The author sets out contrasting accounts of the superego and neglected or largely forgotten accounts of the ego ideal, and gives his own reformulations of these theories. The case illustrations are lively and uncluttered with psychoanalytic jargon so that the interplay of unconscious internal and external interactions between patient and analyst shows through. The clinical situations described are rooted in his countertransference experience and in each case the key point is that attention to one’s countertransference is essential for the patient to be appreciated and known through painstaking transformations of the transference within the analytic process. I think it is a book of practical truth and reason – what it is like to be a psychoanalyst, both self-appraisal and criticism, and with candour the author includes what he has missed and had blind spots about. Overall it gives a perspective of psychoanalytic development within the mind of the analyst and the effects of this on his work.
At the outset the author describes how the patient “will evoke a potential aspect of the analyst’s personality” – perhaps a pathological side but not necessarily so, for the patient as well as the analyst “has an instrument that can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (2). Because of this the patient can also sense the analyst’s misunderstandings and blind spots, and this frequently comes into the dynamic of the work. He concurs with Freud that “no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and his internal resistances allow” (3). (Freud 1913, SE 12: 320; 1910, SE 11: 144–145). So, in time, the patient sees the analyst as they are, unconsciously but nevertheless truly, and typically or frequently, just beyo