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The epigraph for the first chapter of Henry Markman’s creative and engaging book is a quotation from Freud’s “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis”, in which Freud makes it clear that the technique he recommends is only suited to his own individuality: “I do not venture to deny that a physician quite differently constituted might find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and to the task before him.” Accordingly, in Creative Engagement Markman explains step by step, in successive chapters, the elements of his own individual way of doing psychoanalysis. Along the way, he pays generous tribute to the many influences that have formed him as an analyst, including his own mentors and the writings of a wide range of analytic thinkers. He enlivens each chapter with one or more clinical vignettes to illustrate the concept under discussion.
Markman holds, as do many others, that the analytic relationship is the most important therapeutic factor in analysis. In this, he draws inspiration from the Ferenczi of the Clinical Diaries, Winnicott, the later Bion and numerous others, most interestingly the less well-known but influential Argentine analyst Pichon-Riviere, to whose concept of the vinculo, or “link”, Markman devotes a whole chapter. According to Pichon-Riviere, the analytic dyad, like any other human relationship, involves a dialectical circuit of communication between the participants. This circuit can be either alive and moving in a spiral in which new configurations can emerge; or it can be dead, empty, and repetitive. The task of the analyst is to remove impediments that block the free, vital circulation that will, if maintained, lead to a good therapeutic process. When this does not happen, the result is what Markman calls “non-process”. This may superficially sound like analysis, but nonetheless the most vulnerable and fearful aspects of the analysand’s psyche remain untouched and therefore unchanged. Markman’s book is devo