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This delightful collection of essays tells the story of a particularly generative chapter of our field’s history.
Beginning in the early 1960s, several forces collided to forge what is now the Psychoanalytic Center of California, a center for psychoanalytic training in the British object relations tradition. Some of the intersecting vectors included tribal hostilities at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute (LAPSI), resulting in fractures and then re-groupings of analysts; seductively sunny weather that beckoned to analysts from colder climates to try a different way of living; and the fruitful connections made between one of the local splintered-off study groups and the London Kleinians who accepted invitations to visit and lecture. Wilfred Bion, Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst, and Albert Mason left England to settle and practice in Beverly Hills. Mason, to whom this book is dedicated, became the leading spokesperson for the British Kleinians in this area, helping to extend British object relations from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.
This book gives the reader an intimate sense of what it was like to be in the actual company of these pioneer analysts. A hint of this is in the charming foreword by Barnet D. Malin, Arthur Malin’s son, who describes an evening in his family’s home where a cigar-smoking Hanna Segal gave him and his brother new miniature James Bond Aston Martin cars (complete with functioning ejector seats).
The experience in reading this collection is one of seeing “old friends,” and being immersed in their characteristic ways of speaking. For example, Segal’s coherent organization, which
anticipates arguments and responses, is in sharp contrast to Bion’s speaking style, which seems to feature a trust that his words, evocative but with inexplicit linkage, will eventually cohere in another’s mind.
A thread running through all the chapters is both Melanie Klein’s influence and each analyst’s effort to put into their own words their deep