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Betty Joseph has been a practising psychoanalyst for fifty years. She shows, in this chronologically ordered series of papers, how she has developed an increasingly more careful process of getting to know, rather than know about, her patients. She has moved from writing about her patients “acting out” in the transference (Chapter 5) to “acting in” (Chapters 8,10,12) as though these were relatively isolated instances of unusual activity, to being attentive to all the moment-to-moment shifts and changes in the constant to and fro of living psychic change (Chapter 14). She now follows not only the patient's transference to her, and her counter-transference to them, but the effect of her counter-transference and her interpretation on them, and this is very much her own contribution, in spite of her debt to Klein and Bion. A natural modesty and a great respect for experience in all its imperfections and complexities means that she is never in love with an interpretation and also morally incapable of thinking in theoretical headlines. She refuses to carve the patient's experience up into oversimplified pieces, yet the writing is clear and convincing. The great weight of Joseph's work is to develop and expand Bion's concept of containment of the patient's projective identifications; she also pursues, however, some of its previously unrecognized implications.
Georgia O'Keeffe said that she decided to paint her flower canvases on a huge scale because in the hectic and technologically excited mood of New York in the 1920′s, no-one would look at small flower paintings, however exquisite. She decided that if she could paint the flowers big like the huge buildings going up, people would have to look at them.”- and”, O'Keeffe said, “-they did.” joseph is of a very different cast of mind; she simply asks people to look more closely at the flower - and, judging by the inspiring effect of her teaching worldwide, they do.
The thoughtful and clear General Introduction by the editors, Fe