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This is a good and important book. It is also very interesting on what might be called the level of the higher gossip. It could well have been subtitled, ‘Or What Psychoanalysts Really Think’.
Before she became a child psychotherapist and an analyst, Victoria Hamilton was trained as a philosopher, sophisticated in the notions of language games and questions of mutual intelligibility between different traditions of thought. Knowing that psychoanalysis is not a discipline — maybe there are no such disciplines — in which knowledge has been systematically amassed within a coherent framework, she set out to look at how analysts belonging to several different theoretical schools used their ideas in practice.
She interviewed sixty-five psychoanalysts in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles (where she now works) and London, between 1988 and 1990. She surveyed the literature on analytic technique, and asked analysts to describe their use of different technical concepts which were drawn from twenty-seven dimensions of technique. This produced ‘various descriptions of the maps or sketches analysts drew of the routes they followed in their daily practice’. Then, by means of cluster analysis, she was able to establish the relationship between their beliefs, the extent to which subgroups of analysts held homogeneous or eclectic views both as individuals and as groups, and the difference between ‘official’ beliefs and what analysts said that they actually did. The bulk of the book is made up of long excerpts from the transcripts of what the analysts told her — often indicating how their views had changed, and how what they had been taught, or felt they were supposed to believe, no longer seemed to fit their clinical experience.