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I wish to comment upon a book review which was published in the April 1997 issue of your journal. In his otherwise interesting review of Joyce McDougall's book ‘The Many Faces of Eros’, David Morgan makes an extraordinary observation, the more so in the context of his earlier comments in the piece. He had been stressing that ‘… it is important for psychoanalytic psychotherapists not to be seduced by the polemic of one organization …’. Then, and one wonders whether it was an act of artistic genius to show the effect on the Subject of a projective identification, he goes on to demonstrate how one can be so seduced.
Commenting on the clinical material in McDougall's book, which apparently shows her as a psychoanalyst, working largely through the technique of reconstruction, he states:
I found this a rather difficult process to follow, no doubt due to my own particular training experience. I am always impressed by how few transference interpretations, if any, occur in the psychoanalysis [sic] by analysts who work from a theoretical basis different from the Kleinian tradition.
This statement is neither substantiated nor elaborated, and so we, the readers, are left wondering what on earth Morgan means by it. Is he suggesting that his training has failed to teach him the variety of techniques used in the psychoanalytic process, which has had the effect of walling him up inside the polemic of one theoretical organization? Is he saying that his, apparently Kleinian, training has led him to write such an extraordinary statement, for which he can have no evidence to substantiate? And is it that this comment reflects precisely what Morgan claims to abhor — that the polemic of his organization's position is that nobody else knows how to conduct analysis of transference, and that