Commentaries on ‘The Symbolism of the Story of Lot and his Wife’

When I was asked if I would consider doing a commentary on a paper the request finished with the remark that the paper was ‘a bit controversial’. This was sufficiently intriguing to arouse curiosity and produce a ‘yes’.

In the first section of the paper, Lanyado sets out to explain and elaborate on why the land beyond transference interpretations as a force for therapeutic change needed

addressing. In clearly setting out the reasons for looking at the therapeutic impact of the child psychotherapist as a new developmental figure, there was a sense that the writer had ‘to dare to bare’, in the face of a historical collective psychoanalytic superego murmuring ‘but this is not real analysis’. It was this tone, that the whole venture was somehow risky and about to meet with disapprobation, that was so intriguing to this particular reader who imagined that many child psychotherapists would be interested in the notion of the therapist as a new developmental figure and arriving at formulations similar to Lanyado's. Hurry's chapter ‘Psychoanalysis and developmental therapy’, in the book of the same title, argues cogently that there is no essential dichotomy between psychoanalysis and developmental help:

our understanding of developmental disturbances and of ways of treating them has been greatly enriched by findings from infant observational research, for the interactions that take place within the therapeutic developmental relationship are essentially similar to those that ordinarily take place between parents and the infant or child. (Hurry 1998: 38)

The therapist enters the child's developmental stream as both a transference and a new developmental object. If there is a therapeutic Zeitgeist then it is precisely the questions and preoccupations in Lanyado's paper that are at its centre. The paper is timely and to be welcomed. It furthers the possibility of thinking about the specific features that effect therapeutic change in a fresh way. It also pushes