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Jeremy Holmes has been straddling many domains for decades. He is a retired consultant psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who worked for many years in both the NHS and private practice. He is an academic and a practitioner, a skilled writer and commanding lecturer. His formidable output of over 200 publications has covered the ethics and the practical application of psychotherapy. However, perhaps his most important contribution has been in providing a clarity of perspective on the overlaps between attachment theory and psychoanalysis. In this book he revisits many of his essays written during his 35 years of work and presents his argument for the enhancement of the creativity of psychotherapists and thereby their patients through the therapeutic imagination.
The central thrust of the work is that there are many similarities between the literary and the psychotherapeutic imagination and therefore ‘literate therapists make better therapists’. Holmes is clear that rather than use psychoanalytic insights into art (and many have done this), he wants to bring ‘artistic insights to bear on clinical work’ (p. xii). His book is in four interlinked parts. Holmes begins by exploring the manner in which poetry and novels can develop the psychotherapist’s ‘imagination-in action’. He then approaches the overlap between psychotherapy and literature from an attachment theory perspective with particular emphasis on therapeutic change. The third section uses literature to focus on the specific areas of narcissism, anxiety, splitting and bereavement. The last section is a bold attempt to explore the sometimes difficult relationship between psychiatry and psychotherapy, again using literature to tease out the tensions. The art of psychotherapy and the science of psychiatry are juxtaposed.
Holmes traces the roots of the therapeutic imagination from German Romanticism via Coleridge and Bion. However, somewhat paradoxically, he argues ‘that imagination can be systematised and