You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These essays aim at demonstrating recent trends, mainly in North America, in psychotherapy as influenced by psychoanalysis and existentialism. There are, however, no essays written since 1968, and most of them date from 1955-65.
Twenty-three writers, including Klein, Nacht, Masud Khan, Greenson, Lorand, W. C. M. Scott and some young Americans tackle three main areas of interest. The first deals with specific clinical problems like prolonged silence or crying, of sleeping, or staring on the part of patients, familiar remarks like, ‘I am not getting any better’, or ‘That's all’, tacked on to a report of a dream in précis form.
These, together with discussions about gifts, free treatment, note-taking by the analyst, the use of first names and the termination of analysis are of perennial interest to therapists. Nevertheless, the actual value of isolating topics in this way is somewhat limited owing to the fact that each topic is really an expression of the patient's personality structure as a whole, functioning within the transference-counter/transference situation. For example, Sandor Feldmann isolates the sentence, ‘That's all’, when tacked on to a shortened report of a dream, to mean that the patient is saying, ‘This is my central problem. Don't go off on to something else.’ This interpretation plausibly elucidates one kind of situation. It is however a positive particularity that cannot be universalized, for in other situations this short ‘throw-away’ phrase, particularly when appended to a thematic abstraction from a detailed and concrete dream, can represent the sort of defensiveness against the analyst's efforts to help that arises from despair, defiance or the fear that change would bring unbearable pain.
The second area covered by this book seems to stem from what I sense to be a feeling of inner constraint by an internal object that may be identified as rigid psychoanalytic orthodoxy. This constraint induces feelings of revolt against the rigidity of second gener