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As a young analyst John Klauber was plunged into the conflicts in the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He was shocked by the way each side misrepresented the other and so he was forced to find his own place in the field of psychoanalysis. In consequence, this book is uncontentious. Though well versed in metapsychology he keeps all the time close to clinical problems. The chapter headings illustrate that clearly: ‘Reporting dreams in psychoanalysis’, ‘The structure of the session as a guide to interpretation’, ‘The analyst as a person’ for instance. They move in a highly disciplined way in the direction of treating the analytic situation as an interaction and as a relationship. It all makes interesting reading.
If some of it seems like making mountains out of mole hills, that is because the analyst as a person is so much engrained in our Jungian tradition that we have ceased to think much about it: that is a pity. Reading Klauber's careful writing forces one to think and so keeps one even more alert to the implications of what we do.
Besides the thoughtful chapters there is a beautiful one describing a depressive syndrome: one cannot fail to be impressed with his grasp of the intricacies of the material. Furthermore, he seems to be moving in the direction of self concepts. He does not get there, I surmise, because he is so thoroughly schooled in the classical discipline of psychoanalysis, which gives him a framework allowing only restricted movement.
Many of the chapters I had read when they were published in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. They introduced me to a significance that identification had for him. Identification seems to provide the building blocks for the mental apparatus and also the means by which a patient recovered, i.e. through identification with his analyst. That is so different from Jungian thinking that I looked up Jung's definition of identification. Sure enough, apart from being normal in childhood it is a means of ‘alienating the subje