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This is a book designed to introduce psychotherapeutically naive but interested professionals to the development of analytical theories (mostly psychoanalytical) by concentrating on an evocation of the analytic experience itself. Symington sets out to convey something of the atmosphere that he experiences. He tries to do this by giving his audience ‘some glimpse into what was happening inside him’, feeling that an exposition of analytical theories would ‘have as much relation to psychoanalysis as a manual of sexual techniques … to the emotion of being in love’. He makes it quite clear in the preface that he is not offering a comprehensive outline of those theories he is to mention but one that is ‘exceedingly personal’.
The fact that I was already recommending this book to interested junior medical staff while reading it reflects the power of Symington's generous appeal to us to glimpse inside him. He constantly invokes or points to the emotional sense behind a particular theoretical model, showing how it originally arose out of clinical experience and how it illuminated his own. His approach is two-fold: by setting out something of his own experience in the first three and final chapters and by placing his subjects in their own historical and social context he is able to review Freud at some length, together with some of his contemporaries—Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and Jung more briefly, as well as Fairbairn, Klein, Bion, Balint and Winnicott.
In the first three chapters he makes clear his own ideas: first that the analytic process is one that can only occur and discover truth if it is between people in dialogue, whether between disciplines and schools or between analyst and patient. In the second chapter he underlines once more the shared emotional disturbance between both analyst and patient as the prerequisite and forerunner of emotional change and intellectual insight: ‘emotional change and insight are manifestations of changes going on at a deeper level of the ps