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This book consists of the text of four lectures prepared by John Klauber as part of a series for the Freud Memorial Visiting Professorship at University College, London, in 1981—he died suddenly only six weeks before the first lecture was due to be given—together with six papers contributed by psychoanalysts whose views are in harmony with Klauber's. References are made by these six authors not only to the lectures printed here, but also to Klauber's earlier book, Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter, published in 1981 and reviewed in this Journal in January 1984 (Vol. 29 No. 1). But the effect of the book is far from being one of constraint or confinement to a particular point of view; the essential themes of ‘illusion’ and ‘spontaneity’, around which the authors organise their contributions, give them freedom to develop their thoughts in their own distinctive ways, an outcome which Klauber himself would have welcomed.
The first two lectures are entitled respectively ‘The role of illusion in the psychoanalytic cure’, and ‘Truth and illusion in the patient's symptoms’. A fundamental illusion is the transference itself, described by Klauber as an ‘act of