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Do not expect this book to be overtly about the goals of psychoanalysis, though they are implied throughout it. The book consists of a collection of papers, only one of which deals with the main title, and this I shall go into shortly. The first and most thematic part of the book consists of eleven papers divided into two sections, one on identification, the other on identity. Section three deals with other theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis, such as depression and mourning, drives and affects, and observations on creativity. Section four deals usefully with various areas of supervision, both theoretical and clinical. The author, who is a psychoanalyst working in practice and university teaching in Madrid, wished to share his ideas with English-speaking colleagues and so collected together these papers, many of which appear in English for the first time.
The chapter on the goals of psychoanalysis begins with a summation of earlier ideas about the goals.
Freud has pointed out that the analytical relationship is based on a love of truth. But this love of truth, one of the main objectives of analysis, arouses powerful resistances. The capacity of the human being to tolerate the truth about himself is precarious, for truth is a permanent source of pain. This fear of knowing the truth is implicit in resistance to change and the fear of growing up and growing old. (p. 212)
The analysand, through the process of analysis, helps the emergence of the real self (as opposed to false self) to achieve the investigative power to continue his analysis alone. Grinberg has doubts about other ‘therapeutic objectives’ in determining the closing point of an analysis and also doubts about stressing the personality of the analysand during ending, without taking into account that of the analyst (p. 213). The chapter becomes rather diffuse, sometimes talking about the termination phase, sometimes about the transformational process of analysis which he contrasts with pseudo-anal