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This is a book written by psychoanalysts from a perspective familiar to most Jungians, of analytic work involving both analyst and patient participating equally in the analytic process. This perspective has been widely explored by analytical psychologists and reflects the implication in Jung's work that the patient can only go as far in his or her psychological development as the analyst, and that the patient's need to change in his or her own way must frequently require change in the analyst also. The book explores this issue by addressing, in a series of chapters, various aspects of clinical practice and especially of transference/countertransference phenomena. Too easily, it is contended, problems thrown up during analytic work and apparently disrupting it, are attributed to the ‘unanalysability’ or pathology of the patient, or to faulty technique on the part of the analyst. In the authors' view, problems need to be reformulated in terms of the analytic relationship and of the analyst being able to enter into the patient's world, and that in this way understanding may be found in the experience of the analytic relationship. Problems which may lead to acting out, premature termination, so-called negative therapeutic reactions, etc. are, it is contended, fundamentally a failure of empathy. Barale and Ferro, in a chapter on ‘Negative therapeutic reactions and microfractures in analytic communication’, quote Bollas ‘if our sense of identity is certain, then its loss within the clinical space is essential to the patient's discovery of himself (p. 163).
My main criticism of the author's argument is that, paradoxically, the patient seems sometimes to get lost. Lacking an archetypal dimension, the impression is created that it is all a matter of the analyst ‘getting it right’, and in this way their notion of the patient seems to be of some one who is, in fundamental ways, passive. Negative therapeutic reactions, for example, come to be seen in this light only as a signpos