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This is a book rather more about a Jungian approach to countertransference than the notion of the wounded healer. With it Sedgwick sets out to fill a specific gap in the literature. There have, he says, been very few books dealing with countertransference from a Jungian perspective. Even fewer have offered an in-depth account of its use in an ongoing analysis. In order to remedy this situation he makes use of material from his own work with a training patient. As he points out, it is here that one puts one's own countertransference most closely under the microscope, even though this may lead to distortion through the process of submission to a supervisor.
The main thrust of the book consists of a detailed account of his attempts to master erotic elements in his countertransference towards an attractive training patient. He bravely includes examples of his own dreams and fantasies about her. In so doing, he does of course run the risk of laying bare his own unconscious processes. Against this, he shows us how these ‘wounds’ may actually become part of the healing process, as patient and analyst struggle together towards containment and individuation.
This part of the book may well be reassuring to trainees involved in similar struggles. It may also be helpful to others interested in learning how a Jungian like Sedgwick makes use of the countertransference on a day-to-day basis. For analysts already involved in this kind of work, however, this section is likely to feel rather laboured. The material focuses around the conflict between the author's desire to act out with his patient and his guilt about this desire. This theme is returned to again and again until what feels to me to be the decisive moment when Sedgwick dreams of cutting down an enormous tree while he and his patient have become lovers. He sees the falling of the tree as a sacrifice of the incestuous fantasy. But surprisingly he omits to mention the obvious and to my mind equally important Oedipal implicati