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This biography aims to present the essential elements of the notes and records of
Guntrip's analyses with both Fairbairn and Winnicott, and to put them into the context of Guntrip's personal history, including the dream sequence which Guntrip had after Winnicott's death. These dreams finally uncovered an amnesia over his brother's death, which he had had since he was 31/2. Guntrip connected this amnesia with his need to work so hard, and with his recurring devitalized exhaustion illnesses.
Guntrip had recorded both his dreams and his dialogues with his analysts. When he died in 1975 he had begun a ‘total project’, in which his dream record (virtually continuous between 1936 and 1971) was intended to show how his unconscious ‘knew its own business and went its own way’. Alan Maberly had affirmed this view in his analysis of Guntrip, who saw one of his interpretations as ‘semi-Jungian’ (p. 51). His liberating independence of mind was shared by Guntrip. Guntrip intended to produce an autobiographical psychoanalytic study to provide data about psychodynamic processes (p. viii), and he published a very condensed version of his project in 1975, sub-titled ‘How complete a result does psycho-analytic treatment achieve?’ ( Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 2, 145-56).
From Guntrip's notes as well as his personal experience of Guntrip and his writings, Hazell (who was in analysis with Guntrip) has produced an outstanding psychoanalytic biography. His unobtrusive and perceptive narrative brings Guntrip and his family members, friends, patients, colleagues, doctors and analysts to vivid life, with their strengths, sacrifices, and failings—some of them appalling.
This book is more than a biography of a courageous thinker who passionately believed in working in an agapaic way with his patients as whole persons, championed and built onto the work of and , and made his own original contributions (most especially in Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, London: Ka