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The essays in this book form the story of a distinguished psychoanalyst's life and work. Developments in psychoanalytic ideas over the past thirty years, particularly the evolution of object relations theory, are comparatively and critically discussed in relation to work with patients and to supervision. Nina Coltart's life emerges as a search for individual truths so that, while recognizing Freud, she puts psychoanalysis into the context of her wide interest in its applications, both philosophically and clinically.
From a Judaeo-Christian background, through the structured systems of medicine and psychoanalysis, she has found that Buddhism has provided her with a spiritual and moral base for her life and work and is a thread drawing her ideas together. Her critical appraisal of the psychoanalytic world parallels my own experience of the field over much the same length of time, so I looked for Jung's contribution via the index. He was not there!
However, in the chapter entitled ‘Buddhism and psychoanalysis revisited’, I found Jung's view of individuation, invoked to describe self-realization and the Buddhist No-Self (p. 133). The chapter begins: ‘The Buddha did not reach his Enlightenment until he was 40, and, contrary to what some people seem to believe about him, he was not swept off into the heavens … his main aim (became) to convey the essence of what he now knew to any who wanted to come and learn from him. He gathered round him a group of people …’ This was strikingly similar to the experience Jung describes in his autobiography and I began to realize that it also describes the experiences recounted in this book.
As she describes in the chapter, ‘And now for something completely different…’, her doubts about institutional rigidities led her, in 1987, to resign as a Training Analyst from the IPA (p. 110) and to offer her teaching skills in the wider therapy world. This chapter contains two of the major themes, which run through the book - the necessity and the haz