You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
R. D. Hinshelwood, the author of the indispensable Dictionary of Kleinian Thought and Clinical Klein , has written a provocative and thoughtful book about the ethics of psychoanalysis. In this work Hinshelwood explores the inherent paradoxes and contradictions which are a normal part of everyday analytic work. These paradoxes and contradictions are evident from the very first session of an analysis. Hinshelwood states that psychoanalytic patients come to analysis unconsciously in search of a mother figure, and what they wind up with is a professional adviser. The unconscious contract, which can form a basic assumption of the analysand, is contradicted by the role of the analyst, which is to interpret psychological experience and to provide a setting in which psychological integration can take place.
The new contradictions and paradoxes that Hinshelwood explores in masterly detail involve conflicts between the analyst and analysand, which are based upon the processes of repression and splitting. For instance, the changes which the analyst strives for in the analysand's personality and in his unconscious are often very remote from the type of analytic process that the analysand wants and to which he believes he is submitting himself. The analysand's search for compromise solutions and enactments with the analyst often are in direct conflict with the analyst's goal of helping the analysand, through the rigour of analytic technique and the analytic process, to obtain higher levels of emotional and psychological integration. This can be seen in the analyst's tendency to avoid intervening in the conflict between the negative and positive transferences, and his stance of neutrality in observing the conflict between different aspects of the transference and understanding its unconscious roots in infancy and childhood. Only in this way can the analyst help the analysand more fully to understand and integrate the specific picture of his characteristic ways of relating in both