Response to Questionnaire

I answer these questions as a Kleinian trained at the Freudian Institute in London. The answer to the first question is rather long, but I felt the need to set the scene a bit, historically. I have made some contrasts with a Jungian perspective which betrays within those answers all my own ignorance of another's method of working and thinking - for that I apologize, but offer it nevertheless as examples specifically of how a Kleinian might get Jung wrong and thus to display particular obstacles to be overcome in creating a discourse between Jungians and Freudians (or at least Kleinians).

1. What in your opinion brings about, or facilitates therapeutic change? How has your perspective on this evolved in your practice? Could you offer a clinical example?

Therapeutic change is difficult to pin down. There are at least three kinds of change which we encounter. People change from moment to moment depending on the context of relationships in which they are momentarily, and to which they are reacting, including the relationship with the analyst. There is, secondly, a process of long-term change which occurs through living anyway; some of this is epigenetic, as time unfolds, so does one's character. But thirdly, we, in the business of influencing people, believe there is a specific, and longer-term change that is derived from, and uniquely derived from, the encounter our analysand has with our professional help. It is important that this third kind of change is not confused with the previous two, and analysts sometimes do suffer that confusion, with the result that they can unfortunately claim responsibility for changes which happen anyway, and are not specifically to do with the encounter with analytic help.

How we distinguish the third, therapeutic change, from the other two, is difficult. It is difficult partly because the theoretical view of what therapeutic change is, has itself undergone a long-term change. Originally, Freud thought that a simple release of emotion was n