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Drawing on Winnicott's central concept of the holding environment, Slochower explores this function in the analytic relationship in a second edition of this book which builds, through the incorporation of new material-both clinical and theoretical-on the first version published in 1990. Slochower views holding as a necessary function, not only with patients in states of acute dependence but also in working with narcissistic and borderline personalities where the analyst is having to contend with ruthlessness, hatred and negation. Although working largely within a relational psychoanalytic framework, Slochower originally wrote her book to challenge some aspects of the relational model, finding its emphasis on intersubjectivity, co-construction and mutuality problematic in working with patients who, in Winnicott's terms, have not really reached a stage of ‘object usage’ (Winnicott 1991).
Following her introduction, chapter 2 sets the scene where she both revisits and challenges the Winicottian holding metaphor and its theoretical basis. She deconstructs what she sees as an idealized and slightly sentimental version of the mother-infant bond, linked too closely with the patient-analyst relationship, and is critical of what she perceives as Winnicott's view that the mother's needs (her subjectivity) recede altogether in the holding phase, when in actuality the experience of parenting is far more conflicted. (My own view is it is hard to read ‘Hate in the Countertransference’ (Winnicott 1992) without insight into the intense feeling mother/analyst has as subject; there is no idealization or sentimentality here). Continuing to draw on Winnicott (1991), she maintains that two separate functions characterize analysis: broadly, the first revolves around holding and its associated capacities in the analyst for constraint and containment. This emotional availability and receptivity is the female element of ‘being’. The second involves a more active stance of confronting, interp