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This collection of papers by the distinguished Kleinian psychoanalyst Irma Brenman Pick spans nearly fifty years. Arriving in London from South Africa, she trained first as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock and then at the British Psychoanalytic Society to work with adults. Her writing and teaching have influenced countless analysts, including the co-editors of this volume.
The title, Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter, intrigues. Like a steady heartbeat, the message pulsing through this collection is that for analyst and patient alike, life with its loves and losses and in all its pleasures and pain must be faced and struggled with. Only in this way can we begin to forge an authentic relationship with ourselves and others. Brenman Pick argues, however, that acceptance of unwanted aspects of oneself and of external reality can only ever be ‘partial’ (p. 123), for ‘there is also a question of how much authenticity we want, or in fact, can bear’ (p. 123).
This last statement offers release from the stranglehold of an idealised overvaluation of authenticity, for when authenticity is idealised, like any ideal it lends itself to absolutism and paranoid-schizoid states of mind with binary structurings of good and bad, right and wrong, policed by a superego devoid of capacity for nuanced and contextually-based thinking. Through such an unforgiving lens, inauthenticity is unequivocally bad and must be banished while authenticity, the favoured child, is made much of and feted as the good and desirable one. Brenman Pick, however, embraces both in considering the well-functioning of the personality, writing that ‘… at best we are in part authentic and part inauthentic’ (p. 132).
Both couple interaction theory and Jungian theory offer ways out of such binary binds, as their approaches attempt to eschew splits and the overvaluation of one at the expense of the other, focusing instead on creative potentiality arising from the integration of opposites. A couple psych