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This is a splendid book. It is an edited collection of eighteen papers in addition to a well-written introduction by Roy Schafer that discusses some of the important Kleinian concepts like paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, transference, countertransference, projective identification, containment, and enactment. The papers are among some of the finest contributions of the British Kleinian analysts like Robin Anderson, Ronald Britton, Eric Brenman, Michael Feldman, Betty Joseph, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Irma Brenman Pick, Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm, Hanna Segal, Elizabeth Spillus, Ignes Sodre and John Steiner. The papers covers a wide range of important theoretical and clinical issues that are all the focus of contemporary psychoanalysis. The editor introduces every paper with a brief but rich commentary which facilitates the grasp of the central themes of the papers.
All the papers that constitute this volume manifest an intellectual and emotional openness to different conceptual schemes and clinical tools. There is a solid awareness of the relationship between theory and observation. Some of the writers explicitly warn the reader against the intellectual imposition of his or her favorite theoretical constructs on clinical materials. They remind us that overworking a theory often leads to psychoanalytic fabrications and pseudounderstanding. Discussions in all the papers aim to capture the genuine experience of the analytic hour. All writers are attuned to the moment to moment shifts in the transference-countertransference nuances of the analytic encounter.
The question of the importance of the analytic relationship begins with a discussion of clinical facts. In the first paper Edna O'Shaughnessy examines the notion of scientific clinical facts by placing it within the context of theory, method, and language. Borrowing an expression from Thomas Nagle, she argues that clinical facts represent a partial view from somewhere. She points out that clutching at “objectivity”