Preface

Reading Michael Feldman, one has a sense of having been welcomed into the workshop of a master analyst to think with him as he reflects on key concepts and clinical problems. Few psychoanalytic writers convey as vividly as he does a sense of remaining accountable to himself. Implicitly if not explicitly, Feldman often pauses to press such questions as, ‘What am I doing? Why do I think it’s the best thing to do? How might I do it better? How much is coming from me and how much from the patient?’

In setting a standard for self-supervision, Feldman consistently foregrounds the intellectually and emotionally destabilizing aspects of clinical psychoanalysis. He steadily risks uncertainty as he works his patient way toward sound insight and deft intervention. And we go with him as he enters clinical situations filled with problems for patients and therapists alike. To give only a partial list: situations that feature doubt, negative therapeutic reactions, conflictual termination, aggression and destructiveness, misfiring of reassurance, envy, pride, and the uses of reconstructions and life histories that are always in flux.

Feldman’s questions and formulations give equal opportunity to keen understanding and reasonable doubt. He maintains a steady focus on the complex mix of transference and countertransference that makes up the clinical process; in this mix lie the hazards and opportunities to be thought through and worked through en route to the construction of analytic evidence, evidence about which it is possible to feel some conviction. Success in this undertaking, depends on the ability – and the courage – to contain the inevitable narcissistic

temptations that beset analytic writers and practitioners: the temptations to seem to have already thought through the problems encountered and resolved them, to substitute assertion and authority for argument and demonstration, and thus to appear to be so on top of it all that one is ready to act correctly and decisively b