Introduction

Michael Feldman has a particular and individual way of looking at and dealing with clinical material, based securely on an established theoretical model. Fundamental to his understanding is his awareness that there are always two people in the room in a psychoanalytic encounter, the patient and the analyst, and that their interaction must always be taken into account – each has an effect on the other, each operates only so far as his or her personality permits, as his or her phantasies, anxieties and defences, allow. The details of the clinical material in this book allow us to see Feldman’s use of this awareness, and his ability to be open to whatever the patient needs to communicate.

This openness, which Bion saw as the capacity to ‘contain’, enables Feldman to respond to the patient’s needs and projections. Increasingly he becomes aware, as he shows for example in his chapters on projective identification, of how the patient’s projections may give rise to subtle, as well as not-so-subtle, responses within the analyst. He indicates some of the defensive mechanisms that the analyst may use in an attempt to maintain his psychic equilibrium. Thus the reader can follow, and to some extent experience, the actual process that enables the patient to get into contact with thoughts and feelings of which he or she was previously unconscious or only vaguely aware. In this sense the reader becomes a participant in what might be described as the research going on in the session, research into clinical processes that may contribute to psychic change.

Feldman’s approach depends on his close observation of his patients and their experiences, and this has led him to feel that understanding has to come from what can be seen in the immediate present. He

shows how the analyst has the opportunity to observe the way in which patients deal with the analytic situation from moment to moment, how they project objects from their internal world into the analyst, thus dynamically indicating h