You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The theoretical hinterland to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, mentioned at the beginning of the last chapter, sometimes goes by the name of ‘theory of technique’. There is no single, unified theory by which every analyst understands the therapeutic process of psychoanalysis. Different analysts base their work on a variety of theories of technique, and their clinical viewpoints reflect these different theoretical understandings.
Analysts do not simply consider what theories they subscribe to and then derive a clinical approach from them. The connection is more complex, because the theories an analyst espouses are inevitably to some degree an expression of the analyst’s own self (Parsons, 2000: 52-4). This is true most of all about the theoretical foundations that analysts elaborate for their clinical work. Analysts form their identities in different ways, and for all of them there is a trajectory by which they have become the individual analysts that they are. Their particular way of working with patients is the outcome of that trajectory. Widely divergent models of psychoanalytic training are discussed in Chapter 13. Even within a single system, like that of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a remarkable variety of training experiences may be found (Anderson, 2009; Johns, 2009; Laufer, 2009; Parsons, 2009; Perelberg, 2009; Rayner, 2009; Spillius, 2009). This chapter is about the orientation in which my own identity as an analyst has taken shape: the Independent tradition of the British Society. As we shall see, this is an approach which by its nature resists being standardised. Portraying it as faithfully as I can therefore involves me, of necessity, in exploring my own perception of it.
The word ‘Independent’ with a capital ‘I’ entered the psychoanalytic vocabulary around 1950, when certain members of the British Psychoanalytical Society agreed to constitute themselves formally as the Group of Independent Psychoanalysts. In the late 1920s, Melanie Klein