Acknowledgements

More people than I can mention, and no doubt more than I am consciously aware of, have contributed to the making of this book.

Its clinical examples reveal how much, in the first place, I owe to my patients. The thirty years I have spent behind the couch and face-to-face, while people trusted me with what they did not know about themselves, have been an extraordinary privilege.

Alongside the British Psychoanalytical Society, always a good home base, I have found a second home, and a warm welcome, in the French Psychoanalytic Association. Discussion in a new kind of atmosphere and with new colleagues has been fascinating, and contributed to Chapters 6 and 13 in particular. I am especially grateful to Laurence Kahn for her encouragement, as President of the Association, when I applied for membership. Regarding Chapter 13, I am also grateful for discussion about the question of psychoanalytic identity with colleagues of the Psychoanalytic Society for Research and Training (SPRF), in Paris.

Most of the chapters stem from lectures or papers that I was invited to present, and I am indebted to all those who, in offering me these opportunities, set my thinking going. I am also grateful for the discussions on these occasions, which were often stimulating and produced ideas that have found their way into these pages. Elizabeth Wolf invited me to write a paper (Parsons, 2009) which, being a discussion of other papers, does not have a place in this book, but the thinking that went into it contributed to Chapters 12 and 13.

I am grateful to the analytic candidates I have taught; for the fun we have had together, and for the liveliness and fresh ideas our interactions have generated.1 I hope the seminars mentioned in Chapters 4 and 13 may give some notion of this.

There are many colleagues from whom I have learned as we have shared our thoughts and bounced ideas off one another. The continuity of regular meetings with Rosemary Davies, Roger Kennedy and Jonathan Sklar has been especial