Introduction

The papers of Edna O'Shaughnessy are amongst the finest psychoanalytic writing. Her papers have a rare combination of an incisive clarity, imaginativeness and a great sensitivity to her patient, including his or her deepest and most psychotic anxieties. She has made important contributions to many of the areas of most current interest in psychoanalysis – personality organisations, the superego, (both abnormal and normal), the Oedipus complex, psychic refuges, and technique; as well as writing with originality about topics not touched on by other writers, such as whether a liar can be analysed. Her work is unified not so much by its subject matter, which is very diverse, but by her underlying preoccupations. These include psychic limits, of both patient and analyst; and the nature of psychic reality and of subjectivity. She is interested in how these can be apprehended with the help of the particular situation of an analysis. She often starts by trying to puzzle out why an impasse has developed in an analysis – and this frequently provokes a new and original line of thought. In this way, theoretical and clinical issues are inseparable in her writing, even more so than in most writing by Kleinian analysts, which is usually very focused on clinical material. Her use of language is precise, free of cliché, and has, as she says of Bion’s writing (1981: 1), a ‘high yield of exact meaning’. At the same time, she writes with great emotional resonance, evoking poetically her patients and the clinical situations in which she encounters them. This is the corollary of her finely attuned and imaginative sense of the patient’s unconscious.

Edna O'Shaughnessy was born in South Africa in 1924. She read Philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand, before going to

Oxford to do a B.Phil., where she pursued her interest in the work of Wittgenstein. She then held the Susan Stebbing Fellowship at Bedford College, London University. She was one of the first to train at the Tav