Preface

It has been my good fortune to have worked in psychoanalysis from the 1950s until the present day. During this time Freud’s late great legacies to psychoanalysis – his map of the psyche in terms of ego, super-ego and id, anxiety posited as elemental, and his final view of human instincts as the conflict, in all their many aspects, of Eros and Thanatos – were explored and developed by Klein (among others) in analytic work with children and adults. And in their turn, Melanie Klein’s new findings and theories offered to those who worked with them a rich field for further psychoanalytic inquiry.

In the 1950s I trained as a Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Dr Bowlby was Clinic Director, while Esther Bick and Mattie Harris lead the Child training in an atmosphere of all of us being at the forefront of research from different perspectives. In the 1960s I trained at the British Psychoanalytical Society where I met for the first time the full blast of group hostilities, in themselves disturbing and unproductive, yet even so new ideas flourished. Over the years a spirit of inquiry has prevailed and group hostilities have mostly given way to an acceptance of our excess of diversity and the concomitant pursuit of varied psychoanalytic paths.

Now, in my old age I still recall my training supervisors: Esther Bick, Betty Joseph and Hanna Segal for my young Tavistock patients, and for my adult training cases Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal. To these foundational influences I add the writings of Wilfred Bion. How different they all are! How different too was the way of inquiry of each into the analytic process. In another, more interior, mode my own analysis endures. A first analysis of 2 years with Dr Charles

Anderson was cut short by his sudden early death. A little later I went to Mr Roger Money-Kyrle and I owe him much.

I am proud to belong to the British Psychoanalytical Society and glad of the long years of work with colleagues there and at the Tavistock Clinic.