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The Healer's Bent1 draws together several of the wonderful papers that James McLaughlin wrote over the years, as well as including much that is new. These writings are both radical and rooted in the earliest Freud. They were original and cutting edge when written, but they were also prescient: they are still relevant and fresh today. It is inevitably a sad privilege to honor the memory of James McLaughlin, who died in July 2006, by discussing his extraordinary book.
In discussing this work and in honoring the author, we are paying homage to an American original. It seems that in recent years, as we psychoanalysts in the United States have wanted to move beyond the 1940s and ′50s and the often narrow straitjacket of classical ego psychology, we have looked across the Atlantic to the contemporary Kleinians or British independents if we wished to retain the importance of a depth psychology, and to Bion if we wanted the viewpoint of someone who begins with the analyst's not knowing. This has been a welcome development, in contrast to the xenophobia and suspicion (also cast on the interpersonal tradition) that characterized psychoanalysis in the United States after the psychoanalytic Diaspora. But often, this transatlantic focus has been accompanied by insufficient attention to those toiling in our own fields—or, in McLaughlin's case, to those cultivating our own gardens