In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop. Edited by Edith Hargreaves and Arturo Varchevker. London:  Brunner-Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis), 2004.  206 pp.

Betty Joseph has had a profound influence on psychoanalytic thinking and practice chiefly in the United Kingdom, but also, and increasingly, worldwide. Unlike that of other major theorists of the last half century around whom whole new schools of thought have arisen, her influence has extended itself gradually, borne along not by any radically new theory of her own, but by a radical extension of the ideas of existing theorists into the largely unexplored and untheorized recesses of clinical process. In so doing, she and her colleagues have illuminated the endlessly difficult terrain of clinical work in a consistently disciplined way, and have unflinchingly posed the question lodged at the heart of every analysis: is real psychic change possible?

As part of the process of constructing a theory of clinical practice based for the most part on extending and deepening the clinical application of Melanie Klein's ideas, Joseph has pioneered the “workshop” method: “namely, a joint enterprise in which all kinds of puzzling or intractable clinical phenomena could be openly explored” (p. 6), in the context of a detailed examination of clinical process among colleagues. This volume is the fruit of several decades of collaborative work of this sort, and documents the theory of psychic change that has emerged as workshop members present material and compare their ideas, chiefly about the obstacles to change, but touching on all the major aspects of the psychoanalytic project.