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Sharon Numa’s book On Being Ones’s Self: Clinical Explorations in Identity from John Steiner’s Workshop is an expression of gratitude by colleagues to John Steiner for his teaching and is a very valuable contribution to Kleinian psychoanalytic literature.
I feel that I need to acknowledge that I agreed to review this book because I am also grateful to John for having experienced his extraordinary way of leading us to understand a patient. I attended his clinical groups on work with borderline patients, which he ran in the adult
department of the Tavistock. I was finished with my child training at the Tavistock and beginning to see adult patients. The group was in the 1980s, and I had been in clinical groups throughout my training. John was not interested in formulations or theory, and it was extraordinary how he led us to use our emotions to understand the patient. He would ask the group to have one descriptive word for our experience of reading the process material. He would ask for the atmosphere of the session, leaving silences for us to find our feelings. He would challenge us if we jumped to any conclusion without having gathered the evidence, which was always from the experience of the patient. As I thought about it later it was a group in facilitating and developing our unconscious imaginative emotional capacities so that we could use our countertransference to understand our patients. And it has influenced the way I work and the way I lead clinical groups.
Sharon Numa’s book is a compilation of papers by Numa and her colleagues who all attended an ongoing clinical group with John Steiner for many years. The members of this group are Kleinian-trained analysts. Out of the experience of presenting clinical work to each other they found that the repeated theme of identity was a central problem that their patients were struggling with. This became the impetus for On Being Ones’s Self, which is comprised of papers about patients struggling from problems of identi