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The Making of a Psychotherapist is the awkward title (see later) of this agglomeration of papers presented to mental health professionals during the last decade and redigested as 16 chapters on diverse subjects related to one's development and experience as a psychotherapist. I was already a fan of Neville Symington for his remarkable capacity to capture the all-around-ness of the psychoanalytic experience, but I was surprised that this took so long to read. For all its simplicity and direct style, this is a complicated book. Both foreground and background are dense with ideas, some confirming, some maddening. Yet it is necessary to keep revisiting every one of these ideas if we are to consider ourselves legitimate clinicians. There is much in these pages that I disagree with, but to emphasize those disagreements would be like summing up Gerard Depardieu (arguably the sexiest man alive) as having a lumpy nose.
In a chapter entitled “The Psychotherapist's Education,” Symington writes:
In their unconscious, patients sense whether interpretations have been arrived at through internal struggle and resolution or whether it is just being passed on from master to pupil and pupil to patient. When a patient senses that an interpretation is the product of the Invention Model, he
Page 415feels at a deep level the union of souls in a common endeavor. This mutuality is probably the single most healing factor in psychotherapy, as it enables the inner creative emotional act. (pp. 21-22)
The Invention Model is Symington's term for an ancient and radical personal pedagogy in which an individual creates an “intellectual structure” that uniquely fits his own “emotional shape” (p. 17). Not everything in this book comes (yet) out of Symington's own Invention Model, but everywhere there is evidence of Symington's ongoing effort to make his own sense of things, which may be what makes the book so engaging. I find this, then, a profoundly “sexy” book in its pursuit of the “inner creative act,” whic