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Fred Busch's credentials are both liberal and conservative—he is a Training and Supervisory analyst at PINE and a Faculty member at both the Boston Psychoanalytic and Massachusetts Institutes; he is connected with the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Institute and IPTAR and he graduated from my own Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute in the '70s as did I. Then he was a tall, tweedy, intense, pipe-smoking psychologist who seemed more academic than clinical in his interests. This, his third book, attests to the superb clinical skills he has acquired and wants to share. Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind is subtitled A Psychoanalytic Method and Theory. The author proceeds to discuss his experience both here and abroad in reference to Freud's paradigm shift between the topographic and structural modes of the mind. Lip service has been given to the significance of the latter but too often he feels clinical presentations have shown how adhesively we cling to uncovering the unconscious and forego the slow and arduous work of defense analysis that eventually allows the analysis and to know his own mental states and way of mentation so that a good termination can come about. Busch leaves out the usual listings of primitive and adaptive defenses that candidates learn by heart. Instead he describes the way we hear them—the change in affect, tone, a hesitation or parapraxis, silence or stare; the way “hello, how are you” is said; the differences between the accounting of the same event in the recurrent historical narrative.
And then he advises how we should respond to these examples of regression, isolation of affect, identification with the aggressor, reaction-formation. Absolutely not with intrusive questioning or showoff