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In my salad days alexander and french's book made a deep impression; my copy is heavily underlined. Its case histories are well, often brilliantly set out, the dynamics of character and neurosis and the therapist's responses dramatically clear, the resolutions impressive. After qualifying as an analyst I spend some years in Michael Balint's (another charismatic Hungarian) short-term therapy workshop, which formed the basis of David Malan's much acclaimed work (1963) on short-term psychotherapy.
As I gained experience in both individual psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in group analytic psychotherapy, and in therapeutic community work, the impressive clarity of the Chicago work to which I had aspired became less attainable but also less desirable. I was settling into the steady pace of the middle- or long-distance runner (the middle-aged analyst) rather than to the dramatic bursts of the sprinter and was coming to appreciate that therapeutic change is the product of many factors, of which the creation of the analytic setting and its maintenance is paramount.
Winnicott's influence was strong in London, though my own allegiance was to Anna Freud's group, and it is Winnicott who wrote so persuasively on the function of the analytic setting as a holding situation, the maturational environment that facilitates