PROLOGUE

An' can you by no drift of conference

Get from him why he puts on this confusion

Grating so harshly all his days of quiet

With turbulent and dangerous lunacy. (Hamlet Act iii, Scene i)

The question of how one understands the mind of another pervades the entire body of clinical psychoanalytic thinking, from the beginnings of psychoanalysis when Freud described his first cases that were treated by his new method. He wrote about how his patients were actually telling stories and expressing affects about themselves through their symptoms. As he worked at encouraging his patients to be more direct, open and comprehensible, he developed a rudimentary model of the mind that enabled him to glimpse at what was going in the minds of his patients.

He soon saw that his early models for understanding the minds of another were inadequate. He turned to knowledge within literature, art, philosophy, and science, which helped, but was not enough. As the body of psychoanalytic knowledge developed further, terms like free associations, introspection, and empathy were used to convey the approach that was necessary to perceive what is going on in the mind of another. Yet an approach does not explain the content of what is seen in the mind of another. A variety of theories and models were developed that helped in understanding the content of what was seen. More attention was devoted to the analyst as a perceptive instrument. New discoveries about the development of the child helped clinicians follow how problems in the development of understanding the mind of another were manifested in symptomatology and clinical material. Bion, Lacan, and Winnicott emphasized that there are levels of the reality of the mind of the other that can only be approximated. At times, when a deep level of understanding is indeed reached, the experience approaches the spiritual.

At this moment, we are in a position to broaden and deepen our capacity to understand what goes on in the mind of another and appl