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In the introduction to Observing the Other: Writings in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychiatry, in a collection of his essays, Peter Buckley highlights the evolution of psychiatry and psychoanalysis over the last half century: the advent of the Diagnostic Statististical Manual and the shift from the hegemony of ego psychology (in which he was trained) to a field with many different theoretical models including relational and intersubjective models.
The volume is divided into two sections, “Case studies” and “Cultural interfaces,” with a total of 11 chapters. The titles of the various chapters illustrate the breadth and depth of his interests. For example, Chapter 1 addresses object relations theory; Chapter 2, three of Freud's major cases; and Chapter 3, mystical experience and psychosis. Buckley values the importance of the therapeutic relationship between therapist or analyst and patient. He states “that the therapeutic relationship accompanied by a positive transference was the bedrock upon which ‘neurotic mystery is turned into normal human unhappiness’” (pp. 2–3). In fact, Buckley maintains that the relational perspective has occurred because of the shift from the classical rational tradition in psychoanalysis to the romantic tradition of subjectivity and the centrality of emotion.
The overriding theme of the volume is the constant interplay between the contribution of inner forces in all of us and the inevitable interaction that goes on between the self and the other person. This interplay is illustrated by Buckley's discussion of how identifications have to be viewed “as amalgams based on actual experience, memory, instinctual wishes, and defenses, all of which form a unity, but it is one that can regressively dissolved into its component parts” (p. 22). In other words, although Buckley stresses the value of real human relationships to the development of the human psyche and the therapeutic situation, he does not throw out the “baby with the bathwater” w