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Adam Limentani is a distinguished and well-known psychoanalyst of the Middle Group, the Independent Group, of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He has held important offices in the British Society and in the International Psycho-Analytical Association; he is a training and supervising analyst of the British Society, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; and was for many years a consultant at the Portman Clinic in London, working with severely disturbed cases of sexual disorders and delinquency.
His philosophy of what the psychoanalyst and the psychotherapist are attempting to do is clearly stated in his Introduction:
Basically I believe that our task is to make a fellow human being aware of that internal psychic reality which has no resemblance to external reality
Page 92although it has a considerable bearing on it. Thus our task is not only to impart a better understanding of the conscious information he already has about his past or present life, to help a person to achieve a better degree of integration or to make the unconscious conscious; but also to guide him towards knowing more about himself and to know what the real truth is about himself and his inner world.
Limentani has selected sixteen of his papers for publication in this volume, and I can, for reasons of space, write only briefly on a selected few of them.
In the first paper, written in 1983 and entitled ‘Between Freud and Klein’, Limentani discusses his own position in the British Society and delineates some of the theoretical issues which were addressed in the 1943 Controversial Discussions between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, both of whom he knew personally.
In a paper which interestingly explores the Orpheus story, ‘The Orpheus myth as reflected in problems of ambivalence and reparation in the Oedipal situation’, Limentani spells out one of the constant problems in analytic work — the tendency of the analytic process to focus on one stage of the individual's life and the ensuing obscuring of