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This is a comprehensive collection of nearly all the paper written by Betty Joseph over the last thirty years. The fifteen papers, some published here for the first time, are divided by the editors into four sections, each section marking a particular stage in the development of her thinking and the corresponding implications for technique.
Betty Joseph is well known, perhaps in some quarters to the point of a caricature that obscures the value of the ideas, for her belief that attention to what goes on in the analytic session is of greater importance and value than a pursuit of the ‘meaning’ of the patient's verbal material. In the moment-to-moment shifts in transference and countertransference lies the richest source of information about the patient's internal world, his object relationships and history. With vivid clinical illustrations, Betty Joseph shows how she observes the tenacity with which, despite the conscious wish to change, patients maintain and enact their ‘psychic equilibrium’, their constellation of defences against anxiety. She shows how the analyst can get drawn into the particular system, for example, by projective identification, to prevent the equilibrium being disturbed. Psychic change is made possible when, through careful and consistent attention to the transference and countertransference in the analytic situation, the analyst can experience and recognise the pressure he is put under without acting it out, and then, with the patient, arrive at a basic understanding of what goes on.
The Editors have provided a general introduction to Betty Joseph's work as well as brief introductions to each section of the book. These are beautifully written, lucid essays that provide a valuable framework for the reader. Not only do they place Betty Joseph's work within developments in psychoanalysis and Kleinian theory, but they succeed in making the more complex papers more accessible.
If you have found the work, or the caricature, too forbidding to try, this