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This excellent book is aimed at teachers of Freud and their students. It is essentially a re-working of the well-known papers by the first three authors on ‘Frames of reference in psychoanalytic psychology’, published in the 1970s in the British Journal of Medical Psychology.
Traditionally, students of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy begin their training with a study of the major Freud texts. As these authors acknowledge,
…formal training in psychoanalysis has a dual aim — to train people to be scholars and to be clinicians.
An implicit third aim, which also informs the spirit of this book, is that the student should identify with Freud's struggle, and the doubts that eventually force a new paradigm into being. As with infant-observation, staying with the complexity and ambiguity in Freud, while at the same time tracing developmental lines, becomes one of the foundations of a psychoanalytical identity.
As we all know, the student is faced with the difficulties of Freud right at the outset, when she is least experienced clinically and least familiar with the ideas that are to become her conceptual tools. There is the added complication that some of Freud's earliest theoretical writing is the least accessible to modern clinicians, and yet some of the basic concepts are there from the start (drive, defence, primary and secondary process, psychological determinism — indeed, the existence of the unconscious itself). There is no