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Enormously influenced by Bion, Caper draws on Freud, Klein, Strachey and contemporary analysts to follow the development of a number of crucial interrelated theoretical concepts. Caper writes with clarity and lightness of touch, synthesising ideas and untangling confusions in a delightfully direct style free from fluff or wordiness. Points are made with impact and ideas given zing by being described from unexpected angles, or with a reversal of perspective. For example, Caper on transference:
the relationships that the patient seems to have had with his objects in the past are a ‘repetition’ of the patient's present relationship with the analyst.
I found Caper's writing on theory full of memorable images and unexpectedly more vivid and alive than his patients’ material.
The book is a compilation of a number of separate articles, most of which have been published before, between 1994 and 1998. Despite some ideas being repeated, the articles work well as a book, as the chapters explore the processes of introjection and projection in increasing depth.
Caper contrasts psychoanalysis with suggestion (early psychoanalysis and many current psychotherapies). Without mincing words, he describes the suggestionist as someone actively working to seduce the patient away from facing the truth: encouraging splitting, discouraging thought, evading rather than confronting problems, and
constrained by the strait-jacket into which he has allowed himself to be tied by his own and the patient's narcissism.
Not that psychoanalysts are free from this sort of behaviour but, as Caper emphasises, the point in analysis is to explore the forces that support suggestion. Much of the book is an investigation into what Caper refers to as
the mind-numbing pull that operates on the analyst to enjoy the intimacy and sense of power of a narcissistic merger instead of treating the patient's state of mind as an object of knowledge”.
If he is to resist infection from the patient, the analyst needs a mind of his