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by Howard A. Wishnie (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford, 2005). £34.00 (hardback).
Reading this book prompted reflection on my own journey toward becoming a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, through social work traditions and teachings. A basic assumption of social work practice was that one would inevitably and properly have an emotional involvement with one's clients, and experience strong feelings toward them, some of which could be thought about as unconscious communications of the client, while others had their origins in one's own personality structure. The problem for social work was, and remains, finding a place where these affective responses could be thought about, and appropriately made use of in the work. Embedded in the literature and teaching which influenced my social work practice, though seldom made explicit, were Paula Heimann's paper (1951) and the work of Winnicott (1947 [1958]), regarding the nature of counter-transference. These have remained seminal influences, but now subject to re-examination in the light of further learning.
Wishnie's has been a very different journey. An American psychiatrist and psychotherapist, trained in the physical sciences, he found himself at first wedded to an ideal of scientific objectivity and benign neutrality, but ‘continued to notice all kinds of inner reactions to my patients. Whatever time I spent sorting through these responses, I could not find a way in which to make them disappear. For a long time I considered this to be a personal failing, and a limitation within myself’ (p. 5). His book describes his subsequent path toward intersubjectivity, and toward understanding of the entanglements and enactments that become an inevitable part of the work. Wishnie contrasts this early striving toward objectivity with his experiences in group supervision where open discussion of difficulties and shared learning we