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John Gordon and Gabriel Kirtchuk, London, Karnac Books, 2008, xvii+152 pp., £19.99, (available only in paperback), ISBN 978-1-85575562-8
Psychic assaults and frightened clinicians: Countertransference in forensic settings, edited by John Gordon and Gabriel Kirtchuk, is the tenth volume in Karnac's important Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series, which is ably edited by Brett Kahr. Like its nine predecessors in the series, this book is organized and written in an accessible style for the growing body of professionals who work in forensic settings with a psychoanalytic orientation. The nineteen contributors, all working with patients, clients and/or staff in forensic institutions, illustrate their theoretical points with case vignettes, which gives each chapter immediacy and relevance that practitioners will appreciate.
Hinshelwood's useful ‘Foreword’ reminds the reader that the best vaccination against the madness of the forensic patient is the creation of shared meaning: meanings that are shared by the carer and the cared-for. Each chapter illustrates the value of attunement to the professional's countertransference as a source of cognitive, and, especially, affective information about the patient and the staff member's anxieties and fantasies. Hinshelwood introduces the three levels upon which the book operates: ‘first on the mind of the receptive patient, then on the general morale of the staff; and finally, on the organisational problems of the service itself’ (p. xxiv).
Forensic patients are most likely to have been traumatized. With this in mind, the book orients the reader to the nature and function of trauma and its psychic consequences in the first chapter, ‘Caring amid victims and perpetrators’ by Anna Aiyegbusi and Gillian Tuck. Aiyegbusi and Tuck introduce a trauma model and build on the work of Caroline Garland as a means of understanding the forensic patient's tendency to ‘master’ their own trauma by projecting unprocessed elements of their traumatic ex