Doubt, conviction and the analytic process: Selected papers of Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman, Betty Joseph ., Routledge & The New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2009, £21.84

Over the past 20 years or more Michael Feldman's papers have provided fresh and clear-minded explorations of clinical psychoanalysis. The challenging issues which he describes and then illuminates are immediately recognizable, although not always acknowledged in one's own work and rarely articulated with such precision. The pressure on the analyst to fudge and smooth-over difficulties, to ‘go with the flow’ and take shelter from the turbulence of the patient-analyst encounter comprises the major theme of this book. He examines how patients bring their ‘problems’: the concerns occupying their distinctive object relationships, and he vividly illustrates how these are translated into conflicts and dilemmas for the analyst, emphasizing how they may then be either evaded and allowed to slip out of sight or faced and analysed.

For example, he shows how a patient with a deeply troubled picture of the Oedipal couple enacts her ‘moral’ quandary, requiring that the analyst contend with a sense of his own responses as either collusively close or excessively wary and cold. Another patient pursues the comfort and reassurance of a familiar enactment and characterizes the analyst's refusal to collaborate with this defensive need as cruel and provocative, requiring the analyst to encounter his own depressive anxieties. A third patient experiences intense hatred and resentment of the analyst's capacity to think for himself and not to immediately comply with the patient's view; powerful pressures are placed on the analyst to offer compromises and concessions in his understanding of the situation, all supposedly in the service of balanced consideration but actually serving to maintain the patient's equilibrium and the status quo.

The difficulties and degree of disturbance investigated in the book are substantial and intimidating. For instance: envy as manifest in the negative therapeutic reactio