Initiating psychoanalysis

Bernard Reith, Sven Lagerlöf, Penelope Crick, Mette Møller and Elisabeth Skale. The New Library of Psychoanalysis Teaching Series, Series Editor: Dana Birksted-Breen, London, Routledge, 359 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-55498-5

We all have personal stories to tell about our own introduction to the world of psychoanalysis, and although this book is written ostensibly for clinicians immersed in psychoanalytic work with their patients, it inevitably resonates with ourselves as patients, specifically evoking our own memories of our first meaningful psychoanalytic experiences that have necessarily remained with us to form the foundations upon which all of our subsequent work has been built. This book is about psychoanalytic beginnings, the initiation of the psychoanalytic process, a critical phase which offers the opportunity not just for the first psychoanalytic encounter for a prospective patient but for a unique meeting of two people – patient and analyst – to create something that has not existed before. In parallel fashion, the book is a collection of mostly previously published papers on the subject, but by bringing them together and drawing out both complementary and conflicting themes, it creates something new and worthy of our attention.

The book evolved out of the work of a working party of the European Psychoanalytic Federation that was investigating the theoretical, clinical and technical issues involved in the initiation of psychoanalytic treatment, in particular the dynamics of first interviews. Their aim was to represent a wide scope of linguistic and psychoanalytic cultures, as well as a range of settings in which psychoanalytic treatment is practiced. The resulting volume spans both geographical and temporal dimensions in being a collection of papers from authors working in different countries and at different stages on the history of psychoanalysis, starting with Freud's first encounter with his patient ‘Katharina’ on a mountain top in the Alps in the early 1890s.