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Joyce McDougall's work combines sensitivity and clarity in ways which, I like to think, rub off a bit on those who venture near. She seems to naturally gravitate to the most creative work of the field—most notably, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, the Kleinians. She absorbed most of these authors before they
were widely known. Unlike Bion and Lacan, her work is quite accessible to the ordinary psychoanalytic reader and does not require a “translator.” She communicates in an immediate, personal way. One ought to say, also, that her work is not limited to any particular camp. It is difficult to find a creative current in the field that she does not use effectively. I am told that in Paris (she is a New Zealander who began her analytic training in London and spent most of her professional life in Paris) she is one of those rare analysts accepted by all conflicting schools.
Her work is an excellent example that it is not necessary to be “original” in order to be creative. The way she makes the best in the field her own illuminates this concept. She speaks through her own struggles and, in a quite real sense, psychoanalysis shines through her. I can strongly recommend her to beginners and experienced practitioners alike. At first glance her work may seem simple. This is an illusion. Her work is clinically subtle and precise. It is a work one can and should engage intimately, not simply with head or feelings but with both My sense of self and my knowledge of psychoanalysis grew from the encounter.
Her book is divided into studies of perverse, psychosomatic, and narcissistic personality operations. In such instance she is finely tuned to the multidimensionality of human experience and tries to give the various faces of Narcissus and Oedipus their due. She is flexible, searching, nondogmatic, but not chaotic. Theory for her is no empty abstraction but expresses and heightens psychic reality. She is unwilling to lose or water down the great insights psychoanalysis has fought so hard