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This book is a tribute to the eminent English psychoanalyst Pearl King. A foreword by Brett Kahr and a skillful Introduction by Ken Robinson give us a fine sense of her life and her career as a psychoanalyst, spanning more than fifty years. Well known for her teaching and seminal papers in the United Kingdom, King is not so familiar to those in other countries, and now a gap is filled in the writing of psychoanalytical history.
The thirteen-chapter book collects King's essays, written from 1951 to the present, and is divided in three parts: clinical issues, the life cycle, and the psychoanalytic process.
In Chapter 2, “Experiences of Success and Failure as Essential to the Process of Development” , King argues that we need to experience ordinary failures as this helps separate out our imaginary (often omnipotent) fantasy of success in reality with the real thing. Of particular interest is her use of the phrase “the ethics of the unconscious,” which she understands as the psychic outcome of the self s phantasy life: one that results in a fear of persecution.
In Chapter 3, “The Curative Factors in Psychoanalysis” —a discussion paper—she disagrees with the French psychoanalyst Sacha