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Reading this book made me reflect about the opportunity available to every analyst to individuate himself, and have a theory, an experience and a work method which is truly personal. In fact, apart from the debts of gratitude owed to one's teachers, I wonder whether it would not be preferable for a psychoanalyst, in his work with his patients and in the work-group with his colleagues, to stop being a student once his training has finished (without being accused of refusing to admit any dependence on whoever has formed and sustained him psychoanalytically, or of aspiring to become one of the “giants” of psychoanalysis), and to express his knowledge, sensibility, powers of observation and even his sense of humour without necessarily having to enter the field and side with one group rather than another. As is well-known, the authoress has worked in various private and public centres in London, and in the J. Jackson Children's Center in Boston. She has worked at the Tavistock Clinic as a supervisor, and has taught at Brunel University, where she trained numerous child therapists.
Frances Tustin seems to me to be refreshingly free of this kind of impediment. She cites various authors and is clearly interested in understanding theoretical text and different ways of working, but at the same time, keeps her distance from their methods and defines the limits of her personal field of research without being afraid to say that her personal insights are just that. On the contrary, she tells us quite sincerely that while her psychoanalysis identity was being formed, she had to work through the anxiety of feeling ungrateful towards her teachers and betraying them, in spite of feeling that she owes a great deal, for example, to M. Klein, W. Bion and, at a later stage, D.W. Winnicott. With extraordinary clarity