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This book celebrates the 80th birthday of Veikko Tähkä, one of the pioneers in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Finland, and the founder of the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society. The book comprises 17 essays, written by colleagues from his homeland, from Europe, and from the USA. Contributions from Otto Kernberg, Joyce McDougall, Anne-Marie Sandler and Robert S. Wallerstein attest to the international orientation and reputation of Dr. Tähkä, who has twice spent several years at the Austen Riggs Center, USA. In their instructive foreword, Aira Laine and Jukka Välimäki give important data of his personal history and thereby also of the development of psychoanalysis in Finland. This should be of great interest to readers from the other Scandinavian countries.
When facing such a book, comprising 17 papers differing in style of writing and in topics, both clinical and theoretical, both essayistic and philosophical, one is confronted with a problem: How to do justice to such diversity? I do not have the answer, but I have chosen to give some idea of the contents of all contributions. I hope the authors will forgive me for writing more extensively on some and not on others.
For those who do not know the work of Veikko Tähkä, Robert S. Wallerstein's essay “Psychoanalytic understanding and psychoanalytic therapy: Veikko Tähkä's contributions”, will serve as a first introduction. His point of departure is Veikko Tähkä's book “Mind and its treatment. A psychoanalytic approach”, published in 1993. However, as early as the 1979 article in the Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, Wallerstein finds the seeds that are further developed in this book. According to Wallerstein, Dr. Tähkä has developed a model for the nature of the mind, a basic assumption being that of a phase-specific interaction between therapist and patient. The central therapeutic concern in treating the psychotic patient is gratification, meaning that the therapist, by way of complimentary responses