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“Anyone who hopes to learn the noble game of chess from books will soon
discover that only the opening and end-games admit of an exhaustive
systematic presentation and that the infinite varieties of moves which
develop after the opening defy any such description”
According to Freud, this point of view also applied to the conduct of psychoanalysis. This may have contributed to the fact that compared to many other psychoanalytic topics, psychoanalytic technique has not received that much written attention since then.
Bjørn Killingmo, Emeritus Professor at the Psychological Institute, Oslo University and his successor, Siri Erika Gullestad, defy Freud's chess-metaphor and find it possible as well as desirable to give instructions at the concrete level in the therapy relation, valid through all phases of the therapy. This is the quite ambitious starting point for their book, and I think they fulfil their ambition very well.
The book is divided into three parts, the theoretical base, clinical issues and theories of change. In the introduction, they place their work among the many psychoanalytic schools of today as belonging to “the object-relational perspective” and they present the profile of the book as “relational-oriented character analysis”.
In the first part of the book, they deal with the theoretical base for practice. They do not intend to give a full systematic overview, but different central clinical concepts are discussed. They emphasize that their understanding of “clinical material” is not limited to conscious and unconscious meaning. The therapist's listening perspective also includes “form of speech, tone of voice, facial expression, look, breathing and not the least, the patient's more general “style” or manners often expressed in a specific posture of the body” (p. 26). They also explain that viewing psychoanalysis from an object-relational perspective to them means that the psychoanalytic process is best understood and formulated as a relation wh