Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 699714

Book reviews
Edited by Lucinda Hawkins and Joe McFadden

Kalsched, Donald. Trauma and the Soul. A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to

Human Development and its Interruption. London & New York: Routledge,
2013. Pp. xvi + 339. Pbk. 29.99
Donald Kalsched has produced an important sequel to his earlier seminal The
Inner World of Trauma (1996). He has again demonstrated his gift for uniting
Jungian theory with the larger psychoanalytic tradition, and he beautifully illustrates some of the ways in which psychotherapy can be a spiritual process.
Kalsched describes the ways in which archetypal defences protect an essential
core of the person, the fragile personal spirit or the soul, from unbearable affects produced by early trauma. He calls these defences the self-care system.
This structure appears in the patients dreams as archetypal or mythopoetic imagery, for example, as angels or demons. The self-care system protects the person from re-experiencing his or her original trauma and from disintegration
anxiety, but does so at a high price; it prevents trusting attachment, resists
healing, and prevents the full embodiment of the soul. The self-care system
performs self-regulatory functions and mediates between the inner and outer
worlds in a way that is normally carried out by the healthy ego, but also prevents spontaneous self-expression. The traumatized person survives but may
not be able to live creatively, although he has privileged access to the spiritual
dimension. Kalsched amplies his patients experience using the gure of Dis,
from Dantes Inferno.
The extinction of the personal spirit must be avoided at all costs, so primitive
defensive operations are deployed to make sure that overwhelming affect is not
fully experienced as an accessible memory. Instead these affects are dissociated,
sometimes appearing as hallucinations, sometimes evacuated into the body to
appear as physical symptoms or acted out in a repetition compulsion, sometimes
in the transference. The inner world is no longer coherentbits of affect and
images oat in a disconnected way. The person lives in constant terror of a
catastrophe that has in fact already happened but which cannot be remembered.
This situation causes severe psychopathology.
Trauma forecloses transitional space and disrupts the possibility of the
archetypal potentials of the Self from incarnating in a humanized fashion;
because they cannot incarnate fully, these potentials remain daimonic.

0021-8774/2013/5805/699

2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Son Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12045

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Normally this transpersonal level of the psyche is humanized by a reasonable

object world in childhood, but in the presence of grossly abusive and
traumatogenic early relationships these processes are not humanized and the
child remains at the mercy of a mythopoetic stratum of the psyche, in which live
dangerous forces of the kind personied in mythology. Kalscheds remarkable
and original claim is that, as a result of trauma, these daimonic gures take
on a defensive function at the same time as they are persecutory. In his earlier
work, Kalsched believed that these gures did not change, but he now believes
they can transform into a more benevolent form.
Kalsched reports typical dreams of trauma patients in which the dream ego or
a vulnerable gure such as a small child (a soul gure) is tortured by a terrifying
evil force such as a vampire or Nazi, which presumably personies traumatic
affect. He points out that this is a different approach to dreams than the
traditional Jungian notion which sees dreams as constructive or compensatory.
He notes that this kind of imagery tends to appear in therapy when the patients
traumatic affect is being remembered or repeated in the transference. In contrast
to the classical Jungian view of dreams, Kalsched does not believe that this kind
of dream is part of the individuation process or that it has a compensatory
theme. Nor can the dreamer be asked to take responsibility for these gures
as shadow aspects of the dreamer.
Kalscheds deeply moving case examples include dreams that portray the
bi-polar nature of the self-care system, of which one part is abusive, the other
fragile and vulnerable. The reader wonders whether these are transference
dreams or whether they simply depict the dreamers intrapsychic situation.
Kalsched acknowledges the importance of asking to what extent the therapists
interventions have played a part in the emergence of dangerous dream gures,
or whether the therapist is unconsciously experienced to be like these daimonic
gureswhat Jung called an archetypal transference. Perhaps, by talking about
dream gures as part of the archetypal self-care system, the therapist avoids
negative affect that would otherwise be directed towards him. Kalsched
minimizes this possibility, and he does not think these persecutory dream gures
can be reduced to images of internalized traumatic early objects because the
gures behave in a much worse manner than what happened in reality. He sees
these persecutory gure as also defensive; the inner tyrant wants to protect the
traumatized personal spirit of the child. In order to prevent the destruction of
the childs core of innocence, to preserve what is left of the child, the tyrant
gure dissociates or encapsulates it into schizoid withdrawal or numbs it with
addictions or makes it depressed to avoid life in the world.
Kalscheds work is not without controversial elements. He has a tendency to
conate brain and psyche in a way that is philosophically problematic if the
reader is not committed to physicalism. He notes that trauma is encoded in the
right hemisphere, adding that it becomes conscious by means of mythopoetic
imagery, gaining archetypal enhancement from the daimonic stratum of the
psyche. This raises the problem of whether the archetypal level of the psyche is

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701

generated by the brain or whether it interacts with the brain if it is separate, in

which case we arrive at the Cartesian problem of how spirit and matter interact.
Are daimonic gures truly spiritual principles, part of the dark side of the
transpersonal Self, which is a priori, or are they fully understandable
developmentally and neurologically? Object relations theorists who want to
reduce archetypal imagery to family dynamics would say that trauma activates
infantile defences. Dream imagery of vampires and demons is generated in an
attempt to make sense of otherwise chaotic experiences, an attempt to organize
and sustain a sense of self in the face of traumatogenic early objects. For some
of us however, these gures personify spiritual potentials that are activated by
trauma and not reducible to brain mechanisms.
Kalscheds invaluable work shows that our psychopathology has a spiritual core,
and demonstrates that dealing with such material is a spiritual practice. I believe his
work is a form of the redemption of evil; the therapist visits the patients hell with
her, becomes a compassionate witness, and faces or even exorcises the devil in the
patients soul.
Lionel Corbett
C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago

Tougas, Cecile T. The Phenomena of Awareness. Husserl, Cantor, Jung.

London & New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 152. Hbk. 95.00 / Pbk. 28.99
The more you look
The subjective was in danger at the turn into the 20th century. The hard sciences
aspired to eliminate it as a scientically valid constituent of the real in hopes of
arriving at evidence-based certainties, but during almost 400 years of Cartesian
thinking, a small scientic contingent strove equally for defence of the subjective
as scientic truth. Two prominent counter-enlightenment scientists of the early
20th century were Edmund Husserl (18591938) and C. G. Jung (18751961).
They were virtual contemporaries, both German-speaking, and it is curious that
Husserls name does not appear once in the General Index of Jungs Collected
Works nor does Jung appear in Husserls writing.
Which prompted Cecile Tougas to bring them together in her very alive book.
Jung would have appreciated clarication from Husserl, says Tougas,1 a judgement
that is justied by this short masterful book, which took 20 long years to write. It is
written in the best new scientic style, which seamlessly melds both the subjective,
that is, the experiences of Tougas as she writes the book, and the objective, the ideas
of Husserl couched in his engendering experiences. The Phenomena of Awareness
is a story of consciousness reecting on itself, undemonstratively demonstrating
what is being written about rather than discoursing on it, an ancient classical
1

p. 111

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rhetorical device known to Tougas, a scholar of Latin and classical philosophy.

This reexive layering of awareness is also the heart of the phenomenological
method founded by Husserl. Like good intellectual biography and autobiography
both, the chapters of Phenomena are personally rich and ring of truth but
surprisingly short and effortlessly digested, an exemplar for presenting difcult
intellectual material to a general audience. The chapters move along rapidly
but also give opportunity to stop for reection, readers choice.
On rst look, it seems that Tougas primarily intends to teach us about Husserl,
and one may read the book with this presumption, learning much. But on further
reection it becomes clearer that the books infrastructure is Tougas conveying her
own experience of Husserl as he conveys his experience of a search for reality. The
account is better seen as an experience of discovery: Husserls Tougas and the
readers. What becomes apparent is how Husserl has been at the heart of Tougass
mature coming to herself, spiritually and otherwise. Since her experience has been
with Jungian analysts and studies, one might ask, Why Husserl and why does she
say Jung would have appreciated clarication from Husserl and not vice versa?
I think that Tougass young holistic world was rst penetrated and then gratefully
afrmed by Jungs recognition of the transcendent. She continues to be grateful, but I
think the immediate truths of Husserls phenomenology provided clearer undeniable
access to world, spirit, and experience of self. After all, with Husserl, one starts with
unmediated nave awareness, not unlike the mind of mythological times when spirit
and material were consubstantial but unreective. Tougas speaks of how different
people nd different languages that pull them towards awareness, then
understanding, and an experiential knowledge of self. For Husserl, this language
was the awareness of everything that the world put before him and the wonder of
awareness itself. So too for Tougas, it would seem. Husserl and Tougas nd reality
as the ineluctable and inexorable succession of unmediated moments of awareness.
In her best scholarly sleuthing mode, Tougas seeks to do two things more. First,
she seeks to anchor Husserls phenomenology in mathematics, the cornerstone of
traditional science.She invokes Georg Cantor (18451918), the German father of
set theory, whose work, coined around the time of his friendship with Husserl, also
a mathematician, is needed to look systematically at all those successive moments
and their aggregates that constitute reality. The gist for phenomenology is the discovery of the transnite realm that explains how focused awareness can never exhaust
the objects or the transcendental layers available to it in the ux of time. Persistence
is one of Tougass virtues, and I think she struggles mightily with Cantors theory of
abstraction. The reader will be tried and may choose to dally or tiptoe quietly past
thesetransnite discussions without breaking the continuityof the rest of the book,
but theres an elusive beauty to the mathematics and insights to be had.
The second noteworthy sleuthing Tougas does is reconstructhow Jung, in
contrast, arrived at images as the organs of reality instead of nding them in the
continuity ofexperiences and impressions that impinge on awareness. She explains
how this came to be because of a misreading of Kants word Vorstellung, an error
of his translator perhaps but left by Jung himself. I had known about this problem

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703

but have never seen it explained so clearly and authoritatively, also so trenchantly
and ominously regarding its consequences. The explanation of the misprision of
Vorstellung alone is worth the book, and it is at the heart of why Jungian speakers
for phenomenology have never accurately served Jungiansor clearly advanced
Jungs work.2 Tougass book is very well written book, and I leave you the
pleasure of hearing the tale from her.
In sum, this book warrants at least one reading and then an ongoing reection, for
it is full of knowledge, but of greater importance it is a humble matter-of-fact and
intelligent document of Tougass coming to herself in awareness with no emphasis
on it as a personal victory. It is a generous statement. Shortly before he died, analyst
par excellence Joe Henderson had a dream of a ctitious analyst who was
complaining to Henderson that his peer discussion group wanted to discuss love
again. But weve already discussed it, said the dream analyst, to which Henderson
replied in a raised voice, Well, discuss it again! Keep discussing it. There is a special
experience of love and joy that accompanies each coming to oneself, not unlike
attaining to Aristotles eudemonia3 or, in Jungs metaphor, being present at the rst
day of creation.4
Phenomena is an avowed labour of love and Tougass love illuminates everyone
she writes about. As it is with us humans, the more we look, the more we see, and
so we never tire of looking if the intent is exercised with thoughtfulness and
agape-like goodwill, the attitude that the Kabbalah calls kavannah. To take
this book in is once more to make such a journey oneself.
David I. Tresan
Society of Jungian Analysts of Northern California

Macdiarmid, Derry. Century of Insight: The Twentieth Century Enlightenment

of the Mind. London: Karnac Books, 2013. Pp. 352. Pbk. 26.99
I hope to entice you on a journey of discovery into the unconscious that will
include the ideas of Freud, Jung and Adler, and others from the 1890s through
to the end of the twentieth century. So begins Derry Macdiarmids
posthumously published book, which sweeps across the last century, addressing
questions of religion, spirituality, anthropology and philosophy through the lens
of analytic thought, alighting in short chapters on selected thinkers and clinicians.
It is a broad canvas, punctuated sometimes a little jarringly, though often
amusingly, by anecdotes and vignettes from his personal experience and the
lives of others. Much of the material derives from his years of teaching dynamic
psychotherapy to student psychiatrists, and his voice drives the ideas along as if
2
3
4

pp. 911, lll12

see Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics
CW 14, para. 760

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coming straight from the lecture theatre or seminar room. Delineating what
he calls a new Enlightenment of the Mind, he offers a simple but
powerful thesis: that notwithstanding the brilliance of thinkers such as Freud
and Jung, their work on the unconscious mind and the depth of subsequent
thinking that has lent a new reason and new morality to our understanding
of human behaviour, what lies beneath it all, is one essential needwhich
is to love.
Macdiarmid was a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who ran the C.G. Jung
Clinic at the Society of Analytical Psychology in London for many years. He
came to analytical psychology through a fascination with the writings of John
Layard. He travelled to Cornwall to meet Layard and thereafter moved to
London at the beginning of the 1960s to be analysed by him, and later become
his secretary. He writes, When I met him, I already knew from his writings
that he believed life to be about instinct wanting to be transformed into spirit.
This engagement with the tension between the instincts, the mind and the
spirit was to become for Macdiarmid too a preoccupation that lasted
throughout his life.
Layard had been in analysis with Jung, and in a revealing chapter, Macdiarmid
touches on the analytic relationship between the two, his own analysis with
Layard, the difculties between them, as well as his admiration for him. He
cites in particular Layards original contributions to an understanding of
human nature and primitive human passions, drawn in the rst place from a
year-long anthropological study of the inhabitants of a remote Melanesian
island, their culture and lifestyle.
Starting his own book with a brief overview of the work of an African tribal
doctora master of psychotherapy in actionMacdiarmid moves on from the
early psychoanalytic thinkers, through the philosophers Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche to Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott among
others. He includes an interesting chapter on Karen Horney and the American
family therapist Salvador Minuchin, chapters on human development and the
roles of hate and aggression, before reaching the core of his argument, that
dreams can hold the source of inspiration and shed light on the meaning of life,
and that the guiding spirit of life is love in its many forms.
In part, this seems to derive from a deeply religious attitude. Like Jung,
Macdiarmid grew up in a religious household. His father was a Scottish
clergyman. Like Jung, he broke away from his father describing in a telling
section: When I told my father I was moving to London to become Layards
disciple, my doubtful father asked me, Is he a happy man? I tried to think I
was being sort of truthful when I answered, Yes, but I knew I was stretching
it. And like Jung, he too struggled to accommodate his innate sense of
established religion with thoughts of goodness and meaning. He recommends
not worrying about whether God exists or not, and concludes after drawing
on the words of liberal moral philosophers and thinkers, and his own experience
of analysing patients, that religion is celebrating with those you love.

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705

At times his broad-brush approachhe writes of the damage caused by

millennia of half-hearted or panicky living not only in our patients but in their
families and the history in which they are immersedcan seem at odds with
more reective thought, and the ner pencil lines of patients who have felt
buried alive, or for whom love is compromised, mutilated or inhibited, are
not so clearly drawn. But with his emphasis on freeing up the instincts, and
the need for the therapist to react to the patient with their whole natural self,
he aligns himself with analysts today and over time who have struggled and
continue to struggle to combine a deeply developed analytic attitude with
natural feelings of benevolence and compassion.
There is no doubting Macdiarmids bonhomie as well as his considerable
humanity, his belief in the vitality of love and his desire to pass on ideas about
being human and how to live in enriching ways. As his widow, the books editor,
writes: Derry Macdiarmid argues that there is no truth more important than the
one discovered by each of us for ourselves. In sentences written the day before he
died, he dispatches the reader on a journey into the world of dreams, imagination
and emotion, which he clearly found so transformative and enriching himself.
Kay Marles
British Jungian Analytic Association of the
British Psychotherapy Foundation

Civitarese, Giuseppe. The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian

Psychoanalysis. Trans. Ian Harvey. London & New York: Routledge / The
New Library of Psychoanalysis Series, 2013. Pp. 217. Pbk. 28.99 / $42.35
In the final paragraph of The Violence of Emotions, the author, Civitarese,
writes (p. 190):
On the stage of the therapy invented by Freud, the analysts reverie (the images that take him by
surprise) and the narrative derivatives of waking dream thought contained in what the patient says,
but also in what he himself says, become the access roads to the unconscious communication that
takes place between two minds, to the wax tablet which, as should be clear by now, is only a
fragment of a much larger writing pad and which corresponds to sociality, culture, the Other.

Civitareses raison dtre for writing this impressive book is to show us, in line
with post-structural, post-modernist thought, that reality and for sure analytic
reality is not an independent, self-contained state or object. Reality, from
ordinary human relations to abstract theories and beliefs, is determined by the
interrelations of the various elements of culture.
On the one hand Civitarese, in writing this book, gives us a portal through
which we can see his own original way of thinking about mental life and
psychic development, and on the other, he encourages his reader to self
reect, and to also become the author of the text, in line with post-modernist
thought.

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Civitareses book introduces the reader to how he interlaces aesthetics,

psychoanalysis, a rereading of Bion, and an exploration of analytic eld
theory, developed by, among others, Ferro, to whom this book is dedicated.
Clinical examples are intertwined with theory to show the reader: 1.
Psychoanalysis has the capacity to illuminate the workings of the mind and is
empirical in nature; and 2. Aesthetic experience, the vehicle for psychoanalysis,
is central for conceptual reection and technical research. Bions starting point
is also Civitareses starting point. Its foundation is what we nd in Descartes:
radical scepticism, and a deep interest in what constitutes reality. Civitarese
is also interested in reality. His focus is on the development of the internal,
psychic reality of the individual, exploring the deepest and most primitive
levels of mental life.
Civitareses analytic realm is an aesthetic realm. In this world, as with art,
various forms of experience are met aesthetically, in other words are both
sensed and invented (p. 112). This idea is not new. However, Civitarese nds
a way to theoretically interlace Freudian principles (pathogenic effects of the
isolation of mental contents, repression, inner conict, centrality of dreaming
to understanding psychic reality) with Melanie Klein (internal object relations),
and align them with Bions psychoanalytic theory (aesthetic: underscoring the
centrality of emotions and dreaming [day and night] dreams) to show in clinical
material how aesthetics work.
In fact, for Civitarese, the eld of analysis is both like a dream and like theatre. In
this world, the analyst and the patient are both actors, each sensing, dreaming, and
reecting. In this analytic eld, in this theatre, one meets the social nature of
subjectivity: the intersubjective birth of emotions. At times raw, violent, and even
irrational, it is these moments that the author describes when the patient shifts
from his or her desubjectivization and becomes a subject. Civitarese is elegant
when he describes how the subject comes into being through warm and cautious
interpretation of the immediate reality. He prefers to let the aesthetic experience
develop fully, allowing the violence of emotion to develop (both in the analyst
and the patient) rather than addressing the total transference in a more immediate
manner.
This book is not easy to read. As it is with an analysis, or with theatre, the
opening of each chapter, each paragraph, and each sentence is a challenge to
the reader, inviting curiosity, openness to ambiguity, and self-reection. The
discursive, complicated, confusing, and saturated material which often
characterizes the beginnings in an analysis, also characterizes Civitareses book.
The challenge to this reader was to get through the dense theoretical material to
arrive at the clinical material. This was like entering the middle phase of an
analysis: a relief of tension, a chance to breathe into a working mode, as
Civitarese connected theory and aesthetic experience in clinical vignettes.
In Chapter 3, entitled The Burning Body, following the theoretical introduction,
there is a poignant vignette as the patient emerges into the room from her
exile. Civitarese writes: Malady is not of the body but of the eld. He sees

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hypochondriasis as a defence against anxiety, as desubjectivization, not of her

doing but a complex response to the nature and function of the analytic setting.
The clinical examples are the strength of this book. They enliven the theoretical
discussion in each chapter as Civitarese discusses subjects like transcending the
caesura, hypochondriasis as desubjectivization, and the aesthetic experience as
analysis. He shows a relationship between the patient and analyst as a warmer
and more intimate experience than it has been regarded in past depictions of
classical analysis.
This is a useful book for psychoanalysts, as well as for psychiatrists and other
psychotherapists who are already familiar with Bion as well as post-modernist
thinking. As stated above, it is a challenging book to read and understand
on the rst reading. However, the clinical material helps to illuminate the
theoretical complexity.
Nilufer Yalman
St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute
Brown, Lawrence J. Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An
Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives. London & New
York: Routledge / The New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2011. Pp. xiii + 167.
Pbk. 26.99/$37.99
In this book Lawrence Brown offers a detailed, yet very readable review of the
developing thought about intersubjectivity of Freud and Klein, and particularly the
expansion of perspectives by Bion. To this he adds his own perspective as well as
those of other contemporary writers inuenced by Bion. As Grotstein writes in the
Foreword, Browns interest has taken him to the post-Kleinians in London, to the
American ego psychologists and interpersonalists, and to South America (p. xv),
drawing on the contributions of Racker, the Barrangers and The River Plate Group,
as well as on Bions theory of groups. Discussions of Bions work often mention
the difculty in understanding his style, which many who knew him suggest was
intentional. Brown gives excellent explanations of the manner in which Bions
thinking related to, expanded upon, or diverged from that of both Freud and Klein.
In this history of ideas of both the unconscious and intersubjectivity, analytical
psychologists can see both similarities and divergences with the ideas of Jung. A
thread throughout is Bions discovery of alpha function. Using Kleins concepts
of the paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions and projective identication,
Bion introduced the ideas of the container/contained, and the movement
between positions, as opposed to static or progressive developmental stages.
Unlike Klein, he also recognized the normal, communicative function of projective
identication. In addition to historical development, Brown gives his own
perspective on what he refers to as Bions ego psychology as an intersubjective
view of psychic structure, the reconsideration of the internalized, thinking Oedipal
couple as thirdness, and the effects of relational trauma on the impairment of
thinking, dreaming and alpha function.

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Using detailed case studies, Brown describes the dyadic relationship between
analyst and patient, focusing on decits in alpha function of the patient and the
manner in which the alpha function of the analyst is inuenced. He gives
particularly interesting examples where the patient can operate and communicate
only from a sensory world of unmetabolized beta elements, and the manner in
which the analyst must work rst to be with the patient and then use his own
alpha function or reverie to initiate this process in the patient. Brown compares
his own perspective particularly with that of Ferro (2002, 2005). His attention
to unmetabolized sensory elements brings up both Jungs (1920/71) typological
work, Blegers (1967/2013) glischo-caric ego nuclei, and Ogdens (1989)
autistic-contiguous position. Brown, like Ferro, recognizes the issues of suitability
of analysis for patients with severely impaired alpha function. In addressing
this, Brown states:
I am emphasizing a technique that assumes the ego is something that is dyadically helped into
existence rather than presupposing it exists, is intact, and may be actively followed as well as pointed
out to the patient.When the patient lacks substantial alpha function or if it is disturbed in the
analyst, then the analytic couple ceases to be a creative pair engaged in the creation of meaning.
(p. 98)

Brown describes in detail his own sense of reverie deprivation, the restricted
development of an intersubjective analytic third, and the delay in achieving any
sense of a dyadic expansion of consciousness (see Tronick et al. 1998). In his
examples, he describes the slowly developing and sensory experiences that over
time, and with improvement of alpha function, can become narratives, and the
use of reverie-sharing in elaborating on each partners associations, which assist in
creating new meaningthe development of beta elements into alpha elements. Brown
sees Bions ego psychology as distinct from traditional ego psychology in addressing
the unconscious ego activity of the linked (ego) alpha function of the analysand and
analyst. This is a way of recognizing the existence of both an intrapsychic and an
interpersonal point of view without having to opt for one or the other.
Brown develops another of Bions ideas in looking at the dream in the
analytic work as mutually constructed:
Thus, to state that the intersubjective connection between two minds is achieved through linked alpha
functions is the same thing as saying that the analyst and patient dream a reciprocal dream together.

[And]through processes of mutual projection and containment, the analytic dyad begin to weave a
dream together that becomes their dream; spun on a loom with threads that spool from the unconscious
recesses of their respective psyches.
(p. 121 & p. 123 respectively)

The conjoint dream is of the eld and transforms the mutual unconscious
phantasy. Understood in the mind of the analyst using her own metaphors,
the analysand is dreamed into existence (Ogden 2001).
After discussing Bions understanding of the development of thinking, dreaming,
imagining and evolving, Brown takes up the issue of trauma and its effect on these

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709

same processes. He hypothesizes that severe trauma has a splintering effect upon the
personality. Compensatory psychological efforts often lead to a brittle and rigidly
organized traumatic organization, with concrete thinking, repetitive enactments,
and the inability to learn from experience. It also remains dissociated from a part
of the psyche that is in touch with reality. Put in the theoretical language of
Bion, there is a reversal of alpha function with many of the qualities of psychotic
functioning. For Brown, harkening back to concepts of Freud and Bion, the ego
has a protective shield. As explained from a contemporary perspective (Schore
2002), the protective shield may be thought of as those internal objects that are
involved in the regulation and management of powerful affective experiences, and
which have neurophysiological correlates.
In severe trauma, the damage to, or destruction of, the protective containing
envelope involves not only a disturbance of affect regulation, but also leaves
the psyche overwhelmed by concrete, raw sensory beta-elements. These
elements become encoded into the body as non-representative, non-symbolic
content, to be evacuated by projective identication, or patched together into
a rigid beta screenorganized chaos. When trauma remains an undigested
fact (Bion 1962) and there is the inability to dream or assimilate the trauma
experience, new experiences are seen as carbon copies of the original trauma.
As a result these experiences are never historicized.
Again drawing on a detailed clinical case, Brown demonstrates both his
own psychological experiences and his work with a trauma patient. In his
discussion he notes the manner in which the analyst must bear being equated
with the patients traumatic objects and withstand the violent projective
identications. Events are felt to be things in themselves and therefore carry
no latent meaning (p. 173). With much time the capacity to think more
abstractly becomes possible for the patient through the successful interactive
experiences with the analyst as container.
In another chapter, Brown uses these same principles to discuss the triadic
dynamics in clinical supervisiona triadic intersubjective matrix. The danger
of using a model focusing on the subjectivities of analyst, patient, and
supervisor is that of losing the clear border between treatment and supervision.
Brown, drawing heavily on Ogden(1996), focuses on the new superordinate
subjectivity (eld) of the three. This he sees not as a static condition, but as an
unfolding psychoanalytic process. To provide insight, Brown gives his own
experiences of selected, shared dreams of his supervisor, himself, and those of
his analysand with clinical and relevant supervisory material as the analysis
progresseda highly unusual report. Equally impressive is the timing, care and
boundary respect exercised in that unusual endeavour.
In summary, this book is a signicant endeavour, bringing together history
and an evolution of thought culminating, but not stopping, in the work and
ideas of Bion. Bion was present for Jungs Tavistock Lectures, and it is no
surprise that elements of Jungs thinking, although not referenced, resonate with
many of those of Bion. Brown, through his own perspective and those of other

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contemporary analytic thinkers, demonstrates that continued development and

emergence are an ongoing part of the analytic endeavour. Intersubjectivity and
the dyadic expansion of consciousness, two leading edge analytic concepts, could
hardly be better presented and described.
References
Bion, W. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: William Heinemann.
(1967). Second Thoughts. London: William Heinemann.
Bleger, J. (1967/2013). Symbosis and AmbiguityA Psychoanalytic Study. London &
NY: Routledge.
Ferro, A. (2002). In the Analysts Consulting Room. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
(2005). Seeds of Illness, Seed of Recovery. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Jung, C. (1920/71). Psychological Types. CW 6.
Ogden, T. (2001). Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming. Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson.
Schore, A. (2002). Clinical implications of a psychoneurobiological model of projective
identication. In Primitive Mental States, Vol. II. ed. S. Alhanati. London: Karnac
Books.
Tronick, E., Brushweiller-Stern, N., Harrison, A., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A., Nahum,
J. et al. (1998). Dyadically expanded states of consciousness and the process of
therapeutic change. Infant Mental Health Journal, 19, 29099.

Joseph McFadden
Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts

Arundale, J. AND Bandler Bellman, D. (EDS.). Transference and

Countertransference: A Unifying Focus in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac
Books, 2011. Pp. 250. Pbk. 20.49
The stated aim of this book is to provide a contemporary contribution to the
literature about transference and countertransference. It is my impression,
however, that the intention of greater signicance is to celebrate the acceptance
of the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA) into the International
Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). The contributors are all BPA members.
The prelude to the book, written with elegance by Debbie Bandler Bellman,
describes in some detail the rather difcult birth of the BPA from within the
British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP). Some members of the BAP
wished to be recognized within the international community but also to
remain part of the BAP, and the process of developing their separate identity
has been, as Bandler Bellman points out, complicated, and at times, treacherous
(p. xxiii). Her prelude is a fascinating description of the process of evolution and
change and the careful path that needed to be steered with the BAP. There are
some contradictions too. For example, at one point, Bandler Bellman upholds
future BPA members passion for the increased possibilities of in-depth work
within the transference and countertransference attendant upon a greater
frequency of sessions (p. xxiii). Yet later, she quotes Michael Parsons rather

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711

different view, that psychoanalytic psychotherapy has evolved over the years,
becoming harder to differentiate from analysis. She returns to this issue
(p. xxxviii), outlining what the BPA views as the essential aspects of being a
psychoanalyst: trust in and enjoyment of unconscious processes; a strong preference
for working 45 times a week in the transference; the capacity to be patient; delight
in the unknown; appreciation and respect for the difculties in the work; recognition of the individuality of each patient; importance of the structure and continuity
of the analytic setting; awareness of personal and ethical responsibility entailed.
With the exception of the issue of frequencythe age old shibbolethsurely many
of these characteristics today belong rmly in the province of psychotherapists too.
Perhaps in the end, the BPA came about because a considerable number of
psychotherapists in the BAP wished both to acquire the status of an analyst and
to establish a place for themselves within the IPA. This they have achieved and
are to be congratulated for their endurance during the process. I reected with
some relief that the four Jungian training societies in the UK have not had to go
through this difcult process as we all have the designation analyst and we are
all members of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP).
The chapters on transference in the book are wide-ranging, bringing some
interesting and thoughtful perspectives to the subject. Arundale writes on
here-and-now interpretations; Irene Freeden on the erotic transference; Jan
Harvie-Clark on love and hate in the structure of the mind; Jessica Sacret on
patients with early experiences of psychic fragmentation; Michael Halton on
phobic attachments and Philip Roys on the transference when ending analysis.
Arundale provides a brief and helpful historical overview to the subject,
although I found too optimistic her view that transference as manifestations of
conscious and unconscious aspects of object relationships ultimately transcend
theoretical orientation (p. xvii). We have only to look at Jungs ambivalence about
transference and its effect on the Jungian community to see that this is not the case
(Wiener 2009). Similarly, Bollas (2007), in his chapter on transference
interpretation as a resistance to free association, highlights vividly the theoretical
and clinical disagreements about transference among British psychoanalysts.
Three chapters particularly captured my imagination. There is an excellent
contribution from Sara Collins on the role of reconstruction in the transference,
arguing cogently against the Kleinian view that transference interpretations
refer only to patients unconscious present fantasies in the here-and-now
relationship with the analyst (pp. 78). Her case examples show clearly how
reconstruction can bring together meaningful life events, including those from
early childhood, and how they are always part of the transference relationship.
Through airing some of the debates about the usefulness or not of addressing
patients past in the analysis, she makes what I found to be a very good case
for viewing internal life as consisting of internal objects that are amalgams of
past and present that can be worked with exibly in the transference (p. 25).
Viqui Rosenberg in her chapter called Sexuality and the analytic couple,
reminds us that it is the singular destiny of sexuality to lie at the crossroads

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where body, fantasy and emotion meet our lives are devoted to mastering our
sexuality, harnessing it and nding ways of deriving pleasure and satisfaction
from it (p. 46). The particular focus of her chapter is to connect sexuality with the
task that is analysis: curiosity and excitementstaple companions of sexuality
nd expression in the analytic vocation (p. 48). Using two clinical illustrations,
Rosenberg emphasizes the need for subtlety when it comes to acknowledging
the sexual in the work and the importance for the analyst to be able to mark
her own sexual feelings and fantasies on the transference. She highlights the
danger on the one hand of not acknowledging the sexual register leading to
possible enactments and on the other how mistimed interpretations can so easily
shift metaphor to seduction. The chapter reminded me helpfully of the
complexity of sexuality within the transference. We avoid it at a cost, yet
always in the background is the cautious hand of an ethics committee.
The last chapter is a little gem. Ruth Berkowitz writes about what she called
the elusive concept of analytic survival. She links survival with concepts such as
tolerance, non-retaliation, containment, reverie and the need to develop a third
position. In her case examples, Berkowitz illustrates how the analyst needs to
surrender to patients transference but how close this can come at times to a fear
of collapse where the analyst fears losing his or her identity. The key to survival,
she maintains, is the capacity of the analyst to reect on her own psychic
functioning (p. 195) and to pay careful attention to work with certain patients
or at certain stages of analysis when the analyst is actually not surviving.
Survival, she says is always in a state of ux without it (survival of the analyst),
the patient may not be able to begin the process of living (pp. 19899).
When I nished this book, I could not help feeling sad and disappointed that
once again in the psychoanalytic world there was no acknowledgement of
Jungs seminal contributions to the subject, especially on countertransference
and on the power of the analytic relationship to transform both parties.
References
Bollas, C. (2007). On transference interpretation as a resistance to free association,
Chapter 5. In The Freudian Moment. London: Karnac Books.
Wiener, J. (2009). The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference and
the Making of Meaning. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

Jan Wiener
Society of Analytical Psychology

Barratt, Barnaby B. What is Psychoanalysis? 100 years after Freuds Secret

Committee. London: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 240. Hbk. 95.00 / Pbk. 28.99
The rapid proliferation of psycho-analytic theories at rst taxed Freud and
then divided him from a good many of his early collaborators both in the eld
of psychiatry and beyond. Institutional attempts to contain this proliferation

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713

and the perhaps inevitable schisms that these engendered, including the secret
committee referred to in the title of this book, merely interrupted the ood
and diverted the ow. At the beginning of the 21st century even Freuds direct
organizational bequest, the International Psychoanalytic Association, is home
to mutually incompatible psychoanalytic theories (as is the IAAP), themselves
divided by diverse kinds of psycho-analytical practices; outside of this may
be found greater diversity still, often with only tenuous links to psychoanalytic
origins. The pressures which maintain collegial relations and institutional bonds
in the face of this at their best promote tolerance, diversity and a genuine wish
to understand and critically evaluate other perspectives and this enriches and
enlivens the development of the eld of study and clinical practice that Freud
provided a method of exploring; at their worst they promote intellectually
and emotionally dishonest compromises, fudge, obfuscation and self-reference
which can act as a kind of dead hand upon development.
It is a relief then when one encounters a courageously explicit and well worked-out
position which does not pull its punches, even if one has substantial disagreements
with it; I think that Barratts book succeeds in this. He starts with an account of
psychoanalysis that is founded on four fundamental central tenets which he outlines
and discusses in chapters 2 to 5: Consciousness and the dynamics of repression;
Personal history and repetition-compulsivity; Sensual embodiment and the erotics
of experience; Oedipal complexities. Understanding and accepting these he views
as essential to the psychoanalytic project and as dening concepts against which
what is and isnt properly psychoanalysis may be judged. To this end in the latter
part of each chapter he lists the manner in which various clinicians and theorists
have departed from this, referring to them as mistaken paths and making forceful
arguments about why he thinks that this is so. About Freuds psychoanalysis
Barratt writes succinctly and with clarity, distilling the essential elements of
complex ideas without oversimplifying or damaging them; he does this in an
incisive way and does not exclude Freud from his targets for criticism.
Barratts version of psychoanalysis encompasses an understanding of its origins
in the natural sciences, but his thesis regarding its practice is essentially as a variety
of meditative self-discipline; a personal search for truth or self-realization and
psychological growth. From this perspective, in subsequent chapters, he
emphasizes the importance of free association to the analytic process and
examines the different kinds of healing, curative, therapeutic and mutative
elements which may be sought in psychoanalysis compared to other therapeutic
approaches. I suspect that Barratt would baulk at the idea that he is promoting
religiosity, but essentially he seems to see psychoanalysis as a secular kind of
spiritual endeavour, and in his nal chapters he explicitly makes links with
eastern philosophy and religious practices.
The mistaken paths that some contemporary psychoanalytic schools have
taken is clearly a matter of considerable ire for Barratt, and these diversications
are undoubtedly a thorny matter. Such criticisms are well known: the accusation
often made against Kleinian ideas, for example, that they emphasize mothers and

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babies in a way that is essentially infantilizing and a defence against Freuds

radical and disturbing ideas about sexuality and sexual feelings; the Kleinians
retort that the Independents avoid aggression and destructiveness and betray
the truth.
Reading about these kinds of exchanges I am reminded of bickering couples
where one says you never do the washing up; the other replies you never do
the cooking; the rst retaliates, you never vacuum and so on ad innitum.
Each proposition is introduced as though it negates the other. Of course they
do not, but in order to determine this there must be a mental space in which
the propositions can be clearly stated and critically examined. But even if the
grievances are valid and worthy of thinking about, often this is evaded because
the real difculty is in bearing the pain of recognizing the limitations and loss,
and essentially there is an unconscious collusion to disavow this.
Analytic ideas in theory offer a way out of these futile exchanges by bringing
analytic thinking to bear upon the process of discourse as well as the discourse
itself, but in practice this aspiration is often confounded. We nd ourselves
vulnerable on the one hand to discounting or denigrating ideas or on the other
idealizing them, rather than engaging in a critical examination that appreciates
both strengths and limitations. Questions of limitation as opposed to evasion
are in consequence often conated in order to prevent the threat posed by change,
development and growth because of the anxiety and painful feelings of loss that
this inevitably involves. One might think here about how recently the proponents
of making links between neuroscience and psychoanalysis have been criticized, for
example on the grounds that they are retreating into theory in order to foster an
illusion of omniscience in the face of feelings of frustration and impotence in the
clinical situation; no doubt this is sometimes true, as indeed it is for any theoretical
idea, because they afford that potential. The ideas do not have to be used in
this way, however, and may, at the very least, potentially add to the repertoire
of concepts for us to use as containers for our clinical experience. Such uses
may themselves become a fertile source of analytic investigation; instead their
limitations come to be paraded as failed omnipotence often on the evidence of
more canard than a wetlands wildlife sanctuary.
For all its value as a clear account of a particular, and at times rather
idiosyncratic, version of psychoanalysis, Barratts book ultimately occupies
doctrinal territory (and in this readers view thus fails an important analytic test)
and is a plea for a particular kind of orthodoxy. In this regard it is difcult
not to think that he rather wants to have his cake and eat it, in that he
introduces his own, actually rather interesting, apostasy. At times I found the
book infuriating beyond endurance and felt it was probably a candidate for
burning. But at the same time I do think that it repays careful, if critical, reading
for its clarity and consistency and so perhaps, paradoxically is also, in my
view, essential reading.
Richard Mizen
Society of Analytical Pscyhology

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