with Nicole Berry, Patrick Casement, Roger Kennedy, Neville Symington, Helmut Thoma and Daniel Widlocher The idea that the analytic relationship is a special form of human relationship, and far from an impersonal encounter, is not new. But few writers have explored the idea and its implications as sensitively and imaginatively as John Klauber, a leading Middle Group analyst and past President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. At the time of his death in 1981, Klauber was at work on lectures to be given as Freud Memorial Visiting Professor at University College London, and this book publishes the lectures he had completed. He took as his theme the nature of the illusion that transference represents, and the relationship between fantasy and reality that the patient - and the analytic process as a whole - explores. John Klauber believed that the analyst's own personality, theoretical persuasion and implicit concepts, blind spots, aesthetic 'space' between analyst and patient - for it is only when the analyst can respond spontaneuously and intuitively that truly therapeutic work can be done. Klauber did not found a school, but he influenced many colleagues. His lectures are complemented in this collection by a wide-ranging group of new essays, by british and Continental analysts, which further explore the texture of the anlytic setting. Newille Symington is concerned with Klauber's notion of spontaneity in relation to aspects of Freud's and Bion's thought. Roger Kennedy examines the meaning, within the analytic process, of 'freedom of the will'. Patrick Casement's focus is the re-experiencing of early trauma in the transference, while Nicole Berry describes the tonality of the last phase of an analysis. Daniel Widlocher explores the relationship between the theoretical concept of ego and Klauber's use of the lay concept of self. Lastly, Helmut Thoma returns to Strachey's classical papers on therapeutic change in the light of Klauber's more developed concept of 'reality' in the transference. The twin themes of illusion and spontaneity weave delicately in and out of the essays, now openly, now more implicitly. |
