Beginning Analysis

by Bernard Reith (Author), Mette Møller (Author), John Boots (Author), Penelope Crick (Author), Alain Gibeault (Author), Ronny Jaffè (Author), Sven Lagerlöf (Author), Rudi Vermote (Author)

How does a psychoanalysis begin? What goes on when analyst and prospective analysand meet for the first time, and what processes are activated to make the project for an analysis possible?

This unique contribution to the surprisingly sparse literature on this most essential aspect of the psychoanalytical practitioner’s work, is the clinical companion to Initiating Psychoanalysis: Perspectives, also part of the ‘Teaching’ Series of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Replete with clinical illustrations, this book is based on the findings of an ambitious research project on first interviews carried out from 2004 to 2016 by an international group of psychoanalysts, the Working Party on Initiating Psychoanalysis (WPIP) of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. The authors, all members of the Investigative Team, are senior psychoanalysts from member societies of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, all with extensive experience in the practice and teaching of psychoanalytic consultation.

Psychoanalysts and analytic therapists, in particular those in training or setting up their practice, will find Beginning Analysis to be essential reading in deepening their understanding of how analysand and analyst arrive at the decision to begin analysis.

Review
From the Foreword by David Tuckett: ‘This book is very, very important, particularly at the present time. It explores crucial questions for psychoanalysts and, indeed, psychoanalytic patients. What has to happen for a meaningfully psychoanalytic treatment to take off and to become established as worthwhile? What are the challenges in doing so? The authors report detail from eight years of discussions of clinical material held in 45 workshops with up to 500 psychoanalysts from all over the world. Facing the challenges for analysts and patients raised in those discussions, the authors describe how they came to extend the diagnostic-type envelope within which questions of first interviews have been hitherto contained and to begin to question the essence of what makes a psychoanalytic encounter "psychoanalytic. This book is a milestone, even a watershed."

"It takes two to create a psychoanalytic patient. The subtleties of the momentous first encounter, the scene in which explodes with full force the desires, fears and unconscious phantasies of both partners has been researched in a systematic way for the first time. Beginning Analysis: On the Processes of Initiating Psychoanalysis and the previous volume Initiating Psychoanalysis are essential reading for those wanting to build a psychoanalytic practice. Beginning Analysis: On the Processes of Initiating Psychoanalysis is also essential reading for those interested in how to do research using psychoanalytic tools."-Dana Birksted-Breen