Book 13

In "Psychic Experience and Problems of Technique" Stewart draws on his own clinical experience to focus on changes in the patient's experience of inner space, and to record the growth of his own understanding of the patient's experience and how this can change. Beginning with an account of the role of collusion in the myth of Jocasta and Oedipus, he goes on to a theoretical discussion of thinking, dreams, inner space and the hypnotic state, in the context of extensive clinical experience. The second part of the book centres on practical clinical issues and problems of technique, tackling in particular the role of transference interpretations, other agents of change, and the problems encountered in benign and malignant types of regression. The wealth of clinical material and the author's informality and openness in presenting his experiences of working with very disturbed patients should be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Michael Balint

by Harold Stewart

Published 9 March 2004
The work of Michael Balint, a leading object-relations theorist, has been neglected since his death in 1970. This book re-establishes his major contributions to psychoanalysis.