British Psychoanalytical Society Research Articles

Introduction: Must We Burn Masud Khan?

Following the publication of a first instalment of the 39 Work Books of M. Masud R. Khan in November 2022 and the recent donation to the Freud Museum London of the full original correspondence between Khan and Wladimir Granoff, and between Khan and Victor Smirnoff, this essay serves the dual purpose of ensuring that Khan’s memory is being kept alive and informing its readership of the newly available archival documents. It briefly retraces the history of Khan’s conflicts with the British Psychoanalytical Society up to the destruction, in July 2019, of the Khan archives that were in the possession of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In addition, the author recounts how he came into possession of the letters Khan exchanged with Granoff and Smirnoff, and why it was decided to establish a Khan archive at the Freud Museum London. The prospect of this new archive being supplemented with the letters from Khan to his second wife, Svetlana Beriosova, and a full copy of the Work Books is also discussed.

Karin Stephen: Bloomsbury's Rebel Psychoanalyst

This paper highlights the important contribution to psychoanalysis made by the psychoanalyst Karin Stephen. Following in the footsteps of other feminist biographers and historians of psychoanalysis, who have worked to bring ‘Freud’s women’ out of the shadows, this article not only focuses on Karin Stephen’s role within the internal political struggles of the British Psychoanalytical Society during the Second World War, but also shows how her psychoanalytic writings can be read in the context of her political activism in the 1930s. Beginning with a biographical account of Stephen’s early life and marriage in October 1914 to Virginia Woolf’s brother, Adrian Stephen, the paper goes on to explore the impact of Karin Stephen’s political activism on her psychoanalytic writing. The article examines Stephen’s arguments, in both her published and her unpublished writings, about the capacity for psychoanalysis to respond to the political crises of the 1930s and 1940s by offering patients freedom from servility to the ‘raging dictator[s]’ within and beyond the inner world of their minds.

Debating well: Why don’t we, and how can we?

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the contributions of Alan Sugarman (US), Rachel Blass (Israel), Paul Denis (France), Luisa Perez (Uruguay), Bernard Reith (Switzerland) and David Tuckett (UK) to a debate on the question of how we can enable productive discussion about our scientific differences and why historically it has been so difficult for the discipline of psychoanalysis to initiate and sustain such discussions. By way of introduction the historical example of the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytic Society is briefly reviewed and several possible factors contributing to the difficulties are provisionally identified, including over-reliance on authority and tradition, eagerness to supervise on the basis of our own theoretical models rather than trying to understand those of others, the lack of clarity and consensus in our definitions of terms, a lack of mutual curiosity resulting in theoretical silos, an experienced threat to identity when adjustments to our positions are called for, and the lack of a methodology for undesrstanding and / or resolving differences.

The London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, from the Origins in 1926 to Today

The London Clinic of Psychoanalysis is part of the British Psychoanalytical Society and its training body, the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The paper discusses the functioning of the Clinic and its beginnings. It then looks at what can be learnt from the Clinic's history and phases of development. The author reflects on the various financial, institutional, political and cultural challenges associated with the provision of low-fee psychoanalytic treatment and concludes that money is not the only barrier to ‘psychoanalysis for the people’.

Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work by Rosine Perelberg

Reviewed by: Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work by Rosine Perelberg Rosemary Davies (bio) Rosine Perelberg, Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work “Tommy, go and clear up your toys now,” Jake barked at his three-year-old son. Seemingly unmoved by his father’s order, Tommy shifted closer to his mother and asked, “Mummy, when is Daddy going to die?” Encapsulated in such a simple if dramatic encounter are the complex derivatives of Freud’s Oedipus complex. As outlined by Rosine Perelberg in her work over the last decades, these complexities cover “the murder of the father, identification and super ego, the setting up of the ego ideal, castration complex, desexualization and sublimation” (2016, p. 126). In one of her three books of selected papers, Murdered Father, Dead Father (2016), she counters what she sees as a drift away from a recognition of the primacy of the Oedipus complex. It is a compelling endeavor, placing little Tommy’s psychic construction of the world center stage. Perelberg’s prolific psychoanalytic writing is characterized by an invitation to absorb complexity but also to associate freely. In her clinical practice demonstrated throughout her work by clinical accounts, she describes how there is no place for the omnipotent analyst, but rather the analyst inaugurates a process (Perelberg, 2016, p. 76). Clinical work is characterized by such things as the open interpretation, the special form of listening, and a scrupulous and compassionate attention to the patient’s lived experience. My contribution to a wider knowledge of Perelberg’s work is offered in the context of “inaugurating a process.” Perelberg provides a rigorously argued psychoanalytic theory, never too far away from the consulting room. Throughout her work, Perelberg (2020) interrogates the centrality of what she calls the myth of origins, how can one be made of two: This is a theme that permeates Freud’s work, as he emphasises mankind’s concerns with its origins and interprets [End Page 793] the riddle of the Sphinx as being about where babies come from . . . The foundation of time in myths is, in so many cultures, related to intercourse between the couple. (pp. 168–169) In her account of her own origins, her 50-year journey from young anthropologist in Brazil, steeped in a rich cultural tradition, to internationally known training analyst and recent president of the British Psychoanalytic Society, she writes: It is striking to see how many of these ideas awaited for so many years until they acquired their full significance for me as a psychoanalyst as a real example of après coup that indicates how the seeds planted in the past acquire full meaning in the future retrospectively. (Perelberg, 2009, p. 249) Furthermore, thinking of her own origins, we can read her scholarship as a homage to Freud, but I think there is something also of a homage to André Green, a titan who straddled the British and French psychoanalytic traditions. Perelberg’s work has been crucial in introducing an Anglophone audience to his work. She respectfully acknowledges other British colleagues who have contributed to this richness. In particular, Green rendered Lacan’s recovery of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit/the après coup,1 comprehensible to contemporary psychoanalysts. In my reading of her work, I trace three—how could it be another number in the writings of an author who elaborates so much of the oedipal dimension of our work?—essential themes of her work. First, she engages with the temporal dimension of psychoanalysis, initially explored by her in a paper based on her infant observation as a candidate (Perelberg, 2008, p. 181). Perelberg (2008) argues that Freud describes not an overdetermined linear temporal progression but many faceted movements to and fro, forward and backward: “There are at least seven dimensions—development, regression, fixation, repetition compulsion, the return of the repressed, the time-lessness [End Page 794] of the unconscious and après coup—like a heptagon in movement” (p. 32). Crucially this conceptualization of the bi-directionality of the nature of Freudian time does much to counter what has been misunderstood in Freud’s work as over determinism: this “rules out linear determinism and thus emphasizes the relevance of the...

Edward Glover, John Bowlby, psychiatry, Bion, and the War Office Selection Boards—towards a context for the emergence of group analysis

This paper is a reflection on the context from which group analysis emerged in Britain during the Second World War. Edward Glover’s objections to the work of army psychiatry in a radio broadcast in November 1943, and the difficult collaboration between the War Office and psychiatrists as they sought to develop officer selection and training procedures, influenced developments in psychoanalysis, including the emergence of group analysis. It considers the response of the British Psychoanalytical Society whose members were engaged in army psychiatry work alongside colleagues from the Tavistock Clinic. Bion’s and Rickman’s collaboration and the experiments at Northfield were an outcome. The abrupt ending of the first Northfield experiment, and the development of psychiatry more broadly, prompted serious questioning within the Society about its isolationalist policies. The Society’s move to develop its training role, and to participate in post war health, mental health and welfare services was a result. Not only did it ensure the Society’s survival, but enhanced the emergence of group analysis as a discipline within the psychoanalytic project.

Interview with RD Hinshelwood

PurposeA one-day conference organised by the University of Essex and the Consortium of Therapeutic Communities, 10 December, 2021 with the theme, “The Unconscious and Organisations”. Presentations and discussions throughout the conference had the aim of generating ideas and sharing knowledge about the unconscious and how this can inform practitioners working in therapeutic communities and other organisations meeting the challenge of emotional distress.Design/methodology/approachInterview with Professor Robert (Bob) Hinshelwood (RH), now 83 years old, who has been involved in therapeutic communities (TCs) since 1969, part of the initial founding of the Association of Therapeutic Communities in 1974, is presented. He qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1976. In 1980 he instigated the founding of the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities along with Nick Manning, David Kennard, Jeff Roberts and Barry Shenkar. In 1984 he founded the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and edited it for 10 years. He was Director of the Cassel Hospital 1993–1997. In 1999 he founded the journal Psychoanalysis and History. He was part of the Free Associations Group (founded by Bob Young and others) which ran the journal Free Associations, and with Mike Rustin and the University of East London, the “Psychoanalysis and Public Sphere” conferences in the 1990s. He has written a great deal about the dynamics of organisational cultures in complex settings. He is Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Professor Emeritus of the University of Essex. The interviewer was conducted by Dr Gary Winship (GW) is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham where he leads the MA in Trauma Informed Practice, visiting professor Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis, and also visiting professor at the Russian State Humanities University, editor of the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities.FindingsHinshelwood reflects on the question of the unconscious and the impact of destructive tendencies on organisational process. He shares his personal experience being a young evacuee during the Second World War and considers the impact of trauma, losing his religion and his subsequent career choices in medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He discusses his experience of supervision with Isabel Menzies Lyth and reflects on the different groups in the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He turns to the question tribalism in TCs and regrets that there had not been more bridge building and collaboration. He talks about his own prolific writing and publishing career which he describes as obsessional rather than passionate, and finally candidly reflects on the prospect of facing death.Originality/valueThe interview was transcribed.

“Reappraising John O. Wisdom’s Critique of W.R. Bion’s Learning from Experience at a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society—17 October 1964.”

ABSTRACT The paper takes up Wisdom's (1964) little known but significant critique of Bion's book, Learning From Experience. While Wisdom appreciates Bion's clinical and theoretical innovations, he criticised the at times confusing structure of themes that were not sufficiently segregated, the extraneous use of mathematical notation, and the scientific/deductive part of Bion's monograph. In deploying a crucial distinction from Wisdom's critique, one that separates the scientific/deductive aspect of Bion's work from its clinical/inductive trajectory, the author offers an approach to reading Bion's complex text.

Bion’s Long Road toward Intuiting the Patient’s Suffering: ‘Theoretical’ vs. ‘Clinical’ Bion

This article presents a chronological investigation of three of Bion’s own analytic case descriptions, while comparing them to a close reading of his evolving theoretical writings during those years. It is divided into three parts: Bion before 1967; Bion in 1967–1968, when he launches a radical revision of his psychoanalytic theory and technique; and the late Bion, especially during the last two years of his life. Respectively, it focuses on three of Bion’s clinical descriptions, presented in Bion’s October 1955 lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society, and in two of his seminars—the Fourth Los Angeles Seminar (1967) and the Fifth Buenos Aires Seminar (1968); and the account of Brazilian analyst, Junqueira de Mattos, of his analysis with Bion over the final two years of Bion’s life. These detailed accounts allow a textual investigation of Bion the theoretician versus Bion the practicing analyst, particularly highlighting the significant gap between them. The author attempts to offer a possible explanation and understanding of this disparity between Bion’s theoretical and clinical texts, and especially of Bion’s long road toward intuiting the patient’s suffering.

Therapy with a Human Face

Therapy with a Human Face Hannah Zeavin (bio) In the universe of Eliza, a video game and visual novel, the American mental health crisis is total: everyone needs treatment. For a start-up in Seattle, the solution is an AI bot, which inducts its patients into confessional quasi-therapy. Hooked up to a heart rate monitor, the patient is reduced to a data stream. The player controls Evelyn, a human counselor with no mental health training, who reads the computer's script. At the end of every session, she is awarded a star-based rating. Patients can leave a tip. The game takes its name from ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's experiment with Natural Language Processing. In 1966 the computer scientist developed the first proto-therapy chatbot while trying to demonstrate the absurd superficiality of communicating with machines. Weizenbaum named his bot after George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, the ultimate mimic. ELIZA, like Evelyn, was purportedly a woman who learned to listen like a therapist without being one. Eliza offers a critique of the state of contemporary mental healthcare. As rates of symptomatic anxiety and depression have soared, face-to-face, non-corporate therapy has become more difficult to access. Even those with insurance often find inadequate coverage, and many areas don't have enough providers. Today, more people might be “in therapy” than ever before, but what that means is vague. A five-minute text exchange with a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) app and multi-session weeks with a psychotherapist are now rendered equivalent under that convening term: therapy. Mental health workers increasingly seek out employment on digital platforms like Talkspace and BetterHelp, which pay their therapists between $20 and $30 an hour. Nearly all digital apps are unregulated and the quality of care has declined alongside the compensation. And millions use an AI-powered chatbot to receive their mental healthcare. Eliza is supposed to depict a dystopia, but it's closer to a realist portrait. The game also includes a second, quieter exploration of the status of therapeutic labor. Who can perform it? For what fee? Is it any good? Is it at least better than what one can do alone? At the center of these questions lies a history of the feminization of therapy—the fight to include women in its practice and its subsequent devaluation. In the United States, the standard account of this story begins in the 1980s, when the requirement that an analyst must hold a medical degree was lifted. But there was already a flourishing psychology community in the early twentieth century, a third of whose members were women. For women in the West, therapy did not go from an impossible profession to a possible one; the feminization of the field happened again and again. To find the origins of our present-day crisis, we have to look back beyond Weizenbaum and his 1966 script to the beginnings of professional psychology in both Europe and the United States. This history is crucial if we want to understand how therapy became, paradoxically, both devalued and out of reach. On June 4, 1938, Sigmund Freud fled Nazi Vienna for the relative safety of London, accompanied by his youngest daughter. Anna Freud was also a famous psychoanalyst, both in her own right and because of her last name. She lacked the medical training that was typical of early psychoanalysts, but it wasn't only nepotism that allowed her to enter the field. In fin-desiècle Vienna, psychoanalysis had slowly opened up to accommodate a number of lay (non-medical) analysts, mostly women, especially if they treated children. While Freud was alive, psychoanalysis was synonymous with his theories, and analysts who departed from his beliefs were marginalized and kicked out of societies. After his death in 1939, the British Psychoanalytical Society was beset by two dilemmas: how to survive during the Second World War and how to practice analysis at all. These challenges generated a schism, with two major camps represented by two prominent women lay analysts, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. [End Page 11] Their dispute, which became known as the Controversial Discussions, centered on Freud's disagreement with Klein's attribution of capacities like...

Repairing the M(other) and the Self Through the Creation of Art: Reading Hilda Doolittle’s HERmione in parallel with Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges through Kleinian Lenses

Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., began to write prose fiction to surmount her traumas and see the way ahead again. H.D. composed varied autobiographical prose, among which her Madrigal Cycle Novels; Asphodel, HERmione, Paint it Today, and Bid me To live hold a pivotal place. Within the scope of this article, I will analyse HERmione in conjunction with Ravel’s opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges which became the main subject of Melanie Klein’s paper on ‘infantile anxiety-situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse’. Reading these two writings in tandem will help to clarify the connections that I draw between Klein’s ‘reparation’ concept and H.D.’s writing. The paper, read before the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1929, both elaborates upon Klein’s analysis regarding art production and introduces the term ‘reparation’ for the first time. Klein starts her analysis with Ravel’s opera, which focuses merely on the destructive fantasies of a six-year-old boy. Throughout the paper, Klein emphasises the significance of the reparation process in the handling of destructive fantasies and reads it within the good and bad mother dichotomy. Reading these two works together will shed insight into how- and why- did H.D. feel compelled to create this particular prose, as well as how similar destructive fantasies affected H.D.’s life and decisions paving the way to her being a writer. HERmione, though composed seven years after Asphodel, is a prelude to Asphodel and tells the story of H.D.’s years in Pennsylvania. This altered chronology indicates that there are emotional reasons for H.D. writing out of chronological order. There may be both editorial and psychoanalytical explanations for her choice to write about her adolescent years, 1906–1911, in particular, after writing on her war trauma and stillbirth, which happened around 1915. In this article, I endeavour not only to explain such explicit choices for a deconstructed chronologic linearity, a prominent feature of modernist forms, within a Kleinian psychoanalytic framework but also to analyse how the writing process contributed to H.D.’s own ‘reparation’ process.

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

Criticizing Phallocentrism in Interwar Britain: Psychoanalyst Sylvia M. Payne's Kleinian Challenge to Freud

Sylvia M. Payne was one of the first women to practice psychoanalysis in Britain. Though she became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, not a single scholarly work is dedicated to Payne's intellectual ideas—a substantial historical lacuna, especially when compared with the research on Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's early disciples and the president who preceded her. This essay presents the first exploration of her early work. It focuses on her belonging to a group of British analysts who challenged Sigmund Freud's thinking on sexual difference. The full scope of this challenge, I argue, as it emerged in interwar Britain, has remained unexamined until today. Adding to the scholarship on the prominent and lesser-known roles of women in psychoanalysis, the article shows that Payne made significant contributions to the field; she also developed the work of Melanie Klein, on whom we also need more research. The study describes the life and work of a woman who has been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century intellectual history. It engages with broader methodological questions of how to define the political, historical role of female psychoanalysts of her generation.

The Emergence of Psychoanalytic Metaneuropsychology: A Neuropsychoanalytically Informed Reconsideration of Early Psychic Development.

This paper is principally concerned with reappraising some of the major disagreements that separated the Viennese and the London Kleinians during the British Psychoanalytical Society's Controversial Discussions. Of particular focus are questions pertaining to the genesis of ego development, the beginnings of object-relating, and the role of unconscious phantasy in respect of these phenomena. The aim of the investigation is to inquire into the light that may be shed on the once intractable conflicts surrounding these questions by bringing to bear more recent developments from psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. First, various key issues from the Controversial Discussions are outlined, before the paper turns to work by Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms that bears on these older arguments and the Freudian theories that underpinned them. With these conceptual foundations established, three questions are posed and discussed with a view to understanding the implications of recent neuropsychoanalytic thinking for some of the entrenched conflicts that divided the British Society. These questions include: (1) what does it mean for the ego if the id is conscious? (2) What does recent neuroscientific knowledge tell us about whether the ego should be thought of as present from birth? (3) How can we understand and locate unconscious phantasy if the main part of the mind that Freud thought of as unconscious is not so? Research from the arena of infant development—particularly the material and analysis of infant observation—is drawn on to illustrate various conclusions. The paper ultimately concludes that taking such an interdisciplinary approach can reveal renewed justification for aspects of the Kleinian metapsychology.

New books on the early history of British psychoanalysis: An essay review.

Reviews the books, Freud in Cambridge by John Forrester and Laura Cameron and Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography by Philip Kuhn. Sigmund Freud and his invention of the discipline of psychoanalysis had an immense intellectual impact on 20th-century culture. Yet, although his writings were received with great enthusiasm-as well as with hostility-we are still lacking full accounts of all the various sites where Freud and his ideas were widely discussed and which rapidly paired his name (as early as the 1920s) with those of eminent intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. Forrester and Cameron's Freud in Cambridge is a good book to read alongside Phillip Kuhn's Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography, published in 2017 (for my full review, see Michal, 2019). Here, I include only what is relevant to a comparison of the two books. Freud in Cambridge opposes writing the history of psychoanalysis modeled on the "Great Man" and focusing on Sigmund Freud the individual and his decisive influence, as it rejects a historical model centered around the bureaucracy of institutions such as the International Psycho-Analytic Association. Concentrating on the British case, the book chooses instead to look beyond Ernest Jones' efforts to spread Freud's ideas, and beyond the workings of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (BPAS) that Jones created in 1919. Kuhn's periodization is earlier than that of Forrester and Cameron, as he provides a meticulous examination and close textual reading of contemporary sources to look at the last years of the 19th century and the era before the outbreak of the Great War. Similarly, Kuhn's book is a closely researched study of the early days of psychoanalysis in Britain within broad medical and social contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Masud Khan: The Outrageous Chapter 4.

Is the fourth chapter of Masud Khan's last book an expression of the author's presumed anti-Semitism, or does it demonstrate a forceful new psychotherapeutic technique? Objective reading of the controversial case material within the context of Khan's stated intention indicates that Khan was attempting to introduce an effective way of managing aggression with patients who often had been considered analytically untreatable. The author further suggests that the limited ability of analysis at that time to encompass the understanding and treatment of aggression in personality disorder contributed to Khan's own individual issues, as well as the intensifying of animosity between Khan and the British Psycho-Analytic Society.

Publish and be fair? “I am myself strongly in favour of doing it”: James Strachey as the candid wartime editor of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1939–1945

ABSTRACTThis article is an examination of the history of Strachey’s work as the editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, work that was shaped by the internal strife within British psychoanalysis and the great international conflict of the Second World War. From the primary sources it has been possible to give an account of how he came to be in charge of the Journal, why he was suited to the role, and also to provide an example of what he was like as an editor dealing with colleague-contributors. It is argued that due to his long-held belief in free speech and candour, and because he was committed to resisting to the utmost a split within the British Psycho-Analytical Society, James Strachey wanted to make both the papers and the ensuing discussions of the Controversies public through the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. As described here, that did not happen in a simple way but he succeeded in publishing papers directly related to the debate by fostering investigation into the subject of internal objects. He also gave space in the Journal to new writers and a plurality of theories, including the nascent object relations theories of D.W. Winnicott and John Bowlby.

D.W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and W.R. Bion: The Controversy Over the Nature of the External Object—Holding and Container/Contained (1941-1967)

The author examines D.W. Winnicott’s multi-layered, dialogue with the London Klein group, most particularly with W.R. Bion and their respective views on the role of the external object in terms of holding and container/contained. When Winnicott earlier on deployed Klein as both a collaborative as well as creative antagonist in evolving a thesis of maternal environment of provision, memorialized in “Transitional Objects,” he expatriated himself from the Klein group by 1953.In the wake of this split, Winnicott continued a dialogic entreaty with W.R. Bion, attempting to interest another Kleinian in the importance of the external object when he commented on Bion’s papers. Bion initially maintained the Klein line of strict focus on the patient’s internal, subjective, and phantasmic experience of the external object during the early period of his “psychosis papers” (1954-1957). He gradually shifted and altered his clinical focus, taking up in metapsychological terms the infant’s normal development of early thinking when he posited the importance of a containing maternal object to metabolize primitive, sensuous elements into rudimentary thought. The author maintains that Bion in part appropriated aspects of Winnicott’s research trajectory, obscuring this appropriation because of Klein’s injunction that Winnicott’s work not be taken up. The separatist existence of the three major schools of analytic thought in the British Psychoanalytical Society also underscored a widespread disinclination towards comparative psychoanalytic theory. As a result, Winnicott’s theory of holding has stood alongside Bion’s theory of container/contained until recent efforts at comparison. By 1964, Winnicott ended his entreaties to Bion and the Klein group when they continued to ignore his many contributions, memorializing it in his 1965 paper, “The Kleinian Development.” The author concludes with comments on how theoretical and clinical differences between analytic theorists can be both generative and still remain antagonistic at the boundaries of passionately maintained group affiliations.

Die Hitler in UNS (The Hitler in US): Evil and the Psychoanalytic Situation

In exploring egregious behavior on the part of psychoanalysts, this article attempts to redefine the traditionally ecclesiastical, moralistic notion of evil. Referencing the “Nazification” of the famed Berlin Institute, the vociferous “controversial discussions” at the British Psychoanalytic Society during the London Blitz, and more recent events involving psychologists condoning torture, the author considers evil as a universal potential in context, rather than a fixed social or psychiatric aberration. As such, the dynamic stance of participant observation is put forth as a safeguard against the analyst's loss of self-reflexivity.

‘Opening remarks at a practical seminary’ by James Strachey

Translations of summaryThis manuscript, dated 1941, is a class on technique taught by James Strachey to first‐year candidates at the British Psychoanalytical Society (), located in the Archives of . As the last of three written manuscripts on transference interpretation, it offers an opportunity to trace the development and subtle shift in Strachey's thinking following his 1934 paper (Strachey, 1934, 1937). The lecture is striking in its precise language, and in the complexity of the issues discussed. Through the use of an optical metaphor, the magic lantern, Strachey illustrates transference, what is therapeutic about a transference interpretation and describes projective identification and some aspects of counter‐transference without naming them as such. Strachey makes a persuasive case for careful attention being paid to the analytic situation, the “artificially simplified relationship between analyst and patient” with systematic comparison to psychotherapeutic techniques of support and reassurance, which he argues lead to only temporary and limited results. The author argues that Strachey continues to be influenced by Klein's developmental, technical, and object relational theories as was already evident in his 1934 paper.