Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

Neville Symington is a member of the British and Australian Psychoanalytical Societies. His books include 'Narcissism: A New Theory', 'The Making of a Psychotherapist', 'A Pattern of Madness' and 'Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis' (all published by Karnac Books); 'The Analytic Experience', and 'The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion' (written with Joan Symington). He has a private psychoanalytic practice in New South Wales, Australia.

'In this book, Neville Symington brings together a wide range of lectures and previously published papers, along with fresh commentary, providing the reader with a veritable feast of his ideas and further thinking about psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. With unusual openness, Symington invites the reader to follow his journey by which he struggled through the process of becoming his own person and becoming a psychoanalyst. He is frankly critical of any theory or clinical practice that falls short of what he believes is needed for analysis to fulfill its potential for enabling patients to enter into their own process of becoming a person, without which their core problems may remain untouched by analysis as it is often practised. Reading through this book in its entirety is to be deeply challenged. I warmly commend it to analysts and therapists and to anyone who is interested in understanding the inner depths of both mind and being.'- Patrick Casement, psychoanalyst and therapist

• Contents1 John Klauber, independent clinician 2 The patient makes the analyst 3 The analyst's act of freedom as agent of therapeutic change 4 Phantasy effects that which it represents 5 Maturity and interpretation as joint therapeutic agents 6 The response aroused by the psychopath 7 The origins of rage and aggression 8 The psychotherapy of a mentally handicapped patient 9 Countertransference with mentally handicapped patients 10 Independence of mind: attachment and the British Society 11 Migration from the Tavistock: impetus for mental change 12 The struggle to achieve independence of mind in the British Psychoanlytical Society13 Narcissism: a reconstructed theory14 Narcissism as trauma preserved 15 Corruption of interpretation through narcissism 16 The core of narcissism 17 The influence of Wilfred Bion on my clinical work 18 Bion and trauma transformed 19 Envy: a psychological analysis20 The structure of paranoia 21 A theory of communication for psychoanalysis