Jacob's Ladder

Josephine Klein was an academic for the first twenty years of her professional life and then a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. She is a Fellow of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and was until recently a member of the British Association of Psychotherapists.

'I have read this book with great interest and enjoyment. It is a work of considerable learning; but learning that is worn lightly and always grounded in real life and everyday experience. It is a book that is provocative and serious - and rich in alusion and reference. [The author's] sensitive use of the artists and writers of the past shows the universality of great art and its capacity to throw light on, and inform, contemporary existence; and the interweaving of psychological and religious motifs will be of interest to any reader who has asked the deepest and most perplexing questions about life.' - Dr Brian Horne'Anyone familiar with Josephine Klein's work will know that she approaches every topic with a refreshingly open mind. Here she considers mysticism - a world of ineffable experience - to see if it might have anything to teach us as psychotherapists. Her project is based on the idea that the framework within which psychoanalysis developed effectively excluded words such as love, soul, spirit and ecstasy, replacing them by such concepts as instinct, gratification, dependency and attachment. Klein wonders if this may have restricted our approach to our clients and perhaps diminished their experiences.'By immersing the reader in a rich tapestry of quotations from the mystics, Klein on the one hand invites us to understand this realm in familiar psychodynamic terms; on the other, she causes us to be caught up in the very texture of ineffable experience so that we experience it first hand and become reluctant to let it go. She then invites us to look at newer ways of psychoanalytic thinking that might allow more room for the ineffable.'- Dr. Ken Wright, author of Vision and Separation: Between Mother and Baby

• Jacob's Ladder -- Introduction—Bach and Handel, transparency and quiddity -- Methodology, language, focus, limits, assumptions, method -- To sing in the presence of a lion— to talk about the ineffable -- The experience of the Holy: Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans -- Unselfish love—some theories -- Love, some examples -- Blurred boundaries and bliss, union, communion and projective processes -- Beyond between within above— spatial metaphors and the intersect -- Processes in the intersect -- Will and attention -- Narcissism—the mystics' remedy