Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

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patient, not not just to what the patient says or to the apparent content of his dream or
whatever it may be but to all sorts of other things like the atmosphere of the session,
feelings evoked in the analyst, the fantasies evoked in the analyst, all those kind of
things are uhm sources of information we increasingly believe about what’s going on
in the patient. I think that would, since you are asking about contemporary is analysis,
I feel that’s the sort of direction of the movement.
AR: So so within the British tradition in which you were trained with an object
relations background, is it an object relations background you have or a Kleinian
background or I know you did a Jungian training first.
DB: yes
AR: and then did another training as
DB: yes
AR: a psychoanalyst
DB: yes I think of myself as pretty kind of mainstream Kleino-Winnicottian object
relations theory. That’s my that's my position as a practitioner and I think I'm a fairly
sort of conventional analyst when I am at work.
AR: yes obviously that comes out in your writing, there is an affinity to those
positions really which we’ll come on to it in a minute. Uhm just in terms of one of the
debates that entered into psychoanalysis, ah really in the 1980s “is it a science or is it a
hermeneutic?", uhm and I know those are obviously quite large polarisations, any
sense of you would stand within that situation or the polarity?
DB: yes I think of, the word psychoanalysis has several meanings, that's the difficulty
with it. I mean it describes a body of theory and it also describes a therapeutic
practice and the therapeutic practice obviously has to be hermeneutic because one is
continually trying to decode the meanings of what is happening or what is being said.
But my own feeling is that psychoanalytic theory is aspiring to be a science, so I stay
on the scientific side of that divide really (a few muffled words).
AR: I’ve noticed obviously in your writings in your 2006 chapter, I have not been able
to get your 2004 paper uh (pause) yet, the one in the IJP, but am going to the Institute
of Psychoanalysis library following this interview and I will get copy a there, that’s
the one on sympathy
DB: yes
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