October 27,2006
Harry Guntrip (1975)
(1975). My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott: How Complete a
Result Does Psycho-Analytic Therapy Achieve? International Review of
Psycho-Analysis, 2:145-156
Harry Guntrip
It does not seem to me useful to attempt a purely theoretical answer to the
question forming the sub-title. Theory does not seem to me to be the major
concern. It is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox
defenders of every variety of the faith. We ought always to sit light to theory
and be on the look-out for ways of improving it in the light of therapeutic
practice. It is therapeutic practice that is the real heart of the matter. In
the last resort good therapists are born not trained, and they make the best use
of training. Maybe the question 'How complete a result can psycho-analytic
therapy produce?' raises the question 'How complete a result did our own
training analysis produce?' Analysts are advised to be open to post-analytic
improvements, so presumably we do not expect 'an analysis' to do a 'total' once
for all job. We must know about post-analytic developments if we are to assess
the actual results of the primary analysis. We cannot deal with this question
purely on the basis of our patients' records. They must be incomplete for the
primary analysis and non-existent afterwards. As this question had unexpected
and urgent relevance in my case, I was compelled to grapple with it; so I shall
risk offering an account of my own analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott, and
its after-effects: especially as this is the only way I can present a realistic
picture of what I take to be the relationship between the respective
contributions of these two outstanding analysts, and what I owe to them.
The question 'How complete a result is possible?' had compelling importance for
me because it is bound up with an unusual factor; a total amnesia for a severe
trauma at the age of three and a half years, over the death of a younger
brother. Two analyses failed to break through that amnesia, but it was resolved
unexpectedly after they had ended, certainly only because of what they had
achieved in 'softening up' the major repression. I hope this may have both a
theoretical and a human interest. The long quest for a solution to that problem
has been too introverted an interest to be wholly welcomed, but I had no option,
could not ignore it, and so turned it into a vocation through which I might help
others. Both Fairbairn and Winnicott thought that but for that trauma, I might
not have become a psychotherapist. Fairbairn once said: 'I can't think what
could motivate any of us to become psychotherapists, if we hadn't got problems
of our own'. He was no super-optimist and once said to me: 'The basic pattern of
personality once fixed in early childhood, can't be altered. Emotion can be
drained out of the old patterns by new experience, but water can always flow
again in the old dried up water courses'. You cannot give anyone a different
history. On another occasion he said: 'You can go on analysing for ever and get
nowhere. It's the personal relation that is therapeutic. Science has no values
except scientific values, the schizoid values of the investigator who stands
outside of life and watches. It is purely instrumental, useful for a time but
then you have to get back to living.' That was his view of the 'mirror analyst',
a non-relating observer simply interpreting. Thus he held that psychoanalytic
interpretation is not therapeutic per se, but only as it expresses a personal
relationship of genuine understanding. My own view is that science is not
necessarily schizoid, but is really practically motivated, and often becomes
schizoid because it offers such an obvious retreat for schizoid intellectuals.
There is no place for this in psychotherapy of any kind.
I already held the view that psychoanalytic therapy is not a purely theoretical
but a truly
Copyright ?Estate of Harry Guntrip
We announce with regret that Dr Guntrip died on 18 February 1975.
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