Routledge Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

What Neville Symington is attempting to do in this book is to trace the pathway along which he has travelled to become a person. This has run side by side with trying to become an analyst. The author has made landmark discoveries when reading philosophy, sociology, history, and literature. Learning to paint, learning to fly a plane, and also the study of art and of aviation theory have opened up new vistas. This account is only a sketch. The completed picture will never materialize. It is therefore autobiographical but only in a partial sense. It is always emphasized that one's own personal experience of being psychoanalysed is by far the most significant part of a psychoanalyst's education. Review "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 About the Author Neville Symington