Doubts and Certainties in the Practice of Psychotherapy

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.

• Preamble -- Concerning Values -- Imagination and the institutional mind -- Depression, disadvantage, and the creative response -- Concerning Theories and Techniques -- Psychotherapeutics: what makes people better? -- Holding: recognizing, accepting, understanding, containing, organizing, integrating, metabolizing, and other such -- Patients who are not ready for interpretations -- Times when transference interpretations are (in)appropriate -- Using general concepts of structure to understand regression, transference, and the working alliance -- Early attachments and sources of later well-being -- Concerning the Development of Ideas -- Fathers: changes in psychoanalytic ideas on men’s relationship with their children -- The contrasting histories of psychoanalytic thought in the United States and the United Kingdom

As a psychotherapist, Jo Klein is both gifted and experienced; as soon as we start to racked by years of experience, permeated not only content, but the very details of language, which is vivid, personal and deeply in touch with inner selves - her own and her patients'. She articulates things that we instantly recognize, yet never knew that we knew; whether one is a practitioner or a patient, the wisdom of her book is a rare refreshment and an illumination.- Nina ColtartJosephine Klein has two outstanding qualities: unusual sensitivity and tremendous common sense. These are combined with wide reading and rich clinical experience to give us a refreshingly simple and humane book. I like particularly the chapters on holding and containment and her thoroughly non-doctrinaire approach to transference interpretation. She is a non-intrusive therapist in the tradition of Winnicott, believing that patients can grow and do things for themselves if we give them half a chance. Many of her patients were "difficult" or "borderline", but her ideas have wider relevance to our understanding of psychotherapy and what makes it helpful. Klein's book is a timely reminder of the varieties of psychotherapeutic experience at a time when fashion and dogma are trying to limit the field. It will certainly be enjoyed by those who share her views; it undoubtedly should be read by those who don't.- Ken Wright