Personal Relations Therapy

This book gives us the broad sweep of a remarkable psychoanalytic writer, Harry Guntrip, whose place is at the forefront of our efforts to explain the role of an emergent and resilient self in the organization and maintenance of human relations. I believe that a substantial part of Guntrip's discovery, his work on a painful and bleak frontier that was simultaneously within himself and in the realm of the science of psychoanalysis, has been absorbed into the sensibility of the field with far less attribution and direct appreciation than is warranted. Harry Guntrip brought a unique intensity to the examination of personal experience in constructing and validating psychoanalytic meaning. His heritage draws directly on the tradition of Freud, whose personal struggles formed the raw data for The Interpretation of Dreams. There are few works of such stature in the annals of our work, few examples of the blending of life and art, life and science. 'Guntrip's work is one of them. In this volume, Jeremy Hazell has done far more than simply collect the records. He has done that, and he has allowed it to stand for itself. But he has done so through his own lens, through a depth of understanding and valuing that shines through. His introduction is a record of the interweaving of Guntrip's personal growth with his psychoanalytic understanding. It is a Baedeker of Guntrip's travels, a rich appreciation, a tribute, and a fine work in its own right. Guntrip's work is important to us, perhaps now more than ever. The issues with which he grappled have come to haunt us in a time of ever more consciousness of the toll of social and personal deprivation, and of a growing awareness that our work is not concerned with egos - with the mechanisms of an autonomous mind - as much as it is with selves in relation to others.