Time Present and Time Past

Pearl King (1918 -2015) trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis from 1946 to 1950, and in 1955 became a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS). She held numerous offices within the BPAS and was the first non-medical president of the society between 1982 and 1984. She also played a significant role internationally in the organisational life of psychoanalysis, among others as Honorary Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1957 to 1961 and of the European Psychoanalytical Federation from 1953 to 1967.Besides her interest in the psychoanalysis of the elderly, a main focus of Pearl King's work lay in the history of psychoanalysis. From 1984 to 1994 she was Honorary Archivist of the BPAS and initiated a computerised search program concerning the history of psychoanalysis in Britain. She published a book (in collaboration with Riccardo Steiner) on the famous controversy between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud during the 1940s - 'The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-1945'.In 1992, along with Hanna Segal, she was awarded the Sigourney Prize for outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis.

• Foreword -- Time Present and Time Past -- Introduction to Pearl King and her work -- A Psychoanalyst at Work—Clinical Issues -- Change: the psychoanalysis of a four-year-old boy and its follow-up -- Experiences of success and failure as essential to the process of development -- The curative factors in psychoanalysis -- The therapist–patient relationship -- On a patient’s unconscious need to have “bad parents” -- The affective response of the analyst to the patient’s communications -- Psychoanalysis and the Life Cycle -- Sexuality and the narcissistic character -- “For age is opportunity no less than youth itself” -- The life cycle as indicated by the nature of the transference in the psychoanalysis of the middle-aged and elderly -- On becoming an ageing psychoanalyst -- “In age I bud again”—achievements and hazards in the analysis of older patients -- Understanding the Psychoanalytic Process -- Alienation and the individual -- Time and a sense of identity -- The timing of interpretations of transference and interpersonal relations in psychoanalytic therapy -- The supervision of students in psychoanalytic training who have previously been trained as psychotherapists -- On being a psychoanalyst: integrity and vulnerability in psychoanalytic organizations -- Questions to ask (myself) about a patient’s material

'This is an extraordinary collection of papers by an extraordinary psychoanalyst. Pearl King has contributed to psychoanalysis, as analyst, teacher, office-bearer, writer and, not least, as a stimulating and wise colleague, for more than five decades.'- Ken Robinson, from the Introduction