ABSTRACT
I was brought up in the grand opera school of psychodynamic assessment. My two most powerful role models were two founder members of the Maudsley Psychotherapy Department, Heinz Wolff and Henry Rey. Their styles were contrasting-apart from the fact that each had a ‘foreign’ accent which I suspect was slightly exaggerated when meeting patients for the first time for dramatic effect. Heinz, who had modelled himself on Winnicott, was one of those disarming and seductive therapists who made you feel instantly that you had known him for years and could tell him anything. This was helped in latter years by his tendency apparently to fall asleep during the interview, which led patients to reveal even more incredible secrets, perhaps in the hope of waking him from slumber. In fact, despite definite alpha rhythm breathing, he took in every detail which he would then use in some devastatingly accurate intervention, delivered with honeytongued maternality. The patients would leave the interview bathed in cathartic tears, hope restored, not least because, as one of Heinz’s juniors put it ‘he promises the patient the earth-and leaves it to the Registrar to deliver it’.
