ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how both patient and analyst contribute to the psychoanalytic process, which can be seen as two-person, yet a unity. It is this clinical approach to the emotionality of the analytic encounter that marks the strongest thrust of Independent work in the past two decades. The chapter presents the views of the recent line of thinkers, including Klauber, Enid Balint, Khan, Stewart, and Limentani. It is now about twenty years since both Balint and Winnicott died, and more recent work clearly has many roots in their thought. Emphasis has been placed on the need for the analyst to make emotional contact with, and conceptualize about, the specific personal details of the patient’s actual feeling state of the moment. The Kleinian tradition has performed a service to psychoanalysis by emphasizing important, hitherto unrecognized, aspects of phantasy and defensive process that require confrontation. In doing this British Kleinians have, rightly, tended to polemicize confrontation.
