Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a new reading of Freud's 1918 Congress address, drawing attention to an ambiguity as to whether the psychoanalysis for the people that he envisaged was the modified form of psychoanalysis that we call psychotherapy. It presents Donnet's theory of how a patient's psychoanalysis is effectively set in motion by discovery and introjection of elements of the analytic setting in its widest sense, until a metamorphosis occurs whereby the patient discovers that he is in a functioning 'analysing situation'. The book deals with social work, where there is a different and very direct relation to external reality. It concludes that a viable therapeutic process can be established in the widely different fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counselling and social work where there is adequate encounter with, and consequent introjection of, the site proper to the relevant field.