ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws on the author applied psychoanalytic work with adolescents and adults in forensic and psychiatric settings within the public health service as well as her work as an analyst seeing patients on the couch. In her view psychoanalytic work is defined as such first and foremost by the analyst's internal setting and not by the external setting in which one practises or the frequency of sessions offered to the patient. It also focuses on four assumptions, where the author outlines and functions as a constant background to his attempts to understand the patients she describes here. Her hope that these assumptions have not acquired in her thinking the status of 'over valued ideas' the danger that they can function as such, and can be thus used defensively by the analyst, is always present and needs to be closely monitored.
