Psychoanalysis comparable and incomparable

What separates a conversation between two people from a psychoanalytic session, and how would anyone recognise the difference? This volume takes up both questions. It sets out the reasoning behind, and the continuing evolution of, a six-year series of meetings run by the European Psychoanalytic Federation Working Party on Comparative Clinical Methods.

Over those six years, more than seventy cases were presented and discussed by over five hundred experienced analysts across sixty workshops. The authors, a group of European psychoanalysts, look at how practitioners with differing theoretical approaches can learn from one another when they bring their clinical work before colleagues. They also offer practical tools that individual clinicians can use to examine and refine their own methods.

The book reports that keeping to the project's task produced some unexpected experiences, which in turn raised basic questions about how clinical discussion and supervision are carried out in psychoanalysis. Written by those closest to the project, it is aimed at psychoanalysts and psychotherapists around the world. David Tuckett received the 2007 Sigourney Award.