Michael Feldman - Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph

THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London. Its purpose is to facilitate a greater and more widespread appreciation of what psychoanalysis is really about and to provide a forum for increasing mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in other disciplines such as history, linguistics, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. It is intended that the titles selected for publication in the series should deepen and develop psychoanalytic thinking and technique, contribute to psychoanalysis from outside, or contribute to other disciplines from a psychoanalytical perspective.

The Institute, together with the British Psycho-Analytic Society, runs a low-fee psychoanalytic clinic, organizes lectures and scientific events concerned with psychoanalysis, publishes the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the International Review of Psycho-Analysis, and runs the only training course in the UK in psychoanalysis leading to membership of the International Psychoanalytical Associationthe body which preserves internationally agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of professional ethics and practice for psychoanalysis as initiated and developed by Sigmund Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute have included Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, John Rickman, and Donald Winnicott.

Volumes 111 in the series have been prepared under the general editorship of David Tuckett, with Ronald Britton and Egl Laufer as associate editors. Subsequent volumes are under the general editorship of Elizabeth Bott Spillius, with, from Volume 17, Donald Campbell, Michael Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg and David Taylor as associate editors.

First published 1989

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in the edited collection as a whole and in the introductory matter Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius; in the papers, Betty Joseph

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Joseph, Betty Psychic equilibrium and psychic change: Selected papers of Betty Joseph, (New library of psychoanalysis; 9)

1 Psychoanalysis I. Title II. Feldman, Michael III. Spillius, Elizabeth Bott IV. Series 150.19'5

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Joseph, Betty. Psychic equilibrium and psychic change; selected papers of Betty Joseph / edited by Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius. p. cm.(New library of psychoanalysis: 9) Complete list of the published papers of Betty Joseph: p. Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Psychoanalysis I. Feldman, Michael. II. Spillius, Elizabeth Bott. 1924III. Title.

IV. Series.

RC504.J67

1989

894407 616.8917- dc19 CIP

ISBN 0-203-35908-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37164-X (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-04116-3 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-04117-1 (pbk)

NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 9

General editor: David Tuckett

Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change

SELECTED PAPERS OF BETTY JOSEPH

Edited by

MICHAEL FELDMAN and ELIZABETH BOTT SPILLIUS

Contents

Preface

The strength and vitality of scientific ideas can be judged by their growth and the developments which arise from them. Freuds own ideas changed and developed to the end of his life. They also gave rise to many different, sometimes divergent or even controversial developments, and I do not mean such dissident developments as those of Jung or Adler, but those genuinely based on Freuds own work and his work in various phases of his own development, some followers pursuing more his early work, some the later.

Of those pursuing Freuds later work, Melanie Klein is probably the most significant. Like Freuds, her own work developed, bringing in new ideas and changes of emphasis, till the end of her life. That development continued in the work of her pupils. Her central ideas of the importance of early stages of development and the paramount role of the interplay between unconscious phantasy and reality and that of the shifts between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions inform the work of all her pupils. Technically, the importance she attaches to the transference is a constant in their work. On the other hand, they pursued their researches in different directionsfor instance, Bion and Rosenfeld into the analysis of psychotics and her various followers developed different styles of work with different emphases.

One of Kleins late conceptsthat of projective identificationof which she gives only a few lines in her paper Notes on some schizoid mechanisms (1946) generated research which has resulted in rich contributions to both theory and practice. In particular it contributed to the understanding and uses of countertransferencean area unexplored by Klein herself. It was also one of her concepts which has gained world wide acceptance among psychoanalysts of various orientations.

With the group of analysts who particularly investigated the implications of that concept for daily technique and clinical approach to patients, in recent years Betty Josephs work is a particularly important development. It is unspectacular and developed step by step, and it is only slowly that it started to gain increasing importance, particularly among Kleinian analysts, but becoming gradually also more generally accepted not only in Great Britain but also arousing a great deal of interest abroad, including the USA.

I first met Betty Joseph when she came to London as a candidate in 1945, but began to know her only in 1949. She was just qualified, having started her analysis with Balint in Manchester and having followed him to London, After qualification she started an analysis with Paula Heimann, and it was at the time of this transition that she came to me (I was just starting as a training analyst) to discuss some of her cases. It always surprises me that I actually remember one of her patients and a dream he brought. He was a shoe fetishist and was particularly interested in high heels, especially those known as stiletto heels. He dreamed that he threw a knife under a cupboard, and I remember telling her that his picture of the phallic woman was based on his projection of his own penis into her. It says something about the vividness and conviction with which she presented this material that I remember it to this day. I also remember it with affectionate amusement, considering how much I have learned from her about projective identification in later years.

Betty Joseph started in the classical Kleinian way prevalent then, but by the 1970s it became clear that she was developing her own increasingly distinctive style. It is characterized by the way in which she listens to her patients with ever-increasing attention to the minute-by-minute psychic changes occurring in the patients mind, related to, and linked with the constant interplay between analyst and patient and its effects on the transference and countertransference.