Book Reviews
A Healing Conversation: How Healing Happens
By Neville Symington
ISBN: 978-1-855753-59-4; 2006; x+135+12 pages; Karnac Books;
Reviewed by Jo Grimwade
School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy VIC
The purpose of six lectures, presented as chapters in this publication, is to answer the question: ‘How is it that someone who has a problem is able to resolve it through conversation with another?’ Each chapter takes a particular angle on the question: an intellectual solution, the meaning of emotion, emotional development, communication and emotion, communication and representation, and the case of pseudo-maturity. Symington does not put great value on interpretation as the means of healing in psychoanalytic work; and, does not put much value on anything other than the relationship. As a product of its mode of development, this book is, at times, very persuasive, but some ideas are left to hang in the air. On many occasions I thought the work was brilliant, and sometimes I thought it offered little. Overall, it seems very worthy of this distinguished Tavistock mentor, who has spent much of the last three decades in Sydney.
Symington explores emotional experience and how emotional life is expressed in psychoanalytic encounters. This is done through grounding in several cases presented by supervisees or from this analyst’s past practice. His presentation of pan-experientialism is concise and demonstrated why he prefers to think this way rather than in materialist or emergent ways. His criticism of the creeping materialism of development psychopathology and attachment neuroscience is sharp.
In contrast to many, he speaks of the need for certainty as part of the healing process. This was distinguished from dogmatism and recounts a change in the analyst, who has ‘created something at the centre of’ himself. This is a capacity that takes in, but is transmuted, creatively, by what Bion (1962) called ‘alpha function’. There are many references in the text to both Bion and Freud. Largely the other influences are philosophers (Kant, Hegel), a linguist (MacMurray), and the biologist Charles Birch, along with many authors of novels.
The least satisfying part of the book is its abrupt and rather aimless ending, which opens up some thoughts about pseudo-maturity in clients and in therapists, without making any attempt to co-ordinate the whole, as an integrated contribution. Indeed the final chapter seemed more like a red herring than a point of closure. The book was a relatively easy read of about 6 hours in one entertaining summer’s day, punctuated by cricket watching. But there is a great deal in it. I will be encouraging my students to buy, but I suspect the apparent lack of jargon and complexity that I observed, will not be so evident to the new learner of therapy. Highly recommended, but incomplete.
References
Bion WR (1962) A theory of thinking, in Bion WR (1968) Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, pp.110-119, Jason Aronson, Northvale NJ.
