Book Review: Unconscious Communication in Practice

Abstract

relationship that anger can be re-experienced as non-life-threatening. Although as therapists we have considerable psychological power in our patients’ inner worlds, largely due to the symbolically parental role referred to, and are likely to have more economic and social power than many of our patients/clients, it seems that this dimension is hard to take on board. Something in the rhetoric of equality seems to militate against the taking of legitimate authority by women working with women, a point that I. Bruna Seu comes at from a different angle when she points out: ‘Validating patient’s perceptions of inequality (particularly when it involves their therapists) is in no way antithetical to working with the unconscious and . . . a therapeutic intervention in itself ’ (p. 216). The chapters that succeeded best in holding my interest were those in which a clearly thought-out therapeutic framework is brought into dialectical relation with theories about women and power, and in which the transference, both positive and negative, is an integral part of the healing process. Both Pam Trevithick (‘Psychotherapy and working-class women’) and Aileen Alleyne (‘Which women? What feminism?’) – which deals with the experience of black women of African descent – are writing about women for whom gender is not the only, perhaps not the primary, source of oppression, and both treat skilfully the political as well as the psychological ramiŽcations of their work, cogently linking the external and the internal world. There is a very wide range of approaches to both feminism and psychotherapy in this collection, and the editors do a good job of marking out the Želd in their introduction, and then of looking back with the reader over what we have traversed together in their conclusion.