The Baby and the Bathwater

Rating:
Summary: Recent essays from a remarkable career
Review: Nina Coltart was a remarkable independent and able training analyst, teacher, and respected administrator at the (British) Institute of Psycho-Analysis for more that twenty years. She has written that since childhood, the thing she loved most was "listening to people telling me their stories." Her intense and fruitful intellectual engagement with her work was well known, and was matched by her commitment to her patients - their hearts and minds as well as their "stories." She specialized in, but was not limited to, consultations for diagnosis and assessment, and was renowned for her skill and sensitivity in referring more than 3,000 patients to especially suitable practitioners. In addition, she had read Modern Languages at Oxford at a young student - medicine came later - and so is a writer for whom the whole world is (sometimes) just barely big enough. All but one of these clear, well-organized essays were written in the past several years. In them she details her various philosophies and opinions, and offers compassionate, insightful, and sometimes thrilling stories from her clinical practice. (She successfully treated one patient with ulcerative colitis with psychotherapy.) She includes - and lovingly explains - many of her personal, relevant, and very interesting opinions. She illuminates her interest and commitment to Buddhism, and its helpfulness to her professional work, in "Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Revisited." In "Endings," her topics are death, the difference between worry and concern, termination of the analytic relationship - and much more. She notes, not insincerely, that one of the worst things about her own death will be her inability to write about it afterwards.

This is a fine collection which anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis will find valuable and pleasurable.