This volume consists of a series of essays, initially inspired over thirty years ago by Freud’s paper on Gradiva -- “she who steps along.”
In the story of Gradiva, a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, suffers from delusions and is able to unravel the mysteries of his emotional life and mind with the aid of a woman who does not challenge these delusions, but rather “steps along” with Hanold, gradually helping him to disentangle truth from fantasy through what Freud called “cure by love”. Gradiva, originally felt to be the source of Hanold’s malady, eventually becomes the agent of its resolution and of his return to health.
This extraordinary tale forms the basis for Mitrani’s concept of “taking the transference”. Through clinical vignettes, various aspects of psychoanalytic technique -- useful from the first encounter between patient and analyst and throughout the process of the development of mind to termination -- are illustrated in detail. These chapters are rooted in and explicate and expand upon the theoretical tenants of Freud, Klein, Bion and Tustin and focus on the act of observing and “taking the transference”, particularly at the infantile level.
Salient topics include the importance of listening in the beginning of analysis with those who know little about analysis as well as with those who “know all about it”; technical implications derived from works by Klein, Bion and Tustin; analytic encounters with adults and adolescents, a psychoanalytic take on a contemporary film, and some ways in which psychoanalysis may lend further meaning to neuro-scientific studies on autism.
