MISTRESS OF HER OWN THOUGHTS: ELLA FREEMAN SHARPE AND THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Edited by MAURICE WHELAN

Foreword by Pearl King. Rebus Press, 2000. 260 pages, Paperback,£19.99

This is an announcement of the book provided courtesy of the publisher. The full book review will follow.
The Editor

A deep-seated interest in people's lives and thoughts must in a psycho-analyst have been transformed into an insatiable curiosity... Psycho-analysis ceases to be a living science when technique ceases to be an art...
Ella Freeman Sharpe

During the 1920s Ella Freeman Sharpe delivered a series of lectures to students at the British Psychoanalytical Society. Her theme was the practice and technique of psychoanalysis. This book explores how the impact of those lectures on the teaching and learning of analytic technique continues to be felt to the present day.

Maurice Whelan provides a biographical sketch of Sharpe, and places her ideas in their troubled historical context - which included the challenge to Freudian orthodoxy launched by Melanie Klein, and its schismatic aftermath. Whelan highlights how Sharpe's concern throughout this period was with the issues and personal qualities that have a direct bearing on the practice and technique of psychoanalysis: independence of mind, personal courage, a love of art and literature, a passion for disputation and argument, and authentic curiosity about the lives of others.

Sharpe's seminal lectures are reprinted here in full, alongside brand new essays by present-day analysts, Eric Rayner, Victor Sedlak, Frances Thomson-Salo, Michael Brearley and David W. Riley. They assess Sharpe's impact upon their own approach to clinical practice and illustrate the enduring, enlivening influence of her ideas.

When I first read Ella Sharpe's work I felt exhilarated. I found her clinical thinking deeply affirming. Above all, with her capacity to think with a fearless independence, tempered by clinical sensitivity, and to speak for her work so clearly, forcefully, and within a literary tradition, her effect on me was enormously freeing.
Frances Salo-Thomson

The flavour for me of Ella Sharpe from her writing is: warm, kind, deeply fair, moral, authoritative, passionate, bossy yet democratic, dramatic and curious - especially about people. Above all, like any good teacher, she was deeply interested in her pupils and patients, wanting the best for their futures. Some might dismiss this as 'therapeutic zeal'; but to me it suggests a passionate investment, which is a prime prerequisite of a good psychoanalyst.
Eric Rayner