Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

In this book Neville Symington brings together a wide range of lectures and previously published papers along with fresh commentary, providing the reader with a veritable feast of his ideas and further thinking about psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. With unusual openness, Symington invites the reader to follow his journey by which he struggled through the process of becoming his own person and becoming a psychoanalyst. He is frankly critical of any theory or clinical practice that falls short of what he believes is needed for analysis to fulfill its potential for enabling patients to enter into their own process of becoming a person, without which their core problems may remain untouched by analysis as it is often practised. Reading through this book in its entirety is to be deeply challenged. I warmly commend it to analysts and therapists and to anyone who is interested in understanding the inner depths of both mind and being.
Patrick Casement, psychoanalyst and therapist

'With unusual openness, Symington invites the reader to follow his journey by which he struggled through the process of becoming his own person and becoming a psychoanalyst. He is frankly critical of any theory or clinical practice that falls short of what he believes is needed for analysis to fulfill its potential for enabling patients to enter into their own process of becoming a person, without which their core problems may remain untouched by analysis as it is often practised. Reading through this book in its entirety is to be deeply challenged. I warmly commend it to analysts and therapists and to anyone who is interested in understanding the inner depths of both mind and being.
Patrick Casement, psychoanalyst and therapist