The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of Otto Isakower’s concept of the ‘analyzing instrument’, the vehicle by which the analyst’s mind becomes joined to the patient’s, each in a comparable state of regressed self-observation. This view of technique is shown to have grown out of Isakower’s pre-war research (shaped by the work of Paul Schilder and Paul Federn) on a variety of...
The paper argues that links between play and magic in British Object Relations point to the persistence of aesthetic concerns within psychoanalysis. Magical thinking is present in British Object Relations psychoanalysis from its beginnings in Klein's play technique and early aesthetic writings, surfacing elsewhere in Susan Isaac's educational experiments and her theories of metaphor. Marion...