Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process

This collection gathers thirteen clinical papers in which Michael Feldman traces what actually happens between analyst and patient over the course of a session. Working in the tradition of Klein, Rosenfeld, and Betty Joseph, he attends closely to the pressures a patient exerts on the analyst to feel, think, or act in particular ways, and to the subtle shifts by which the analyst is drawn into confirming a patient's expectations. He reads reassurance, compliance, grievance, and the pull toward premature certainty as movements within this exchange rather than as isolated symptoms.

Across the papers Feldman argues that understanding forms slowly, through the analyst's willingness to register these pressures in himself and to tolerate not knowing before a formulation settles. For the practising clinician the value lies in its detailed accounts of ordinary clinical difficulty: moments when conviction hardens too fast, when doubt becomes paralysing, and when noticing one's own participation reopens the work.