Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Memory, desire and the discipline of not knowing. The most demanding book on this list.
Transitional objects and potential space. Winnicott at his most quoted and least dogmatic.
Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945
Melanie Klein · Vintage Classics · 1975
Publisher pageThe early papers, including the play technique and the first accounts of internal objects.
What is known but has never been thought. The most influential British book of its decade.
Attachment placed on an ethological and evolutionary footing, against the analytic orthodoxy of the day.
Separation
John Bowlby · Pimlico · 1973
Anxiety and anger as responses to threatened separation rather than as pathology.
Patterns of Attachment
Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainsworth, Mary Blehar, Everett Waters, Sally Wall · Psychology Press · 1978
Publisher pageThe empirical work that gave attachment its classifications and its research programme.
Mourning, and the difference between grief that completes and grief that cannot.
Bowlby writing directly about what attachment means in the consulting room.
Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self
Peter Fonagy, Gyorgy Gergely, Elliot Jurist, Mary Target · Routledge · 2002
Publisher pageMentalization set out in full. The bridge between attachment research and analytic practice.
Difficult by design. The Fink translation is the one to read.
The Language of Psychoanalysis
Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis · Routledge · 1967
Publisher pageNot a dictionary so much as an argument about what each Freudian term actually carries.
The unconscious, repetition, transference and drive. The single most cited seminar.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I
Jacques Lacan · W. W. Norton · 1975
Lacan teaching rather than writing, and much the easier way in.
Desire, the good, and what an analyst is not entitled to want for a patient.
The clearest English exposition. Written by Lacan's principal translator.
Narcissism reconsidered as a developmental line rather than a defence to be dismantled.
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
Otto Friedmann Kernberg · Jason Aronson · 1975
Structural diagnosis and the argument for a confrontative technique. The counterweight to Kohut.
The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant
Margaret Schönberger Mahler, Fred Pine, Anni Bergman · Basic Books · 1975
Publisher pageSeparation-individuation, observed rather than reconstructed from the couch.
Kohut after the break with drive theory. Empathy as method, not manner.