Preface

In my contribution to a recent volume paying tribute to Nina Coltart (Rudnytsky and Preston 2011), I proposed that the most important question to ask oneself in reading an analytic author is whether one would want to be in treatment with that person. It is a measure of my esteem for James McLaughlin that I now place him alongside Coltart in my private pantheon as the contemporary with whom I would most have wanted to be in analysis, secure in the belief that I would have had a genuinely therapeutic experience.

As with Coltart, who died in 1997, my love for McLaughlin derives entirely from reading his work, as I regret that I did not meet him before his death in 2006. And just as the volume I edited with Gillian Preston, Coltart's sister, was the first collective stock-taking and celebration of this most independent of the British Independents, so this issue of American Imago is the first time that McLaughlin's achievement has been comprehensively scrutinized and given its due. I make no bones about my conviction that McLaughlin, like Coltart, was one of the greatest—if most undervalued—analysts of the twentieth century, and I hope my labors will help to make what may still be well-kept secrets more widely shared.

If I think of McLaughlin as an "American Coltart," it is first and foremost because of the rare eloquence of his writing, which bears comparison with that of "the Jane Austen of psychoanalysis," as I have called Coltart. And then there is the unsparing honesty of their self-revelations as each neared the end of his or her life—Coltart's in her interview with Anthony Molino (1997), and McLaughlin's in the outpourings inspired by William Cornell, his editorial muse for The Healer's Bent (2006)—allowing us to see how the analyzing instruments of both were ground on the wheels of their early losses and traumatic histories. Both were steeped in classical analysis but ended up as radicals, distancing themselves from the establishments of which they had once been dutiful servants. For both, the explicitness of their self-disclosures—McLaughlin confesses to a "full-blown skunk phobia" in childhood as well as "nocturnal panic attacks set off by dreams and phantasies of a stovepipe . . . burning the place down as we slept" (29)—is paired with a consummate gift for writing about the patients to whom they gave the full measure of their devotion. Indeed, I would submit that McLaughlin's combination of autobiographical candor and enthralling clinical material—always imparted from a patient-centered standpoint—raises him above even Loewald in his capacity to speak to the condition of contemporary analysts, and makes McLaughlin second only to Kohut as a driving force behind the emancipation and transformation of mainstream psychoanalysis in America.

In taking stock of Coltart, I felt constrained to observe that she cannot be credited with having added any new terms to the psychoanalytic lexicon. I would have said the same of McLaughlin until, on rereading The Healer's Bent, I belatedly realized that he does in fact mint an impressive number of coinages. Chief among these is "the healer's bent" itself, which McLaughlin defines as a cluster of traits often found in physicians—especially therapists—that is "centered on a willingness to dampen one's own sexual thrust and narcissistic claims for reward and recognition so that others might be enhanced" (2006, 27). Equally memorable is his triad of "dumb spots, blind spots, and hard spots," which comprise the array of limitations—attributable, respectively, to lacunae in knowledge, impairments in psychic functioning, and professional deformation—that together give rise to "the analyst's part in shaping impasses in treatment" (21). To this list I would add "transference sanctuaries," those places of refuge where each of us can engage in "the relaxation and freedom for contemplation to be found in desultory minding while anchored in some routine physical activity reinforced by familiar sights, sounds, and smells" (114), as well as "lateralizing preferences" (1987, 133)—the tendency to use one or the other hand in symbolically meaningful ways—and also the distinction between...