Betty Joseph, 1994

Described as a “psyschoanalysts’s psychoanalyst”, Betty Joseph is a distinguished psychoanalytic clinician who has been working with children and adults in full time analytic practice since the 1950s. Miss Joseph’s seminal papers were published under the title of “Psychic Change and Psychic Equilibrium.” The main interest throughout her long analytic career has been in the clinical and technical areas of psychoanalysis. Working within the Kleinian tradition, she has developed a distinctive approach to technique and has been widely influential. With her sensitive focus upon the precise details of the clinical situation, she has demonstrated and drawn out the technical implications of Kleinian concepts, particularly those of projective and introjective identification. She is interested in the way the patient’s need to maintain psychic equilibrium may permeate the analytic situation and in how psychic change may occur in the face of this.

Her publications include “The Patient Who is Difficult to Reach”, “Addiction to Near Death”, “On Understanding and Not Understanding”, “Transference: The Total Situation,” “Projective Identification: Some Clinical Aspects”, and “Psychic Change and the Psycho-Analytic Process.” She served as a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a training analyst at the British Psychoanalytic Institute. She has lectured throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia and India.