The publication of a new edition of Anthony Storr’s The Art of Psychotherapy by Jeremy Holmes can be seen as an act of instauration. It probably represents an ambivalent rejuvenation in that it both preserves some of the text and usurps its predecessor. The words of a dead psychiatrist are translated in the manner that W.H. Auden observed: ‘the words of the dead man are modified in the guts of the living’. This is a work of restoration in content and form, in concrete and symbolic terms. The concrete restoration of the content of this classic psychotherapy text is an ambiguous act of resurrection, which I see as symbolic of a need for the renewal of psychotherapeutic psychiatry underpinned by psychoanalytic thinking.

Why resurrect (and bury) Storr’s The Art of Psychotherapy? Will today’s psychiatrists who doubt the evidential basis or value of psychoanalysis in psychiatry embrace this work of restoration? The visceral relevance of psychoanalytic experience for psychiatric practice lies in the close attention it pays to the primitive emotional impact of work with disturbed early developmental states of mind in patients.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic experience for psychiatrists in training and beyond does not aim to make psychiatrists psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Rather, the aim is to help psychiatrists recognise, take seriously and use their felt experience to metabolise mental pain, to reflect on and contain disturbing feelings with the aim of understanding disturbed minds. Holmes exemplifies this aim without redacting the urbane humanity of Storr’s vision of psychoanalytic psychiatry and being a psychoanalytic psychiatrist. He identifies with Storr’s passion for describing psychoanalytic psychotherapy for those who are curious about the nature of emotional experience from infancy to death.