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By Margaret I. Little. New York: Aronson, 1981, 323 pp., $40.00.
I found this an extremely uncomfortable book to review. Most superficially, this is because, as the author states in her Preface, it is "not a tidy book." The contents encompass everything from Dr. Little's poetry and her "Notes on Ibsen's Peer Gynt" to what have become classical (albeit controversial) contributions to the psychoanalytic literature like "On Delusional Transference (Psychotic Transference)" and "On Basic Unity (Primary Total Undifferentiatedness)." Further, the material ranges from the traditional "objective" case reports and theory formulation to more personal—I should really say intimate—and subjective writing. The book is also not "tidy" in respect to the consistency of its quality. Some of the papers are first-rate, clear, and with a bold and original sparkle; others are put together in a somewhat slipshod fashion with proposals that do not appear to be buttressed sufficiently by clinical evidence or by theoretical coherence. Unfortunately the limitations of thi report make it impossible to document either the positive or the negative evaluations in any detail.
Another difficulty was that I so much liked and admired the Margaret Little that I came to know in the course of reading this book. She is a woman of courage, integrity, and compassion. She cares about people and patients, and she is not embarrassed to say so openly. Where else do we read about an analyst challenging her patient with the following: "You know very well that that simply isn't true. Why