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The two books reviewed here present a collection of essays by the English psychoanalyst Paul Williams. Invasive Objects is on understanding, treating, and contextualizing the traumatized and more treatment-resistant patient; The Fifth Principle is a more or less autobiographical account of the abusive and chaotic first eight years of his life. Both books reward the reader by adding significantly to what has been written about the treatment of this cohort. Virtually all of the first book's essays, which are divided into clinical and applied sections, have been published previously. The books are appropriately reviewed together, as much of the work in the first echoes and appears influenced by data from the second, giving readers a unique opportunity to understand how a clinician's reconstruction of and adaptation to a version of his early life, as well as, implicitly, his personal treatment, can inform his later work. The perspectives Williams presents have clinical, theoretical, and anthropological implications, and by his own acknowledgment emerge also from his earlier career as a social anthropologist and later a clinician on an inpatient team that integrated psychoanalytically informed treatment with other modalities for patients in various stages of psychosis (Jackson and Williams 1994). The clinical examples in the book, however, are mainly from the outpatient treatment of patients with extreme treatment resistance; the applied examples come from from philosophy, theater, poetry, music, and art. In addition to the insights and specific technical strategies provided, the essays provide articulate and persuasive arguments that clinicians reconsider the current primacy of psychopharmacological, instrumental, and short-term treatments and not abandon psychodynamically informed assessment and therapy.