Clearly located in the Independent tradition of British psychoanalysis, this is at the same time a book of great individuality. It offers an original theoretical view and clinical stance on issues which face any analyst or psychotherapist.

The fundamental theme is the infant's early experience of the object. The knowledge of the object-relating that has been lived through becomes a part of the person which cannot be made explicit in thought or articulated in words. This is the ‘unthought known’. We can sense its presence in many ways, through dreams, in aesthetic perception and above all in the transference. Such opportunities for glimpsing the ‘shadow of the object’ are described throughout the book. In the clinical situation Bollas is constantly concerned with the therapist's need to sense what kind of object the patient is drawing him into being. So stated, that is a familiar idea. What is original is the way Bollas uses it, not simply to reveal to the patient something defended against