You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this book Josephine Klein creatively synthesises a good deal of the psychoanalytic and other literature about the way in which very young babies come to make sense of the world and, hence, the way in which we as therapists should approach the baby in us all. As she points out, there are many ways of trying to understand the emotional life of babies, and she has largely described and synthesised what has become known as the object-relations approach. The lineage she traces stems from Bowlby, Balint, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip on the one hand, and Kohut and Kernberg on the other, with a look along the way at some other authors such as Frances Tustin on infant autism and Marguerite Sechehaye's work with Renée, a schizophrenic girl.
The book begins with a digest of some of the neuropsychological evidence about the way in which we form concepts and come to join our ideas and experiences together. I enjoyed this section of the book and found it a novel and useful inclusion in a work on psychotherapy. It has always seemed to me a pity that Freud's interest in relating psychoanalytical processes to biological ones has been seen as a kind of physical reductionism and has fallen out of favour. The physiology of emotions is much less understood than that of visual or cognitive processes. Many of the issues raised by the research are relevant to debates within psychotherapy - for example, the evidence that we are not born as whole selves, but are integrated by certain kinds of experiences. An imprtant aspect of the book is that it attempts to explain not so much pathological forms of experience but normal good-enough health, which in many ways is harder to describe. The author takes up Balint's distinction between those people who seek to merge with others and those whose tendency is to want to escape, to be free. She tries - not always successfully - to avoid value judgements about different kinds of personality in order to produce a more complex and differentiated acc