Who would have thought a near thousand page archive could be so dramatic? Yet this book - documenting the gruelling debates that wracked the British Psychoanalytic Society fifty years ago - has all the excitement of theatre. Indeed, with its introductory cast list, verbatim dialogue, five act organisation, rumblings of war, dead father, filial bitterness, and contentious successor it could be Hamlet - in female garb.

The action opens with the Society's 1942 Extraordinary Business Meetings indicating many things rotten in the state of psychoanalysis. The Society's lamentable lack of public relations bode ill for its participation in post-war health service reconstruction. Internally it is riven by seemingly intractable scientific differences