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This is an immensely worthwhile book. Dr Hinshelwood warns us in his preface that psycho-analysts do not always write clearly and attractively. Indeed I have often reflected that one definition of a psycho-analyst might be a ‘novelist who can't write’. Dr Hinshelwood, however, can write and I found that what he has to say in this treatise was of particular personal interest in that he sets out and clarifies issues that were simply not addressed objectively during my own analytic training in the late 1950's.
At that time the analytic world was, in Britain at least, still dominated by echoes of the so-called controversial discussions of the early 1940's. The discussions were about interesting but containable divergencies of viewpoint about human development, while the controversy was about who was to be allowed to conceive and rear analytic children.
The importance of Dr Hinshelwood's book is that he takes a standpoint well beyond that somewhat sterile dichotomy and complements his excellent Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by focusing attention on the clinical evidence on which that thought is based and on the criteria of validation. He shows his usual mastery of a wide mass of material and, while describing the work of many analysts, brings to it his own distinctive imprint, so that even familiar ideas and events take on a fresh light as he writes about and juxtaposes them in his own way. His method is essentially chronological and he begins by asserting that: ‘Melanie Klein's contributions are so rooted in the basic Freudian discoveries that they cannot be comprehended without some understanding of Freud’. In particular he emphasises Freud's basic departure from hypnosis in seeking to give expression to what was not under control rather than attempt to control it by suggestion. This in turn leads naturally to the method of free association and to the investigation of childhood memories, dreams and the importance of symbol formation, noting importantly, as Dr Hinshelwoo