Narcissus and Oedipus: The Children of Psychoanalysis by Victoria Hamilton; with a new Foreword by Eric Rayner, and a new Preface by Murray M. Schwartz, Maresfield Library,  Karnac Books, London, 1993;  336 pages; £17.95.

This beautifully composed and lucid book sets out to re-examine the two myths on which much of early psychoanalytic theory is based, and then to show us what we can now understand is missing, both within the interpretations of the myths themselves, and outside, in the transitional areas of experience which Hamilton suggests lie between them and span them. The author herself was trained as a Child and Adult Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in Britain, but has worked about half of her professional life as a psychotherapist and lecturer in the USA. What many people trained in the British Object Relations tradition would regard as theory of early and rather historical interest is still current in the United States. She shows, however, that these issues are not simply of historical interest here; her intellectual rigour and nose for sniffing out the meta-theory which lies behind the theory (she has a training in philosophy) show us how regularly some of these early ‘mistakes’ continue to invade our thinking. ‘Mistake’ is my word and probably a bad one, for Hamilton is interested in the nature of knowledge, and especially in its incompleteness, rather than its incorrectness. She examines the psychoanalytic tragic vision of knowledge from this point of view. She is sensitive to literature and is delicately attuned to the developmental potential of her patients, so the clinical and literary sections make beautiful and easy reading. Her thoroughness at times makes the theoretical sections