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The Book Reviews Editor of the BJP did not know, when she rang me to ask me to review this book, that Nina Coltart was my training analyst. I accepted the invitation without hesitation, but soon found myself experiencing the curious mixture of feelings one has when asked to comment on one's analyst's work: namely, the sense of feeling at the same time singularly qualified and unqualified to comment, both by virtue of the perspective granted by the role of analysand. This quandary remained, and shifted only when a forgotten comment by another analyst on Nina Coltart's work surfaced in my mind. This comment was: ‘Nina Coltart's students are all quite different. The fact that they've retained their individuality strikes me as being important.’ I realized that I could review this book from the standpoint of the Nina Coltart I know, which will not be the same as others' versions of her. I was then faced with a further problem: the Nina Coltart described in Kit Bollas's introduction to the book is not the Nina Coltart I knew. Kit's description is of a somewhat ethereal, slightly blue-stocking figure exuding spirituality. My experience of her was of a lively woman who possessed a remarkable ordinariness and unusual sanity. Perhaps something upon which many would agree is Coltart's clinical standing: she was, as Bollas points out, one of the great training analysts, supervisors, teachers and administrators at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s when she retired from analytic life. This book, her last, demonstrates her clinical skill with the familiar clarity and textural complexity that characterizes her earlier publications. Yet this collection of papers is a signing-off. Reading them, one is left with the impression of an author saying goodbye by way of a series of late-in-life reflections upon past experiences and present values. I shall return to this; first, the papers.
Coltart opens with her membership paper for the British Psych