‘Call the world if you Please “the Vale of Soul-Making”’. Margot Waddell's choice of this quotation from Keats as the epigraph to Inside Lives signals what is perhaps the book's central theme: that each stage of life, indeed each moment, presents us with the choice of whether or not to engage fully and honestly with the reality that confronts us - a reality that includes our own feelings. To the extent that we choose to do so, we will be in a position to attempt what Bion calls ‘learning from