Post-War Psychoanalysis and Art: Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality by Stephen James Newton. Published by  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001;  264 pp; £60.00. Psychological Aesthetics: Painting, Feeling and Making Sense by David Maclagan. Published by  Jessica Kingsley, London and Philadelphia, 2001;  157 pp; £16.95.

These two books are highly illuminating. They reiterate, in terms of art and psychoanalysis, a major post-war revision of Freud's theory of unconscious primary process towards much greater recognition of its fluid interconnection with secondary process consciousness. Marion Milner attributed this revision, at least in part, to ‘problems raised by the nature of art’ (Milner 1956, p. 211). Winnicott attributed it to learning from analysing schizophrenics during World War II that our initial, primary state of mind is one of ‘unintegration’ of which he wrote:

There are long stretches of time in a normal infant's life in which a baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or whether he lives in his mother's face or in his own body, provided that from time to time he comes together and feels something. (Winnicott 1945, p. 150)

Citing Winnicott approvingly, Klein characterized our first, primary process experience as, in a sense, bounded in consisting of object-related paranoid-schizoid anxieties and defences, these intermeshing with manic and depressive states of mind involving the integrating effect of experiencing others as loved, loving and good. Segal in turn used these ideas in