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The organization of this book into two volumes, entitled Exploring Feeding Difficulties in Children and Exploring Eating Disorders in Adolescents, under the overall title of The Generosity of Acceptance, has clearly been carefully considered. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia usually emerge in adolescence when the young person is grappling with the vicissitudes of sexual development and the pressure to begin to move away from the family into the outside world. But how, then, do we understand the self-starvation of pre-adolescent children? Can their problems also be seen as eating disorders? This book succeeds, partly by virtue of its separately titled volumes, in signalling the differences between these age groups whilst, at the same time, suggesting that there are many common issues connecting the cases of children and adolescents. In particular, the fear of dependence and of accepting from another and the associated strategies of defence are recurrent themes in the case studies of both volumes and provide the overall title of the book. This title also refers to the need for generosity in clinicians who must accept the sometimes violent projections of their patients.
Both volumes consist of collections of case discussions written by current and past members of the Eating Disorders Workshop in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic and by clinicians in Italy who have completed Tavistock-model courses in child and adolescent psychotherapy. The introduction, which is common to both volumes, outlines the main themes of the book and provides a useful overview of the psychoanalytic thinking, based on Klein's theory of object relations, underpinning the case discussions. It outlines two main themes: the failure in some aspects of the early dyadic relationship between mother and infant, and the failure to work through the oedipal situation. Drawing on Bion's notion of the mother-infant relationship as container-contained (Bion 1962), it is suggested that there has bee