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Here it is, sixteen years after her death, a book in the new History of Psychoanalysis Series, an eagerly anticipated book on the life and work of Dr Nina Coltart. It is constructed as a ‘garland’, a collection of pieces around and about Nina Coltart - a book of reminiscences, essays and some previously unpublished material. This ‘garland’ of a book invites many, and varied people, from family, friends, analysands and supervisees to think about, review and comment on the life of Nina Coltart. Everything is here included, her book reviews, letters, two obituaries she wrote, a specimen of her calligraphy, her curriculum vitae: stuff that a woman in her position would have been, and was, asked to produce in her 69 years of life.
This motley collection is divided up into two sections, Part I: Tributes and Part II: Uncollected Writings. Each of these sections is split into subsections and the book has 51 chapter headings. Despite the long list of contents the book is hard to navigate and the provenance of the papers is not always clear. For example, when looking up Brendan MacCarthy, whose piece is printed as Chapter 17, one does not expect to read a previously published piece from an obituary he wrote in the British Psychoanalytical Society Bulletin. This is a posthumous reprint, and the reference to his surviving wife, children and grandchildren seems unnecessary and sets the tone for the curious lack of boundaries to come.
Nina Coltart was a distinguished psychoanalyst. The seminal events in her personal history, of which she made no secret, are therefore in the public domain. Having studied languages at Oxford she went on to study medicine, and after having qualified she began her analytic training. She garnered, among other titles, Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. She had a fine reputation as a clinician, a diagnostician and, later in her career, a writer. She was also thought of as a maverick and sometimes lone voice in the psychoanalytic community, i