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Thirty years after working on the collection of papers which produced what could be described as the defining overview of the Independent position in British psychoanalysis at that time (Kohon, 1986), in this book Kohon has both revisited the field and refined his thinking. He has used many of the papers which are part of the 1986 volume, and kept the four central themes: early environment, the therapeutic encounter, regression and female sexuality. However, as Kohon notes in his introduction (p. 5), this is not a new edition of an old book: it is an extension and development of how he sees the Independent tradition in today's British psychoanalytic context. As such, there are seminal papers in each section which will be familiar friends (and sometimes adversaries) to psychoanalytic readers. There are also some papers from the 1986 book which have been omitted. Kohon describes the problem of choosing from current thinkers as well as the previous papers being very similar to the problem of choosing 30 years ago, and he has tried to put together something which both elucidates the current thinking and offers the reader a satisfying experience with food for thought. He has done this partly by offering a careful and interesting analysis of the history and progression of the Independent tradition before the reader begins to tackle the papers, and includes a chapter by Perelberg in this first section. These orient the reader so that the detailed meat of the thinking is more easily digested. Another way of helping the reader's digestive processes as well as honouring some current thinkers in the field has been to begin each of the four sections with a new chapter looking specifically at the areas in the light of current knowledge.
Josh Cohen writes of earliest infancy in the light of knowledge from infant research, which was not much available when the Independent tradition was in its own early infancy. The following three chapters - Bollas on the transformational object, K