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‘If you want’, said George Bernard Shaw, ‘to advance unconventional opinions, do so in conventional clothes.’ Institutes and How to Survive Them is, at first appearance, a fairly regular and neatly put together collection of lectures and papers by a professionally successful and well-known psychiatrist/psychotherapist; leavened perhaps by a touch of humour attributable to the Cleese—Python factor, but nothing really subversive. Skynner's writing style is beautifully clear and lucid, but not flamboyant or provocative. He has an almost jovial bedside manner, telling us something slightly obvious of which we have always been dimly aware. Yet behind the disarming style and the neat but unobtrusive editing is a much sharper thrust. Something that makes one think again about one's own practice and institutional life.
The collection covers a period of nearly twenty-five years from the early sixties to the late eighties, and sheds a good deal of light on the history of the child guidance movement, group analysis and family therapy. Indeed it is an invaluable document for anyone seeking to understand recent developments in these areas. However, the book is not really about these movements so much as it is about one man's journey through them. Neither is it really about ‘institutes’, nor even about institutions. It is more about institutionalization, and the author's ability to stay one step ahead of it. He has a happy knack of being in at the exciting free-wheeling pioneering stages of development and moving on as the new ideas become institutionalized into doctrines.