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In an effort to vitalise the book review section, Ulla-Britt Parment has joined Tord Nystedt as a book review editor. The Editorial Board of International Forum of Psychoanalysis has also asked the regional editors to appoint in their respective regions a book review editor who could help us find people willing to write reviews or suggest interesting books for review. In Brazil Marli Piva Monteiro has been appointed. We will inform you of the other book review editors as soon as we have their names.
What kind of book is it that Mitchell and Black have written? I do not quite agree with the subtitle “A history of modern psychoanalytic thought” (my italics). To deserve this title I think a much deeper penetration should be undertaken into how different traditions have evolved, how they have affected each other directly, or indirectly through more general cultural trends, how politics and personal relations have influenced the directions different ‘schools’ have taken etc.
What kind of book is it then that Mitchell and Black have created? Looking at the list of contents one may get the impression that the book presents in order some of the more prominent “schools” of psychoanalytic thought. This is certainly also a way of reading the book. And along with the presentations of theories and concepts we also get vivid case material illustrating how we can evaluate a clinical material according to the view of the different traditions.
However, Mitchell and Black do more than set forth those in themselves valuable descriptions of various lines of psychoanalytic thought. Now and then they unexpectedly let two or more psychoanalytic tracks cross each other, thereby expanding our feeling for a wider mental landscape. E.g. when presenting Ericsons epigenetic theory, the authors, within the limits of some twenty lines, make a comparison between Ericson's concept of basic trust vs. basic mistrust and pertinent concepts of Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Sullivan. In these flashes of l