This stimulating book can be read as merely an account of the work of Dicks and his colleagues in the Marital Unit of the Tavistock Clinic in the National Health Service between 1949 and 1965. On this level it is an extremely lucid exposition of the developing concepts and interviewing practices of Dicks and his colleagues as they tried to assuage the miseries of the ordinary bad marriage among the professional, middle-class, and skilled working-class clients of South-East England who were referred to them by various agencies or who themselves sought help. The miseries of these marriages and the changes produced by the interviews with Dicks and his colleagues are illustrated by thirty-one case-histories, some of them very detailed (one covers 25 pages). These thirty-one cases were selected out of the 2, 000 which were referred to the