The Independent Tradition

DEAR MR HAYLEY,

Thank you for the reviews of the book I edited on The British School of Psychoanalysis—The Independent Tradition, published in the IJPA, by Stephen L. Post (1987, 68: 432) and by Pearl H. M. King (1987, 68: 553).

I would like to clarify for your readers one of the points made by Miss King. She says on page 554:

Many of them [ordinary members of the British Society] still do not like having to be part of a group, and reserve the right to accept or reject contributions to psychoanalysis, after they have been freely and fully discussed, from whatever quarter they come, especially when they are put forward by fellow independents. This is one of the reasons why no one has succeeded in collecting and editing a group of papers by some of the colleagues, and as mentioned in the Preface, several did not wish to be included.

This is not quite right. What I said in the Preface reads as follows:

I was sorry not to have been able to include, for copyright reasons, papers by Paula Heimann, Pearl King and Marion Milner.

Paula Heimann was dead by the time I started putting the book together, so she could not have expressed a wish to be included or excluded from it. Her Literary Executor, Dr M. Tonnesmann, would have liked to give her permission for Dr Heimann's inclusion but was asked by the Publications Committee not to do so. It was said that the Publications Committee wanted to have priority over Paula Heimann's papers, so as to publish them first, before they appeared in any other form. It was the same with the case of Marion Milner, who very much regretted not being able to give me her consent for her inclusion in the book. The only author who did not want to be included was, in fact, Pearl King. The reason given to me by her at the time was that she was planning to put together a collection of her own papers, and did not feel free to give me permission for any of her papers to be published in my collection. There was no mention whatsoever of a wish not t