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Eric Rayner has undertaken a welcome, much-needed, and challenging enterprise: a comprehensive overview of the contributions and thinking of the so-called Independent group (or school) of British psychoanalysts. Originally called the 'Middle group', these analysts emerged as a result of the controversial discussions between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud and their co-workers and followers.
In his Introduction, Dr Rayner states:
The book attempts to show the contributions of the main independent figures. Jones, Sharpe, Glover, Flugel, Payne, Rickman, Strachey, Brierley, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint, Klauber, Khan, and Bowlby are now dead, but we will consider also many analysts who are alive today and actively working and contributing. Our aim is not to portray the work of each author in rounded form. Rather, we have selected lines of thought and then shown a writer's contribution to each of these (p. 3).
The reader will not find 'critical appraisals of each author, the aim is only to describe and summarise. Critical evaluation and debate must be left to the reader'. One might say that Dr Rayner's approach reflects the open-mindedness and open-endedness which is so great a source of pride to the Independent group.
As Dr Rayner points out, his major challenge was the existence among the Independents of such widely divergent thinking as to result in their reluctance to establish precise boundaries that would circumscribe their ideas. He stresses their adherence to the British tradition of toleration of differing views and their willingness to explore empirical evidence regardless of its origin, a tradition that motivated them to occupy a bridging (middle) position vis-à-vis the feuding factions.
Dr Rayner has organised his material according to ideas and concepts shared by the Independents rather than by each Independent. There are thus chapters on affect theory, on the relation between affective and cognitive