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no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore (Freud, 1905, pp. 77-8).
Mahler's work has been so thoroughly taken up in our basic theories that beginner psychotherapists regularly use the term 'rapprochement' without having read Mahler at all. Ironically, general usage often signifies the blunting of hard-won theoretical clarity. Concepts need to be made new again—even strange—if we are to recapture the sharpness of an original insight.
This book is a collection of papers initially presented at the Twenty-Second Annual Margaret Mahler Symposium on Child Development. Mahler's work serves as a prism through which the contributors refract their own conceptualisations, taking as their common theme the nature of nonverbal communication, its sources in early experience, and its relevance to clinical work.
Mahler recognised that child analysts must rely on nonverbal communication more than other analysts; so it is all the more striking that most of the contributors to this volume are not, in fact, child clinicians. This allows the reader a fresh chance to explore the more general applicability of Mahlerian conceptions to nonverbal phenomena in adult clinical work, to return again to the problems Mahler posed, and to reassess her ideas and their appropriation into our theoretical canon.
The book is organised around four main presentations, interspersed with four discussions that stand as chapters in their own right. The effect is to immerse the reader in material that is turned slowly over in the mind: we can re-read, savour, and argue in the imagination. It is impressive how the authors work and re-work the phenomenon of nonverbal communication through the concepts of separation, individuation, and rapprochement.
The introductory chapter by Selma Kramer, 'Nonverbal manifestations of unresolved separation-individuation in adult psychopathology', sets the context of the book. In this chapter