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Jock Sutherland died in 1991 at the age of 86, and it is an unexpected pleasure to welcome a book of his collected writings and lectures—unexpected because he did so many other things in his life that it was difficult to realise that he had written so much. Like only two other psychoanalysts, John Bowlby and Anna Freud, Sutherland was awarded the CBE—for his work for over twenty years as Medical Director of the Tavistock Clinic. Besides having been the Editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and of the British Journal of Medical Psychology, he was also the Editor of the International Library of Psycho-Analysis and saw twenty-eight books through to publication. He was not only a training analyst in the British Society and co-founder of the Scottish Institute of Human Relations, but he also became a consultant to institutions in Topeka, Washington and New York, where he regularly visited and taught from the mid-1960s onwards. In the Epilogue, Dr Scharff says that Sutherland ‘had a profound impact on psychiatry in the United States’ and ‘persuaded American psychoanalysis to stretch its ego-psychology orientation to include the tenets of British objectrelations theory’ (p. 425), introducing Fairbairn's work, then little known, to American psychiatry.
The book has been beautifully edited by Dr Scharff. To make three of the twenty-five chapters, she has collated or combined material from different sources without any trace of seams or patching. The last two chapters are transcriptions from audiocassettes of a talk at the Washington School of Psychiatry and of informal teaching interviews in Washington and New York. Four of the chapters were papers Sutherland co-authored: with H. S. Gill (two); Gill and H. Phillipson; and I. E. Menzies.
Confronted with the prospect of reading through so many papers from various sources, I turned first to the last chapter, ‘Reminiscences’, and was rewarded with a vivid memory of Sutherland talking and teaching informally. There