This book is an attractive collection of papers based on work with families and adolescents. The preface and initial résumé make no bones about the copyright of what the authors call ‘the Tavistock-Klein object-relations approach’, a term which appears throughout the book.

The main theoretical underpinning is in fact based mainly on the psychoanalytic views of Klein and Bion and some of their followers. This emphasises the understanding of the level of shared fantasies and unconscious assumptions of the ‘here and now’, both in the individual and in group dynamics as applied to the family setting. It also illustrates how the use of the therapists’ counter-transference experience is pivotal to the often chaotic interaction occurring in disturbed families as portrayed in the various clinical examples.

The book is divided into three main sections comprising three, four and seven chapters respectively. The general introduction to the history and