This textbook has long been awaited by educators within psychoanalytical institutes, psychiatric residency programmes, clinical psychology graduate schools and the more psychodynamically oriented and sophisticated social work programmes. The authors intended to produce a textbook to give readers ‘an understanding of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis while at the same time providing an up-to-date picture of the field’ and hoped that ‘both the seasoned practitioner and the neophyte student will find the chapters contemporary, valuable, and useful’. Obviously, the authors also wished to avoid a compromise product that might seem simplistic to the ‘seasoned practitioner’ while simultaneously being obscure to ‘the neophyte’. Kopff & Nersessian have done an admirable editing job in their efforts to achieve such balance, and for the most part succeed in their quest.

Their decision to opt for a ‘primarily Freudian perspective’ instead of writing from another perspective does produce one problem for the reader who sets out to read the entire text from