Midwifery of the Soul: A Holistic Perspective on Psychoanalysis: Margaret Arden. London: Free Association Books. 1998. Pp. 118

This is a collection of eight papers that gives special consideration and place to the following idea:

This quotation, set before the contents page of the collection, is from Goethe.

It informs all the thinking behind Margaret Arden's distinct and separately driven subjects for this collection, and it makes possible the disparateness of her titles and themes for exploration, precisely because it acts as the anchor and unitary base for separateness and difference.

In this sense, she locates vastly different-seeming matter within this central thought expressed by Goethe, the whole that holds and affirms against the dissection that misapprehends in the interest of detail. It is in my view essential that our acts of desecration in the interests of our own brand of understanding we call science and knowledge should have this salutary prescript, this reminder of the importance of the overriding whole, in order that we may be safe from our own undoing of science and meaning. It is timely, at the close of the first century of psychoanalysis. It is both a statement about the position of psychoanalysis, or that of any other human discipline, come to that, for us to attend to seriously and also the affirmation that whatever we may believe and hope we achieve through the workings of splitting and dividing and tabulating methodically Goethe's ‘Nature’, in other words, ‘psychoanalysing’ the elemental forces will always assert their position to the contrary.

Those that speak, as the author does in these papers, in honour of those disparate forces and their unity, not sameness but ways of expressing difference within the unity, will act in the care and best interests of both psychoanalysis, or any other human discipline, and Nature, of which man is a single part.

Holism, then, is the driving force of these writings, which are also a developmental or processive j