Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide.: Edited by Rosine Perelberg. London:  Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis). Pp.  208.

The impact of this profound and humane book (the product of a research project at the Anna Freud Centre into analyses of physically violent patients) consists in the way that it enables the reader to review what they know about the subjects of violence and suicide and to both consciously and unconsciously reformulate their own views of the subject. In addition, the reformulation will be a dynamic, ongoing process and will therefore be likely to lead to further evolution of the kind of understanding so necessary in scientific psychoanalytic research. The term mentalise comes to mind time and time again when reading about the patients and concepts discussed in this book. Mentalise includes as part of its definition a process of metabolisation that takes place in the mind. The activity of metabolisation is of the utmost relevance to violent and suicidal patients and it is explored in depth and in detail in this volume. If the metabolisation process is relatively successfully accomplished, the risk of a sudden outbreak of violence, even of murder in some extreme instances, is reduced in highly disturbed patients. In addition, the resort to suicide is also reduced as long as the metabolisation that has been attained can be maintained to some significant