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Margot Waddell is the Co-Editor (with Nick Temple) of a series of books entitled the Tavistock Clinic Series, of which Inside Lives is one, and the one that she has written herself. The series represents the work of the Tavistock Clinic, its ‘inside life’ on a number of important issues, such as trauma, psychotic states in children, eating disorders, adolescent disturbance, as well as a different kind of text, which celebrates the work of Hanna Segal. The series is for those who are both specialists and practitioners in other institutions and also for those beyond the professions, interested lay readers.
Inside Lives is a communication of a complex subject, the ways in which psychoanalysis has something to contribute to our understanding of the growth of the self (the lay term), the personality (the psychological term), and indeed the soul (a poetic or spiritual term). All these terms appear in the book and concern the author. The growth of the personality, the day-to-day material of psychoanalytic work, what impedes such growth, what releases it, the innumerable issues for the developing self (all this having been the domain of fiction, indeed the domain of all artistic endeavour whose creators might be termed the instinctual researchers into the self) Waddell, as a psychoanalyst and writer on this, and on literature, has gathered up into one continuing thread of her own thinking. She moves easily between psychoanalytic approaches, to literary ones, from the theory and practice of psychoanalysis to the demonstration of the issues of selfhood in fictional and poetic form.
Waddell states that
the capacity to develop, to experience one's life in such a way that one can learn from it as well as about it, is rooted in an enormous range of interlocking factors for which psychoanalytic theory provides certain central
Page 836concepts and descriptive mechanisms. A working and re-working of these concepts in relation to someone's lived experience, at different ages and in different