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Dear Sirs,
I have some comments to make about the review of my book by Mawson (2003).
I am, of course, disappointed that your reviewer wasn't pleased with my book. But he has made a serious error, which, not having noticed, he then elaborates ‘de haut en bas’. He informs your readers that ‘the aim of the chapter [one] is to demonstrate the clarification of confusion using a psychoanalytic method’. No it isn't, not by a long chalk. The clearly stated aim of the chapter is ‘to describe a consultation in which confusion presented as an emergency in a young man’ (p. 5)—and that is exactly what the chapter does. He compounds his error over 300 words of irrelevance, finding the ‘clinical weakness’ in his own phantasy as a jumping-off ground for further disapproval. It must be part of editorial responsibility to monitor their reviewers’ straying from their own ‘Guidelines for Book Reviews’. One of these reads: ‘The book reviewer is not charged with the task of instructing the author what he should have said or how. The reviewer's own ideas on the particular subject should not usually intrude on the primary purpose of informing the reader of what the author has said … [he] … should aspire to criticism that is clear but tactful and in good taste’. Your reviewer, I maintain, is out of order on all these counts, and some others.
Nowhere does your reviewer mention the word ‘dreams’ or convey that the book is hugely concerned with them. There is no reference at all to the favourable outcome of the clinical work with dreams in seven of the chapters, nor does he pass on to prospective readers the very relevant information that the seminar aspect in the title occupies nearly forty pages of discussion and question and answer.
Your reviewer doesn't seem to like the fact that my knowledge of literature ‘tends to be brought into the consulting room more than with most modern-day Kleinian analysts’. I contrast this with the reviewer of Di Benedetto's book in the same book review section who