It is rare to find in the psychoanalytic literature a book as delightful to read as this, one from which it is the reader's privilege to learn with so much pleasure. The author's intellectual and imaginative gifts, so much in evidence in the writing of the essays collected in this volume, produced between 1960 and 1989, are also generously utilized in the work she describes. It is arduous work: the residential treatment of children and adolescents who have been diagnosed in need of primary care.