Maud Mannoni: The Child, his illness, and the others.  Tavistock Publications, London, 1970. Price £3.15.

This book is an exciting and unusual one. Madame Mannoni is a French psychoanalyst trained in the tradition of Jacques Lacan. She works in a number of unorthodox ways, both in her approach to her child patient's family, and

because she is interested in applying the insights of psycho-analysis to cases of apparent mental retardation. She is writing here of her work with children, and its theoretical basis. A number of her analytic cases are reported on in detail, and the cases that she discusses are mainly those of severely ill children. The theoretical terminology derived from Lacan's work is unfamiliar to English readers, but a helpful glossary is provided, and reference made to an English volume on Lacan's thought. The book is translated from the French, and this work seems to have been done well.

The nub of her argument about childhood psychosis is that the sick child is struggling to attain an individual identity in the face of his own regressive urge to inhabit the personality pressed on him by parents who require of him that he serve as container for aspects of their own experience with which they cannot deal. Her assumption, therefore, is that analysis with a child is only possible if a dialogue is established between parents and analyst which offers to the parents a possibility of feeling understood as persons by their child's analyst, and thus lessening their need to use the child to express their own problems. In such a setting analysis of the child can proceed. In many of her cases, the amount of work done directly with the parents was considerable, as the child's developing integrity of personality is threatening to parents who have needed to use him in this way, since it undermines their own psychic system. Mannoni's cases are from her private practice, but it is clear from her argument that were a professional team on the English Child Guidance model available for work with these families, this would not meet, in her view, the needs of the situation. F