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In Britain the clinical community - unlike the academic and feminist/intellectual - has maintained a rather xenophobic insularity in relation to French theoretical developments of the last few decades. The domination, perhaps more apparent than real, of French intellectual life by structuralism in general, and Lacanism in particular, has posed a barrier of conceptual inaccessibility for those brought up within a more empirical tradition - with all its attendant prejudices. The tendency has been to keep away from ‘foreign’, especially French, ideas, with only a few exceptions, the work of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and André Green, for example.
To this somewhat myopic attitude recent translations of the work of Didier Anzieu and his colleagues offer a welcome antidote, consisting as it does of a thoroughly comprehensible model of a psychoanalytic approach to the self rooted in the earliest psychic development of the infant. The ideas have important implications for work with severely disturbed, autistic and psychotic children, enriching and extending our current and still limited understanding of this troubling area. As such they complement and contribute new dimensions to theories conceptually familiar within the British tradition, yet cast in a distinctively different form, and in some ways much more extensively elaborated than their English counterparts.
This body of writing is characterised by the very absence of dogmatism, by breadth and range of thought as well as depth, and by the way in which the central concepts are developed out of a commitment to look both inward and outward simultaneously, and to examine the interface between. Anzieu positions himself thus in the opening pages of The Skin Ego:
“There is an internal conflict in psychoanalytic thinking between an empiricist, pragmatic, psychogenetic orientation (more common among the British and Americans), in which the psychical organisation is seen as resulting from unconscious childhood experiences (particul