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This formidable volume covers the crisis that arose in the British Psycho-Analytical Society that was largely brought about by the vigorous attack on Melanie Klein's work by members of the Viennese group headed by Anna Freud, with the addition of Edward Glover and Melita Schmideberg (Melanie's daughter). It is an interesting and informative book, especially because it documents the tendency for developments in psychoanalysis to proceed by rifts in which one or more psychoanalysts are either expelled or retire from the main body headed by Freud. It all started with the direct or indirect expulsion of Jung, Adler, Stekel and their associates; it seems that comparable processes have been and continue to be repeated, especially in the United States.
Belonging to a ‘dissident’ tradition that Jung initiated, I find it all especially interesting because there have been similar splits having, if I am not mistaken, comparable causes: a main one being the assertion by a number of ‘true blue’ analysts that a deviant theory and practice had arisen which should no longer be called ‘Jungian’ or ‘Freudian’. In the case of the analytical psychologists in London a smaller number of analysts broke off to start an alternative training which was supposedly ‘true blue’; that splitting again to make four training groups in all. Whereas the Society of Analytical Psychology had not succeeded in containing the two groups, the psychoanalysts had done so. Would this very detailed exposition shed any light on why different theories and practices raised such intense and even violent emotions?
The first section of this massive volume is headed “The evolution of controversies in the British Psycho-Analytical Society”. It begins with a valuable editorial introduction by Pearl King and goes on to record a series of Extraordinary Business Meetings, the first of which was held on February 25th 1942. In this and subsequent meetings the discussions consider a number of resolutions proposing changes in th