The title of a lecture chosen by Dr Meltzer to launch this book at the Tavistock clinic in December 1994 was the ‘Role of Writing in Psychoanalytic Development’. I found this particularly apposite, when reading through the book to review it. This collection of thirty-four papers ably edited by Alberto Hahn is presented in chronological order from 1955 to 1989. There is a useful introduction by Dr Hahn and a summary of each chapter by him in the preface to each paper. Many of the papers have not been published before, including a book-sized paper