Michael Fordham, Freud, Jung, Klein — The Fenceless Field: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology, ed. Roger Hobdell, Routledge, London and New York: 1995.  284 pp., £40.

This book is a most fitting testament from the late Michael Fordham, for, while it presents some of his most recent work, a major section deriving from his last seminars with child analytic trainees, it also illustrates his profound and scholarly interest in a comparative developmental study of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In that regard, it represents Fordham's perspective that analytical theory is best considered through reflective study of clinical material.

The work offers a sampling of the depth and breadth of experience of a singularly important figure in the analytic world, who tried to reconcile analytical psychology with important basic aspects of psychoanalysis (from which Jung had broken away in 1913) in the course of which he formulated his own developmental theories based on the self.

The first section, ‘Towards a current model’, is a new contribution that stems from Dr Fordham's recent seminars for the child analytic training. In it he considers and relates many fundamental clinical papers by Freud, Jung and Klein. Fordham states that his interest in the Freud papers is to do with Freud's gradual building up first a structure of the mind and then a picture of an inner world which needs the pain of loss to bring it about.

Fordham seems especially interested in the child cases, Little Hans by Freud and Anna by Jung, and in childhood and developmental aspects of the other cases he considers. It could be said that he is interested too in the childhood of psychoanalysis as it developed in the early pioneers. The child cases seem important to Fordham for various reasons — for instance, their importance as an antecedent of child analysis and in the aspects Freud missed, because of his stage in the development of his ideas and because of his too-firm adherence to the sexual theory. Freud seemed not yet to grasp the implications for the evidence of the inner world of psychic reality or for the development of the capacity to think.

Fordham interweaves t