Generations of students at the Tavistock have greatly benefited from Margot Waddell's lectures on personality development. The publication of this book is a happy event, allowing us and a wider public to have access to these riches and her further thoughts on the subject. Based on the original psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud, those of Klein and post-Kleinians, drawing on many years of experience of clinical work, added to by observation of babies, children, adolescents and adults and inspired by literary sources, she now presents us with a cohesive picture of inner growth.

The story of how we grow is, as she states in her introduction, ‘not told in orthodox developmental terms, nor yet as a comprehensive view of how, expositionally, psychoanalytic theory would explain such matters. It is, rather, an attempt to trace the unfolding of the inside story of the inner life of a person.’ The book tells a story, or rather many stories, of different individuals and allows us to discover the meaning each one