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Susan Isaacs: a life freeing the minds of children, by Philip Graham, London, Karnac, 2009, 352 pp., £29.99
To most readers of this journal the name of Susan Isaacs will be remembered, if at all, in connection with a series of papers she wrote, or co-wrote, as part of the Kleinian contribution to the so-called ‘Controversial Discussions’ that dominated the proceedings of the British Psychoanalytic Society during the period of the Second World War. Child psychotherapists trained at the Tavistock Clinic will almost certainly have read her paper on ‘The nature and function of phantasy’ (Isaacs, 1948), widely regarded as the classic statement of the Kleinian position on the role of the infant's earliest mental processes, and their impact on the later development of the personality. What they will not have derived from it is much of an impression of the author herself, other than that she is clearly articulate, definite in her views, and categorical in her manner of expressing them. They would certainly get no inkling from it that she was the person described, in the words of her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as ‘the greatest influence on British education in the twentieth century’ (Pines, 2004).
Isaacs was a woman not just of many parts, but of many personas. The enigma of her personality is compounded by the fact that within the disciplines of education, child psychology and psychoanalysis, where she was once such a dominant figure, her contributions are nowadays practically forgotten. So it is a mark of her historical significance, as well as of her contemporary relevance, that one of the present-day luminaries in child psychiatry and child welfare, Philip Graham, has chosen to write this very substantial biography about her. In doing so, he has both amplified and moderated the earlier, rather hagiographic account of Susan Isaacs written by her former pupil, and later successor as Head of the Dep