Nurturing natures

Nurturing natures, by Graham Music, London, Psychology Press, 2010, 314 pp., £22.46, ISBN 978-1-84872-057-2

This book is a very impressive and solid achievement, fully deserving the rich praise on the back cover and fly sheet from Peter Fonagy, Anne Alvarez and others – ‘tour de force’, ‘superb’, ‘masterly’, ‘MUST read’. In the introduction, Music outlines the book's task: ‘This is a book about how a human baby, that tiny bundle of biological inheritances, develops into a psychological, emotional and social being’ (p. 2). Of course, in one form or another, that is exactly what we expect a book, written by a psychoanalytic child psychotherapist and with this kind of title, to be about. What is different about this one is the source Music almost exclusively draws on. As he says,

I describe many of the increasingly rigorous yet exciting research findings of recent years … (Our) understanding of how people develop from infancy into adulthood, and how early beginnings affect later functioning, has grown beyond all measure … (This) is mainly scattered in a vast array of scholarly books, chapters, and journal articles, and hopefully much of this research is distilled here in a digestible form (p. 2).

It has, it is true, become much more common in recent years for books on child development by child psychotherapists to draw somewhat on this research literature. What is striking about this book is the sheer extent to which it does so. On my rough count, more than 850 research papers and books are cited and Music indeed succeeds in distilling them and making them digestible. In contrast, as I will go on to discuss more fully below, there is hardly any referencing of psychoanalytic literature and no use of clinical material.

Some of the chapters cover different chronological stages of development – in the womb, at birth, infancy, middle childhood, adolescence. But one of the things that contributes to giving the book its real distinctiveness is that this familiar chronological o