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, edited by Meg Harris Williams in consultation with Maria Rhode, Margaret Rustin and Gianna Polacco Williams, London, Karnac for The Harris Meltzer Trust, 2012, 342 pp., £29.99, ISBN 13: 978-1-78049-106-6
This book brings to life the extraordinary figure of Martha (Mattie) Harris (1919–87), and every contribution to this collection is a living testament to her dynamic and continuing influence on the developing field of psychoanalytic work with children and parents. She was a brilliant and unique teacher, much loved by several generations of child psychotherapists who were fortunate to be trained by her and she continues to live on inside them as an enabling and inspiring presence. I was one such young trainee in the late 1960s and feel touched and privileged to be asked to review this book as it evokes all my own memories of being ‘enabled and inspired’ by the richness of her teaching, her clinical insights, human wisdom and personal kindnesses to me.
It is not possible to do justice to all the varied accounts of her teaching or the many moving tributes and recollections of her generosity and motherliness to all her students, but what is so remarkable is that, quite separately, each writer brings out Mattie’s very special, perhaps even idiosyncratic personality so that even if you had never known her, her presence is splendidly vivid. We can picture her, a tall woman in her floral, self-made flowing dress, with heavy-lidded, almost sleepy and yet penetratingly attentive piercing grey-blue eyes, carrying and sometimes dropping files and papers, both flustered, verbally hesitant, even vulnerable and yet clear minded and confident, dealing with the moment and keeping everyone and everything in mind. As Margot Waddell writes, her style was less about conventional ‘knowledge’ than about wisdom. Above all she was a deeply humane person.
The book is divided into three sections: ‘In England and abroad’; ‘Clinical work and supervision’ and ‘Personal recollections’. There is, h