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This book contains a series of articles by British psychoanalysts on their work with families. The audience to whom it is addressed is stated in the foreword by Sutherland to be ‘the helping professions’. The articles are of very uneven quality. Some are excellent: for example a little gem by Winnicott, ‘Mirror-role of mother and family in child development'’, describes how an infant comes to self-recognition through the reflection it finds of itself in its mother's face as the mother responds truly as opposed to responding in non-genuine ways to her child's behaviour; a thoroughly workmanlike and systematic account by Bowlby of his work on childhood mourning, including a perspective on the relation between his own and Freud's and Klein's concepts; and a most useful review of the literature on the frequency of loss of key figures in various periods of the early life of patients suffering from various categories of mental illness.
There is also an interesting and convincing presentation by Use Hellman of material from the analyses of a mother and child who had been bound together in a destructive and partly psychotic symbiosis. Their two analysts compared notes on the material obtained. From the knowledge of the mother's psychology and of the child's transference to his analyst, the mode of interaction which had prevented reality testing and the defining of boundaries between mother and child is reconstructed. This knowledge also enabled the child's analyst to distinguish between introjected aspects of the mother's behaviour and the child's own psychology. This must have greatly helped the work of defining the child's ego boundaries.