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‘We believe that it is of fundamental importance to many professionals to have an understanding of… the relationships within families.’ That, stated in the preface, is the aim of the authors of this book. They add that they intend to pursue this by describing aspects of the unfolding and evolving life-cycle of the individual and his family in interaction. In particular, they propose to discuss ‘secrets’, i.e., primitive feelings and phantasies—of individuals and of family groups as a whole, repressed but active in potentially destructive ways within family relationships. However, on page 39, they state: ‘We shall … look … especially [at] the persistence of the Oedipal theme and related secrets. This is the topic of our book.’ As the book is indeed essentially about incest, the title is rather misleading. Noting that, however, the otherwise puzzling absence of reference to major writers, such as A. C. R. Skynner, on the subject of family psychodynamics was understandable to me.
There are some structural features of the book which need comment. The subject and author indexes are quite adequate, but the system of including notes to chapters at the end of the book I found irritating in a relatively slender volume. I was also surprised to find no acknowledgments to colleagues, and did not feel that the book gained in fruitfulness or integration from joint authorship.
The central issue is that of how the authors deal with their actual chosen theme: incest. The treatment of the subject is repetitive, both in theoretical and case-illustration terms. It broadly states and re-states—at times in almost moralistic terms, which made me wonder if the authors felt unconvinced—that the child ‘must of course’, for some reason, after enjoying (if fortunate) feeling sexually attractive to his parents, ‘give up’ his oedipal wishes towards those parents and displace them appropriately on to more viable non-family members. That displacement is described as a symbolic development—it is unar