In his introduction to this most welcome book, Samuels quotes Jung: ‘The theory of compensation [is] a basic law of psychic behaviour’. It seems clear to me that it is that same basic law which acted as a well-spring for this rich compendium on a theme that all readers will recognise as one that has, until recently, been conspicuous by its absence in the literature of both analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. A second source of motivation lies in the socio-cultural changes that have taken place rapidly over the last twenty years. Those years have been an epoch during which we have just emerged from the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960s, and in which changes in the role of the father have, perhaps, outrun the necessary psychic