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A first book, written late in life, by a dedicated analyst is always a rather special event. It represents the distillation of all that the analyst has thought about, suffered, enjoyed and struggled with as he participates in his patients' lives and develops through this experience. It is quite different from a paper which usually represents a point of view at a particular moment. Such a book is this volume by Redfearn, whose many papers will have made him a familiar figure to regular readers of this Journal. It provides much more than the publication of ‘collected papers’ which so often reflect these passing and not always co-ordinated viewpoints, and it is clear that in this work the author has not only pulled together his previous writings but has developed and clarified what he wants to say now.
The theme is the self and the multiplicity of selves which each individual seems to have, and the opening chapter, ‘Ego and self: terminology’, sets out the field and demonstrates the confusion generated by the varying uses of these terms by different authors. He regards the Jungian use of the word ‘self’ as being essentially different from that of writers such as Kohut, and he develops and enlarges on this special usage in the next chapter on the ‘Jungian self’. In subsequent chapters, Redfearn turns to a consideration of those aspects of the problems of the self which have interested him in his clinical work. These concern particularly the relationship between God and images and the self, the place of the body and the body image, and the question of where people locate their sense of ‘I-ness’. In developing his ideas, Redfearn adopts the term ‘sub-personalities’ to describe parts of the self as manifested in images or patterns of behaviour. These may be split off or repressed parts, i.e. complexes, or plastic and adaptive parts resulting from the introjection of ‘good’ parental figures. They may be collective and archetypal or personal and individual. They may be subord