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To readers of this Journal the work of our Consultant Editor, and former Editor, Judith Hubback, will be well known. Here are fourteen of her papers, not presented chronologically, but grouped together carefully under broad headings. These embrace the art, craft and technique of analytical therapy, contrasted approaches to the theory of analytical psychology, and clinical papers focusing on the dynamics of the transference and coumertransference, linking particularly the concepts of Jung, Klein and Winmcott. In the last section of the book, as an analyst working in London, she shows how analytical psychology has developed since the Tavistock Lectures given by Jung in 1935. A final chapter is devoted to themes which are of central concern to her, those of change as a process in the self, when self and other meet, and the nature both of the healing mutative factors and of those counteractive forces which hold up progress and development.
Those who are training to be analysts … will see that the work of an analytical psychologist consists in the constant interaction between the patient and the analyst and between what happens (when that can be established) and what is thought about it. There is a mysterious marriage between the two, which is not so singularly mysterious as to be unfathomable (p. viii).
A valuable paper is the one entitled ‘Depressed patients and the contunctio’. An account is given of the treatment of six patients, all of whom had been in chronic depression. The mother of each had suffered bereavement from which she had not recovered. Hubback is convinced that ‘too many and too strong negative archetypal images are absorbed by an infant or young child from a depressed mother, most particularly if she is a bereaved woman who is still caught up in her anger and sadness, so that she cannot direct herself towards the baby and genuinely smile into its eyes. Not enough validation of its lovableness is offered to such an infant at the stage in life when that ex