As the emphasis in the title suggests, this book is not specifically about the mother-infant relationship but more a series of reflections and thoughts about aspects of that relationship inherent in culture and society.

‘Within the mother-infant dyad, both mother and infant mediate experiences of both ego and self for one another’. The author is especially interested in the quality of this relationship and how feeling and imagination, which are more active forms of these early experiences of mutuality and receptivity, express the individual's relation to self and community often in ways that need to be explored.

With these notions as a framework, the author explores a number of related subjects: the self as an inner authority; the psychological issues raised by the universal customs of feasts and feasting; the psychological and cultural issues posed by the practice of magic. However, as a fellow enthusiast, it was his discussion of Blues music that really caught my imagination. It serves to illustrate some of his main