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Those who have read Margot Waddell's inspiring book The Chamber of Maiden Thought, which she co-authored with Meg Harris Williams, will know what a gifted writer she is on the subject of psychoanalysis and literature. This book, her most recent publication, is based on her teaching experience at the Tavistock Clinic, and draws on her clinical and supervisory experience, as well as her deep knowledge of the poetry of Yeats, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the novels of George Eliot, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.
Inside Lives is subtitled Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality and traces the psychoanalytic understanding of the emotional development of the personality from a perspective steeped in the understanding of the work of Klein and of Bion. Inside Lives is about ‘how a person grows up’, not in terms of stages in their development, but how different ages are characterized by ‘different states of mind, each typified by particular defences, anxieties and qualities of relationship’.
Margot Waddell begins by orientating her reader to what she means by that much overused phrase ‘states of mind’, linking it to stages of development. The way she uses ‘states of mind’ is similar to the Jungian concept of a personality having many subpersonalities, which co-exist within us and which we can drop into at a moment's notice. It is, however, a more detailed version than Jung's in that Waddell links it to stages of development. She wants us to understand the relevance of the state of mind to the emotional age of the person: how, for instance, an 89 year old woman happily married for 60 years could be suffering intense jealousy, which when examined closely revealed an Oedipal dilemma, the desire for the sole possession of ‘one parent to the exclusion of the other’. This, like many of the examples given, shows the effect of anxiety on the mind and the way it can stoke up irrational states, which are not linked to the chronological age of the person experien