Patrick Casement, a senior independent psychoanalyst of the British Psycho-analytic Society, has written what is both a searing critique of contemporary psychoanalytic training practices and a vision of what it means to be a truly competent and self-aware psychoanalyst. In tracing some of the personal, group and institutional processes that go on inside psychoanalytic Training Institutes, and identifying ways in which these processes might be handled in the interests of students, he also sets out his stall with regard to what is the more desirable state for an analyst—newly qualified or a senior Training Analyst—to be in, or to recover, in respect of these pressures. Both parts of his