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Eva Seligman practised as an analytical psychologist in London for almost half a century, and this collection of ten of her papers puts this reviewer in mind of Shakespeare's assertion that ‘Ripeness is all’. The papers are not all dated, but internal textual clues suggest that they range over the greater part of her working life. Although a few have been published in this and other journals and in compilations, others are in print for the first time; and most importantly, by publishing all these papers and two appendices in one volume, Seligman gives us an insight into her unique way of being an analyst. In reviewing this volume, I shall first comment on the individual papers, and then give my reaction to the experience of reading the book as a whole.
Dr Redfearn, in his short introduction, commends the book for its ‘absence of the counter-productive multiplicity of do's and don'ts, rights and wrongs, which bedevilled, and still bedevils, the various trainings in analysis and which results in so much anxiety and rigidness in our trainees …’. This approach is evident in the first paper, entitled ‘The case for a versatile approach to analytical practice’ in which Seligman describes elements of work with six patients, bearing out what it means in practice to follow Jung's statement that ‘When we are dealing with the human soul, we can only meet it on its own ground, and this is what we have to do when we are faced with the real and overpowering problems of life …’ (quoted Seligman p. 5). Versatility, in Seligman's practice, can extend to the involvement of a third party in the form of a close relation of the patient's when ‘an intensive unconscious enmeshment with the third is the major content of a patient's life and thus constitutes the main psychopathology of his illness’ (p. 15). Versatility does not, however, mean for her the abandonment of all boundaries, and she states categorically that while prepared ‘to be drawn into aspects of the patient's outer life, as we