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It is refreshing to read a book that advocates the practical benefits of an analytic perspective-in collaboration with an orthodox medical approach-to the field of psychosomatics. Our culture's obsession with ‘evidence based’ interventions and a ‘scientific’ quantitative definition of what constitutes that evidence, means that analytic thinking is in danger of being eclipsed by cognitive behavioural therapy in the eyes of the medical establishment. The treatment of psychosomatic illness is by no means immune from that tendency. This book however bucks the trend and is a welcome addition to the psychosomatic literature in the analytic tradition of such authors as Franz Alexander, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott. Naturally it lacks the startling originality of those early pioneers. But it does succeed in drawing together information and evidence from a variety of sources-including, it has to be conceded, cognitive behavioural therapy as well as psychoanalysis, neuroscience and orthodox medicine. The book is peppered throughout with a series of pertinent case histories illustrating each of the themes under discussion.