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This book presents the best kind of synthesis between personal reflection and theoretical exploration. Astrid Berg gets the balance right as she discusses her experiences in South Africa as a child psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, and her witness to and participation in the journey of South Africa from apartheid to democracy. She confronts, in a moving and yet matter of fact way, her racial fears and the gaps in her understanding as a white person in a predominantly black country.
Necessarily Berg's personal journey is at the same time intensely political, as she confronts the ignorance of the white minority and explores, often with some discomfort, the difficult relations between whites and blacks. All this is done with humility, care and devotion to her task-but above all the book reveals the overriding importance of being conscious of the ‘personal equation’, as Jung puts it, in introducing analytical psychology into non-European countries. Such a task is self-implicating to the highest degree, and Berg provides a model of sensitivity and poise as she forges ahead with her project. Berg is at all times respectful of her mentor, Vera Bührmann, a Jungian pioneer in South Africa,1 but her own work is also pioneering in terms of the challenges she faces.
The case study of the infant Athi is moving to the point of bringing tears to the reader's eyes, but the extraordinary feature of Berg's style is its absolute refusal to lapse into sentimentality. She engages emotions about the plight of Athi and his mother Nosakhele without being cloying or indulgent. The book is full of feeling but it handles feeling in a restrained manner. In this alone it is a welcome addition to the literature of infant observation, where the subjective domain of the researcher is often bracketed out. Here the subjective is present but controlled. In this regard I kept thinking of Robert Romanyshyn's work The Wounded Researcher,2 which is