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First impressions are important. This is a big book, with many authors and a massive range of subjects. It is jointly edited by a psychoanalyst with academic roots in English literature and a psychiatrist with a degree in philosophy, and this partnership raised expectations that the contents would capture the benefits and the pitfalls of working with differences - of profession, status, theoretical orientation to name but a few - which I know from my own experience feature strongly in the life of the organization. That this path might prove bumpy is signalled by the front cover image of a couple cut into by a sharp, triangular shape.
This is not a book to be read at one sitting or even within a week. My reading extended over two months and my assessment is a distillation aided by copious notes. I was helped by reading Virginia Woolf: How Should One Read a Book? (1935) where she makes the point that after we read a book what stays with us is its shape: ‘there they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgements we pass upon them’ (p. 41). And so this review is what hangs in my mind, and I apologize that it is necessarily selective and omits important subject matter which on another day I would want to include.
The book begins strongly with a preface and foreword that describe what the editors set out to achieve. They were responding to Anton Obholzer's suggestion that it would be timely to produce a volume that illustrates the core concepts and methods - the ‘rootstock’, as he put it - that have underpinned the life of the Clinic since its inception in the aftermath of the First World War. While the contributors make frequent reference to the life of the Clinic in the inter-war years - Kahr's account of the history of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology and Hopkins's account of the history of the Child Guidance Training Centre, both provide rich insights into the formative influences during this period - this volume is essen