You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This collection—highly creative, frequently brilliantly original, and noticeably and unabashedly British—is nevertheless difficult to review in a world context. Peter Fonagy's introduction is glowing. Each paper (with one or two exceptions) seems to be a gem of concise, clearly illustrated writing. It seems to me that this book can be regarded as a modern proposal for psychoanalysis to become more relevant to the global community through the disciplines of psychiatry, sociology, psychology, and social work—all of which, incidentally, are undergoing dramatic shifts in the United Kingdom via the policies and practices of the British National Health Service.
At first, I thought this collection consisted essentially of attempts to apply psychoanalytic thinking to community-based work that might have worldwide applicability. In the United States, such thinking involves several approaches; here there are various advocacy groups, and we see the modification of psychotherapy for particular populations—for example, torture victims, indigent persons, and so on, and psychoanalytic conceptualizations may be applied to community problems, but with techniques and interventions that are not necessarily psychoanalytic in nature. Editors Alessandra Lemma and Matthew Patrick state that their book grew out of experiences of working within the British National Health Service, however, and consequently these essays (which are sometimes autobiographical in nature) contain many reflections on what it is like to work in the public health sector in Great Britain. Some commonalities with the work of individual practitioners and public health workers elsewhere can be identified, nonetheless.
Having immigrated to the United States from a British Commonwealth nation some forty years ago, I find that this book, authored by a sterling group of British psychoanalytic thinkers, stimulates complicated feelings in me. At times it seems rather narrow, as though some of the writers are trying to justify