The Early Years of Life: Psychoanalytic Development Theory According to Freud, Klein, and Bion. By Gertraud Diem-Wille; translated by Norman Merems, Camilla Nielsen, and Benjamin Mcquade. London:  Karnac, 2011.  310 pp.

Gertraud Diem-Wille has made a solid contribution to the literature on early child development, skillfully integrating the contributions of Freud, Klein, and Bion, and thoughtfully melding these into her own idiom. This monograph was originally published in German in 2007 by Kohlhammer, GmbH: Stuttgart, and translated into English for the 2008 Karnac edition.

In an interview with the author provided by her publisher, Diem-Wille emphasized that she had aimed to write the kind of book that she would have liked to have read when she was a student at university or while she was raising her two daughters as a young mother. The author also wanted to permit the lay reader or student to obtain a more experience-near glimpse into the analytic process of clinical work with children, in which the analyst mainly tries to interpret the play material and interaction generated by the child in order to understand the unconscious anxieties and conflicts that have been hindering the child's development.

The author further stated that she would like to help psychoanalysts and psychotherapists unfamiliar with the processes of infant observation to develop a further understanding of how useful these observations may be in understanding not only the child her-/himself, but also the “child in the parent.” That is, Diem-Wille also explores with the parents their memories of their own upbringing in order to understand, and also to teach the parents about, how the child may be enacting in the present an intergenerational transmission of the parents' (and maybe the grandparents') own lived trauma and internal anxieties. This work with the parents is enormously helpful in enlisting their commitment to the analytic work, as well as in expanding their empathic capacities with their child, thus fostering continued development.

Here Diem-Wille illustrates another key principle in child analysis: that effective work with parents, as part of a therapeutic alliance, may not only safeguard the analysi