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 book presents a challenge to the reviewer: it is at once a memoir, a survey of phases in human development, an account of the clinical practice of a gifted psychotherapist who has served in a number of ways during a professional lifetime at the Tavistock Clinic, and a guide to others who seek to learn from her experience. As a memoir, it is a gripping account of a child in a German-Jewish family, their escape from Nazi terror, her mixed welcome in England, her supportive education in a Quaker school and at Birmingham University, and her “need to understand more about human nature,” which ultimately “led me to psychoanalysis and to becoming an analytic psychotherapist hoping to bridge the gap between the broad-minded spiritual-religious orientation gained in childhood and psychoanalytic insights acquired in adulthood” (p. 11).
Isca (I will use her given name, as others do, because of the complexity of her surname) organizes her text around the human experience of transitions encountered in the process of growing up—“Endings and Beginnings.” Following the views of Klein and strongly influenced by Bion, she begins with speculations about intrauterine experience and the “catastrophic anxiety (terror) at being separated from the mother's body” (p. 17). To Meltzer's description of the infant's “aesthetic experience”