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This volume consists of thirteen separate pieces, each of which (with one exception) has been previously published as a journal article or book chapter. It collects a lifetime of work and incorporates, albeit mainly in implicit ways, Spillius’ dual identity as social scientist and psychoanalyst. Though she was an important member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and of the group of analysts often referred to as Contemporary Kleinians, Spillius described herself as fundamentally feeling that she was “just visiting psychoanalysis” (p. 143). While being a psychoanalyst in her own right, she was simultaneously doing a kind of “field work” as a social anthropologist, observing the group of which she was also a member. Indeed, throughout this book, she writes primarily as a psychoanalyst but she is also studying and reflecting on the culture of the Contemporary Kleinians, with an eye toward its place in the larger Kleinian and Freudian cultures. This “just visiting” perspective consistently informs her point of view and it is often explicitly acknowledged by Spillius; it supports an attitude that is unusual in my experience of psychoanalytic writers. Spillius “loved” (p. 2) psychoanalysis and many of her psychoanalytic colleagues, but she also “studied” them and saw where they were defined and limited by their own culture. Reading between the lines it is my inference that, while allowing her greater distance from cultural pressures to conform her thinking, this positioning also occasioned intellectual challenges and theoretical tensions for her as a group member. Belonging to a group defined, to a significant extent, by a theory would have been inherently challenging for an analyst who believed that “… there is no way of showing convincingly that one theory is better than another… ” (p. 149).
The papers in the book are presented in chronological order and span the arc of Spillius’ career from anthropologist (such as Chapter One: “Conjugal Roles and Social Networks”)