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“The day that one qualifies as an analyst,” Nina Coltart (1992) said, “the analyst that one is going to be is a mystery” (p. 2). The Baby and the Bathwater is the third collection of her papers to be published in this country. It is a group of ten essays, written, with one exception, since she began a semi-retirement four years ago, and in it she contemplates the span of her career, and how she became the analyst she was going to be.
Coltart read Modern Languages at Oxford before training as a physician in the early 1950s. She studied psychoanalysis in the English “independent” or “middle” tradition, which remained deeply influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacy of “Bloomsbury” and which refused to take an either/or position in the bitter controversy that arose between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in the early 30s. And she has clearly maintained her autonomy since then. This book is an individualistic portrayal of the development of a highly individualistic thinker and spirit. Coltart tells us casually in the preface that it brackets the first and last of her writing life. I'm not sure if this is as ominous as it