Briefly Noted

SOUL MURDER REVISITED Thoughts about Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory by Leonard Shengold New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, viii + 328 pp., $35.00

Ten years after the publication of his groundbreaking book, Shengold extends his work on soul murder. He writes in a jargon-free style about the relationship between early trauma and later adult functioning and pathology. His reading of literature is extensive. There are chapters on Swinburne and Elizabeth Bishop, others on child abuse and the concentration camp, and Freud's “A Child is Being Beaten.” Replete with literary allusions and quotations, this is psychoanalytic writing at its best and most engaging.

INSIDE PICTURE BOOKS by Ellen Handler Spitz New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, xxii + 230 pp., $25.00

The noted art historian Ellen Handler Spitz has written a thoughtful study of children's picture books with many illustrations. Her work, certainly influenced by her knowledge of psychoanalysis, covers all of the well known children's books: Babar, Little Black Sambo, In the Midnight Kitchen, Goodnight Moon, The Velveteen Rabbit. The themes covered include bedtime, separation, loss and death, curiosity, and identity. For psychoanalysts and their children.

RELATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS The Emergence of a Tradition edited by Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1999, xx + 514 pp., $37.50 paper

This 500-page paperback book, Volume 14 in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, edited by two of its leading exponents, is an excellent introduction to relational psychoanalysis. The 17 papers cover a broad spectrum of points of view. Each paper contains a useful introduction and an afterword by the author of the paper—a new and creative way to present