Jungian Child Psychotherapy: Individuation in Childhood. Edited by Mara Sidoli and Miranda Davies.  Library of Analytical Psychology. £14.95 paperback.

This is a thoroughly useful and enjoyable book, which could be read with profit by most analytical therapists, whether they work with children or adults, and whether or not they are Jungians.

It consists of a collection of fifteen papers, some of which have been previously published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology; and these have in some cases been refined for the purposes of this book. The focus is Michael Fordham's important development of Jungian theory of the self and his fostering of child analysis. There are two papers by him. James Astor's thorough introduction outlines the theory, and the various authors emphasise different aspects in discussing the child cases they present. This makes for a rich experience for the reader. There are frequent drawings from infant-observation seminars, and the book as a whole demonstrates well how fertile the interaction between Jungian and Kleinian ideas has been. Winnicott and Bion, too, frequently inform the writers. I wished that Stern's work could have been referred to, but this book must have been in preparation, and most of the papers written, before The Interpersonal World of the Infant was published.

This collection should be on every Jungian's bookshelf. For other readers it will show not only how much modern Jungians in this country are indebted to object-relations theory, but also what a deep extra dimension they bring to it through Jungian archetypal understanding of unconscious processes.