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Margot Waddell's Inside Lives is clear and direct. It ‘talks to you’ about the
… ordinary ways in which a person may grow up — internally as well as externally.
It is focused on the development, loss and retrieval of a capacity for thinking, in Bion's sense, and how an individual's ‘predominant identificatory modes’ recur at different stages in life, reactivating the earliest defences against psychic pain. It has substantial insightful chapters on states of mind, models of learning, and stages of development from infancy to old age. You can believe the tributes inside the cover of this very readable volume, such as Mike Brearley's comment that this is a book for ‘specialists and non-specialists alike’, for new perceptions and old truths are conveyed again and again in fresh language supported by accessible case-material from psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
The book's thesis is developed consistently throughout, to show how psychoanalysis, following Klein's central theories, leads to the illumination of the individual's internal world; and, following Bion's extension of Klein's theory of projective identification, leads us to view containment as therapeutically central. There is a purposive shift away from Freud's emphasis on ‘the quantitative intensity of biologically driven forces’ to an emphasis on the ‘richness of emotional relationships’ (p. xii). A drawback, to my mind, is the insufficient weight given to the body and the power of instinctive forces in severe disturbance, which would get more mention in a Freudian account, and to cruel and perverse relationships, coming from dead, paralysing and sadistic internal objects, to which more recent Kleinian accounts would give more emphasis. Unshiftable, destructive forces, lodged deeply in the personality, are seen to belong, in the author's view to Klein's ‘more pessimistic notions about human nature’, near the end of her life (in ) (p. 89). Such forces, I concede, may not invariably be common in all ordinar