This is a beautifully written book with a good balance of theoretical and clinical sections. The clinical material is detailed and thought provoking and gives the reader a very good insight into the way in which Mitrani works. The author stresses in the Introduction that the book ‘is not intended as a guide to analytic practice, it is solely intended as an example of how one analyst works’. This she does extremely well. The book is very moving and I enjoyed reading it. However, it raised more questions for me than it answered. In this sense it is a book to be read and debated.

The book is underpinned by the theories of Tustin, Bick, Meltzer, and others who deal with autistic, and early pre-symbolic states, with the concept of adhesive identification as the central defence of these states. The author gives a detailed history of adhesive identification and of other similar terms