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The very first impression of this book is the abundance of the letter ‘M’ on its cover; together with the Margaret S. Mahler Symposium logo depicting a woman cradling a baby, it brings almost immediate association with mothering and the strangely satisfying rhythm of its title brought to mind the soothing pace of nursery rhymes. Put it together with the book's provenance and it all certainly makes one curious. The ten-chapter volume consists mostly of papers presented at the 32nd Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development in Philadelphia in 2001. It is a collaboration of nine, mainly Philadelphia-based, analysts led by Professor Salman Akhtar, a distinguished training and supervising analyst and a prolific writer/author in his own right who edited it. The book is touchingly dedicated ‘To the memory of Margaret S. Mahler. Teacher, friend, source of inspiration’. It is arranged in the form of a dialogue; four original papers, each followed by a response from the fellow analyst; the book begins with an opening chapter and ends with an overview.
The opening chapter, written by Henri Parens, attempts to give the reader a very brief synopsis of analytical thinking about mourning on three pages. Klein is dealt with in one sentence which, in a book that uses one of Klein's fundamental ideas in its title, is perhaps a little surprising. He then takes us through the four main papers, including one of his own. I found myself wondering about the chapter's usefulness; it did not seem to contain anything fresh to those familiar with the subject, while those relatively new to it will find it very sketchy to say the least. Somehow the feeling is that Parens says everything that he attempts to say in the name of his introductory chapter alone, ‘We all mourn; C'est condition humane’.
Helen Myers in her wonderfully titled chapter ‘Does Mourning Become Electra?’ moves with ease from Freud to Bowlby to arrive at the first of her questions about the loss of the mother. Is the