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by Mary Ayers (Brunner-Routledge, Hove & New York, 2003). 224 pp. £78.95 (hardback), £19.99 (paperback).
In this book Mary Ayers presents us with some valuable insights into the roots of shame from the perspective of the infant's experience of the mother. As a piece of personal analytic research it is a work of considerable scholarship. As a book for a readership attracted by the title Mother–Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis, it is frustratingly sparing on clinical illustrations and did not, for me, establish a clear sense of the author's clinical practice and experiences. Ayers develops a theoretical thesis about the ‘Terrible Mother’ and the pervasively destructive impact of this Mother's cold, projective and unreflecting eye contact with her infant. This thesis is underpinned by a very extensive and rich literature search drawing upon a wide range of cultural, artistic and literary sources. Ayers defines the essential features of the psychic catastrophe that she is proposing in Chapter 3 as ‘a form of psychotic anxiety’ … (resulting) … ‘from a mother's unreflecting eyes; in other words, shame at its core’. The sentence which follows this identifies a principal concern of her thesis but also highlights a difficulty with it to some extent: ‘Shame is the annihilating affect that lies at the heart of a psychic element related to survival hidden in an otherwise sane personality’ (p. 74). In this sense Ayers is proposing a discrete and latent but nevertheless fundamental fracture in the psyche, originating at a very early or primitive stage of development. Although an arresting thought in terms of an individual psychopathology, she does not go on to provide compelling clinical evidence to illustrate her view of the problem in terms of the complexity of subsequent developmental processes of the i