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A. Lemma and M. Patrick, Routledge, 2010, 240 pp., £20.69 (paperback)
This volume appears as an accomplished addition to the project embraced by Alessandra Lemma, Matthew Patrick and the BPC itself to extend and realize the potential of psychoanalytic applications in the public sphere. Looking outwards, away from the couch, the ambition is clearly not only to publicize the relevant work being done in public institutions, but to challenge the perception of critics of the analytic modality as lacking both evidence base and relevance.
Addressing practitioners looking inward, there is also an aim to provide evidence of the relevance and need to address demands for accountability and the need to innovate and engage with the whole range of psychosocial, health, policy and political concerns which form the wider context within which clinical practice is claimed to be held to account in the marketized NHS. The volume takes its place among the remarkable achievements in securing a future for psychodynamic work in the NHS through a growing body of work including the core competencies allowing entry to the IAPT service and the recognition of psychodynamic relevance in depression by Alessandra Lemma and her colleagues.
The work presented is confident applied psychoanalytic understanding and practice, often informed and focused by complementary observation and research, including manualized treatments (Mothers and Babies Service). Applied clinical work covers suicide prevention, mothers and babies in prison, working with parents and under fives, traumatized adolescents, young black people, panic disorder, medically symptomatic patients, psychiatry and forensic work. This developmental and cultural range and depth is further enhanced by a chapter from John Alderdice showing how psychoanalytic insight can help to find a way to think and facilitate movement in situations of profound external and political complexity and conflict. Andrew Cooper and Julian Lousada take on the task of f