Psychodynamic approaches to the experience of dementia: perspectives from observation, theory and practice: edited by S. Evans, J. Garner & R. Darnley-Smith, London, Routledge, 2020, 268 pp., £120 (hardback), ISBN 978-0415786645; £28.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0415786652; £23.34 (e-book), ISBN 978-1315160221

It is hard to read the thoughtful and varied chapters of Psychodynamic Approaches to the Experience of Dementia, edited by Sandra Evans, Jane Garner and Rachel Darnley-Smith, without coming away with the sense of how deeply human beings touch one another throughout the life course. This book is full of a wealth of collective professional knowledge and know-how, from an understanding of policy provision, neuroscience and psychiatry to attachment and psychodynamic theory. However, underpinning all of this crucial and informative detail is the relational fabric that brings and holds people together, and allows a person with dementia to share their stories, anxieties and hopes safely with another: another whose presence is both alive and containing in equal measure. This presence, despite the clear depth of knowledge among the book’s editors and writers, is paradoxically containing because of the practitioner’s capacity to be able to sit with the uncertainty and not-knowing involved in the trajectory of unbecoming; those gradual and incremental movements towards the end of a person’s life. Each essay contains movingly illustrated vignettes that demonstrate how such relationships between the professional and the cared-for person often leave a lasting effect, prompting further thought and learning.

Any professional who has worked in dementia or end-of-life care will be reminded, as they read these pages, of individuals who have touched them intimately, so much so perhaps that something has shifted in their own inner world; a process which is sometimes only fully understood in the absence which follows a death. I think of the woman whose wild strands of hair falling into her eyes acted as a painful signal that her own mind and life were increasingly out of her control, and the way that health-care assistants would gently pull back the errant wisps in a bid to contain the anxiety from spilling out further; I think of her lying in her bed, oxygen mask to her face and inviting