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31st July 1969.
Dear Dr. Stierlin,
I am grateful to you for sending me a copy of Conflict and Reconciliation. I can see that you have tried to give a comprehensive view of the basis for schizophrenia in its human relations aspect. As you know, I have a great interest in this field.
I am taking the opportunity to send you a reprint of something which quite likely you have already met (La Schizophréne Infantile en Termes d'Echec d'Adaptation).
I have not read your book through, as I hope I shall do. At this moment what I would like to do is to say that in the quotation you kindly make, page 87, from my writings, you use the words good experience. It is important to me that in my writings I always say good-enough rather than good. I think that the words good-enough help to steer the reader away from sentimentality and idealisation. Incidentally, you list me in the index as being quoted on page 78, which is wrong by one line because somehow or other my name has got pushed over, perhaps by the printer, to page 79; A very small detail indeed. I am grateful to you for referring in this way to my writings.
Should you be going into another edition, you could put under my name in the selected bibliography the names of the books instead of the papers, which people often find it difficult to get in touch with.
Incidentally, Mother and Child: A Primer of First Relationships has been withdrawn, and the English version is now available in U.S.A., a Penguin (Pelican A668).
The other three references could be better given as:
Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. Tavistock Publications, London, 1958.
The Family and Individual Development. Tavistock Publications, London, 1965.