The baby and the bathwater

'…if this is her final book, she has left the best for last.

Psychoanalysts trained within the Independent Group are often asked by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists abroad which book they should read to get a feel for the way independent psychoanalysts think and work.

In the past one has referred to Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, Rycroft’s Imagination and Reality, Khan’s The Privacy of the Self, and Marion Milner’s opus.

But if we are to have one book, this is it. We may say “Here, you will find it here”. This work is a literary spirit of place – a beautifully rendered conjuring of sensibility – and to my mind it is the single best expression of the English psychoanalyst of independent persuasion we are ever likely to have.’ From the Foreword by Christopher Bollas