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Certainly, Winnicott has taken Spelman a long way. Her scholarship in advancing her thesis is impressive, and for the psychoanalytically ori-ented therapist in search of widening clinical horizons, her brief merits respectful attention. The student of infant development will, however, gain more from her baby observation report in the relatively brief chapter 6 than from the day-to-day didacticism of earlier chapters.

Overall, Winnicott’s Babies and Winnicott’s Patients provides the reader with a serious, if effusive formulation of Winnicott’s thought and some of its clinical applications—a primer, if you will, to the reading and crit-ical appraisal of his actual work as laid out in its useful bibliography.

AARON H. ESMAN (NEW YORK)

EXPERIENCING ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS. By Isca Salzberger-Wit-tenberg. London: Karnac, 2013. 195 pp.

This book presents a challenge to the reviewer: it is at once a memoir, a survey of phases in human development, an account of the clinical practice of a gifted psychotherapist who has served in a number of ways during a professional lifetime at the Tavistock Clinic, and a guide to others who seek to learn from her experience. As a memoir, it is a grip-ping account of a child in a German-Jewish family, their escape from Nazi terror, her mixed welcome in England, her supportive education in a Quaker school and at Birmingham University, and her “need to understand more about human nature,” which ultimately “led me to psychoanalysis and to becoming an analytic psychotherapist hoping to bridge the gap between the broad-minded spiritual-religious orientation gained in childhood and psychoanalytic insights acquired in adulthood” (p. 11).

Isca (I will use her given name, as others do, because of the com-plexity of her surname) organizes her text around the human experi-ence of transitions encountered in the process of growing up—“Endings and Beginnings.” Following the views of Klein and strongly influenced by Bion, she begins with speculations about intrauterine experience and the “catastrophic anxiety (terror) at being separated from the mother’s body” (p. 17). To Meltzer’s description of the infant’s “aesthetic experi-

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ence” in its contact with the mother’s body, Isca adds a “spiritual con-nectedness which enables him to sense her love, her faith in life’s good-ness” (p. 29).

In successive chapters, she addresses the early development of object relations and the process of weaning, which, in conformity with Kleinian precepts, she sees as potentially highly traumatic and ridden with infan-tile fantasies “of mother keeping the breast to feed herself and/or giving it to father or a baby/babies inside her” (p. 35). Clinical examples lend support to Klein’s view that “the way the early loss at being weaned is managed sets the pattern for how later losses in life will be dealt with” (p. 41). Little is said about the role of innate temperament in shaping such outcomes. A subsequent chapter sensitively outlines the transition from infant to young child, “from which the child emerges with a greater awareness of his own identity, his place within the family, of himself as one amongst a multitude of other people” (p. 54).

As the child progresses through nursery school, elementary and sec-ondary education, emphasis continues on the problems aroused by tran-sitions, each potentially rampant with anxieties—even school holidays. Isca delineates ways and means by which these fears and feelings of loss and separation can be dealt with, specifically within the framework of the British educational system. Much the same is offered about “Tertiary Education and the Beginnings of Work,” where she touches on the very actual problems of graduates with degrees in the humanities in finding appropriate work and a professional identity in the current economy, British as well as American.

So the book goes, through the stages of adult life up to and in-cluding bereavement, retirement, growing old, and facing death, each chapter marked with brief clinical illustrations that show Isca’s sensitivity and empathic responsiveness. If she fails to credit Erikson’s work on the stages of life, she conceives her own calendar out of her own life experi-ence, as well as that of the patients she has seen at the Tavistock and, now retired, in her own practice.

Altogether, this book would seem to be aimed at both a lay audience and that of students in the mental health fields seeking to learn the skills of a master psychotherapist. Like many writers in the Kleinian tradition, the author refers exclusively to the work of British colleagues; the expe-

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rienced psychoanalyst will miss reference to American and Continental contributors, particularly those with different views about early develop-ment. Still, the writing is engaging and skillful in integrating personal life experience with theory and clinical activity. It is a good read.

AARON H. ESMAN (NEW YORK)

INTRODUCTION TO CHILD, ADOLESCENT, AND ADULT DEVEL-OPMENT: A PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE FOR STUDENTS AND PROFESSIONALS. By Ivan Sherick. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. 183 pp.

The task of describing psychoanalytic thinking to the broader profes-sional and general audience is a crucial one, and never more so than in this day and age when psychoanalytic ideas have been increasingly devalued in the academic- and healthcare-financing spheres. One of the most central of psychoanalytic ideas is that human experience is made meaningful by its developmental context. Ivan Sherick’s book, Introduc-tion to Child, Adolescent, and Adult Development: A Psychoanalytic Perspective for Students and Professionals, brings this core perspective to bear on the development of the mind and psychological experience across the life span. In straightforward, everyday language, he describes both the typ-ical psychosocial experiences and the related psychoanalytic theory for each familiar epoch of human experience from birth to old age. To the degree that he succeeds, Sherick is indeed a good ambassador for psy-choanalytic thinking to a broader educated audience seeking accessible entree into this complex body of understanding.

Sherick is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who has been teaching, supervising, and practicing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for over forty years. He trained in child and adolescent psychoanalysis with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Clinic in London, and did his adult training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society. He has a number of prior publica-tions in top-tier psychoanalytic journals on such varying topics of child development as normal envy and emerging sexual identity, the use of ego-strengthening therapy with children who have primary ego deficien-cies, and adoption and disturbed narcissism.