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The Baby and the Bathwater

Author(s) : Nina Coltart

Reviews and Endorsements

'Nina Coltart's The Baby and the Bathwater is a clear water flowing gently over rocks. Her observations of a career in psychoanalysis span more than thirty years of writing, showing us how the ends of her professional development were contained in the beginnings, and showing us how this was so in detail through her wonderful prose. From the specifics of clinical histories and experiences through her long and interesting career to the chapters on spirituality and philosophy - both personal and clinical examinations of philosophy - she demonstrates the powers of a penetrating mind. Trained at Oxford, Coltart has moved both within and beyond the constraints of several traditions - medicine, psychoanalysis, Christianity, Buddhism - to give us the rarest of gifts - an independent mind. This is a book for the novice because it will give them inspiration and courage to begin, and a book for the war-weary veteran psychotherapist and psychoanalyst because it is rejuvenating. If you want a fresh wind in your therapeutic sails, read this book!'
- David E. Scharff, M.D.

'…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