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Ordinary people and extraordinary protections

‘s book is a clinically vivid and carefully argued account of a Californian analyst’s exploration of the meaning of some psychoana-r” lytic concepts familiar to British and many European readers but rather little-known in the United States. The framework will be especially well known to those with a background enriched by Infant Observation and clinical work with children. Judith Mitrani found her thinking much changed by her engagement with the ideas of a group of broadly ‘postKleinian’ thinkers, notably Bick, Bion, Winnicott, Tustin and Meltzer. The books title conveys well the insight at the heart of this tradition in psychoanalysis: apparently ordinary experiences can ovenvhelm the psychic capacity of the developing individual and lead to efforts to protect the vulnerable self from collapse which are themselves deeply inimical to emotional growth. One theoretical formulation Mitrani does not cite is the concept of double deprivation (Henry, 1974), which is an elegant application of the insights arising from Bick and Bion’s work to the particular case of the deprived child, whose defensive retreat may make him extra-ordinarily difficult to reach, indeed apparently impermeable. Some of Mitrani’s cases bring sharply to mind work done with deprived children and adolescents. Similar territory was explored by Joseph in papers written during the 1980s (Joseph, 1989), which link these theoretical developments to Klein’s concept of the ‘total situation’ as it is encountered in analytic work.