The Baby and the Bathwater

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.