Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of Personality (Tavistock Clinic Series) [Paperback]

Inside Lives, however, is a volume that contains a clear, poetic voice of understanding which addresses itself directly to the problems and developmental challenges associated with the life of the mind in the context of the body it inhabits from conception until death. Unwilling to fly off into speculations about human psyche, Dr. Waddell presents a very well-researched, down to Earth discussion of the complex processes that propel human development. She also includes a seamless, well-articulated description of Kleinian and 'post-Kleinian' theory which serves as the point of departure for her thinking and informs the text throughout this wonderful monograph.

Dr. Waddell's focus is on the inside textures and imaginative contents of experience as opposed to behavior, per se. Although she spends some time looking at the 'stages' and milestones of the growing child, she is more concerned with oscillations of mental states that exist simultaneously in differing proportions throughout development than with defining characteristics of the stages as if each were a monolithic entity set in some sort of behavioral stone.

At the crux of Dr. Waddell's conception of personality development is the individual's interpersonal relationships experienced both consciously and perhaps even more importantly, unconsciously, especially with primary care givers in the early phases of growth. To quote from the text as an illustration of this principle,"The baby arrives with his own complex emotional life.He is also already invested with an extensive range of others' feelings, hopes and fears, with anticipated or imputed similarities and dissimilarities, for example, to parents, or siblings, and with expectations of what he will do for the parent, or couple, of what place he will have in the family. The most powerful and incontestable of these influences and determinants are those of the most immediate environment, his world, the world of his mother's body and mind." (p.20)

The central theme of Inside Lives is Wilfred Bion's conception of the mind as a living entity in its own right. Dr. Waddell takes this notion a step further in stating that how we use the mind (or are allowed to use it) determines our capacity for emotional development. Her exegesis of this observation and analysis of its ramifications are illustrated by a wealth of clinical and anecdotal detail which demonstrate exquisitely just what she means when she makes this connection and why it is so important.

Dr. Waddell understands children well! Her knowledge is based not only on the study of relevant texts, or on years of teaching and supervising countless students at The Tavistock Centre in London where she works. And not even on the thousands of hours of inspired clinical work she has done with children and young adults of all ages. It is based primarily on her capacity to see experience ON ITS OWN TERMS and to respect and take seriously that experience as an inviolate creation of a unique individual operating in a set of unique environmental circumstances.

I spent an academic year at The Tavi a decade ago where I worked on the adolescent unit as a clinical associate. During that year I attended a weekly case conference given by Dr. Waddell and I also spent a number of months in supervision of my clinical work with her. It was a great learning experience for me and I have found myself feeling terribly nostalgic while reading this book. Its emphasis on the phenomenolgy of experience is rare in this day and age of behavioral and pharmacological approaches to understanding and treating psychological distress and I admire the way in which she is able to concentrate so effectively on what she calls 'the composition of the self' as the all-important variable in understanding human development as the unfolding of an INSIDE story.