In this paper, the author revisits the problem of ‘premature ego development’ first introduced by Melanie Klein in 1930. She also highlights several developments in post‐Kleinian thinking since the publication of that paper, which can be seen as offshoots of or complements to Klein's work. The author proposes a link between this category of precocious development and the absence of the experience of what Bion termed the ‘containing object.’ She puts forward several technical considerations relevant to analytic work with patients who suffer as a result of early developmental failures and presents various clinical vignettes in order to demonstrate the ways in which these considerations take shape in the analytic setting.

The authors explore the interpersonal aspects of the early development of an experience of external reality and the roots of this experience in primary intersubjectivity. They suggest some implications that this has for psychoanalytic work with the patient's experience of external reality. They argue that the external world is not an independently existing 'given', for the infant to discover, as is sometimes implicitly assumed. Infants acquire knowledge about the world not just through their own explorations of it but by using other minds as teachers. The experience of external reality is invariably shaped through subjectivities. The authors argue that at first the infant assumes that his knowledge is knowledge held by all, that what he knows is known by others and that what is known by others is accessible to him. Only slowly does the uniqueness of his own perspective differentiate so that a sense of mental self can develop. In clinical work we frequently observe the undoing of this process of differentiation, and understanding the underlying mechanisms can be helpful in managing the transference and countertransference consequences when the process has been derailed.

AbstractBook reviewed in this article:La adopción: Un tema de nuestro tiempo [Adoption: A contemporary topic] edited by Milagros Cid and Silvia Pérez‐GaldósLa peau [The skin] Edited by Gérard SzwecEntrevista e indicadores en psicoterapia y psicoanalisis [Interview and indicators in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis] by Antonio Pérez SánchezThe art of interpretation: Deconstruction and new beginning in the psychoanalytic process by Wolfgang Loch, edited by Peter WegnerPsychoanalytic collisions by Joyce Anne SlochowerPsychodynamic diagnostic manual by the PDM Task Force Vulnerabilità alla psicosi [Susceptibility to psychosis] by Franco De MasiSaber y no saber: Curiosidad sexual infantil [To know and not to know: the sexual curiosity of children] by Mariela Michelena

Austen's extraordinary realism in depicting the dynamic internal processes which follow on the heroine's loss in Persuasion becomes clear in the light of a psychoanalytic understanding of mourning. Persuasion dramatizes the effects of a mother's death in adolescence as these come into play at the time of the heroine's separation from her fiancée and her later mourning. The thesis of this paper is that, despite falling in love with the brilliant hero, an unfinished mourning and an unconscious identification with her dead mother helped to persuade the heroine Anne Elliot to break her engagement, to create a ‘final parting’ as her mother had done to her in dying. The heroine's internal monologues show that she has projected some of the darker feelings of mourning, her anger and resentment, on to the hero and that she reopens a complex mourning process, partly through the displacement of affect, showing how traumatic effects of loss can be worked through in deferred action, effecting positive psychic change.