Reviews

‘Thinking Space’ is a gift to clinicians everywhere, a gift perhaps not easy to receive but one we really must receive. Frank Lowe and colleagues offer readers the fruit of a collaboration among clinical colleagues that is enviable and well worth emulating. In chapters of great clinical depth and personal honesty, Thinking Space demonstrates how transformative it can be to work together to construct safe spaces in which clinicians, and clinicians and patients, can begin to think about painful experiences of difference, hatred of the other, and all kinds of unconscious prejudicial blindness – including the blindness inherent to our relation to the theories and institutions we hold most dear. For trainees to senior clinicians, this book is a must-read. –Lynne Layton, PhD, Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; and Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

This publication is timely, arriving after many years of work centred at the Tavistock Clinic. It makes a case for the profession to consider its own model of thinking and not evading the difficult issue of working with diversity. These previously exiled topics in psychoanalysis will create a shift in theory, practice, and supervision, and will be valuable to training courses and guardians of the psychoanalytic cannon. –Lennox K. Thomas, senior member, British Psychotherapy Foundation; child and family psychotherapist; and Honorary Fellow, UKCP

This is a courageous and complex book, one fruit of an initiative by Frank Lowe and others over some years to create a genuine ‘space for thinking’ about ethnicity and racism, class, sexual identity, and other kinds of ‘difference’. At its heart lies exploration of the power of these issues to ambush our thinking and destabilise our relationships. The ‘Thinking Space’ model of work aims to contain destructiveness without sanitising debate or suppressing the emotional injuries that afflict minority groups, and divide us all. These papers are deeply felt and immensely thoughtful. Thinking Space should be read by everyone engaged in community, social, and therapeutic work – and by a wider political audience, who want to root their ambitions for our societies in a proper understanding of how to negotiate ‘sameness and difference’. –Professor Andrew Cooper, Professor of Social Work, Tavistock Clinic and University of East London