ABSTRACT
It is hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the first edition of The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition. When, in 1983, four years after qualifying as a psychoanalyst, the author first suggested the book to a senior member of the Publications Committee of the British Psychoanalytical Society, she was met with a wry smile as he said, 'Quite a task, to put together a book about a group that refuses to be a group'. The attention centred on the influence of the early environment in the development of the individual was a specific result of the theory of object relations: it was argued that an individual was formed, from the very beginning, following the vicissitudes of the relationships with objects. The Society has always been very welcoming to overseas students and analysts.
