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Published by Tavistock Publications, 1987; 444 pages; £14.95. In this book Josephine Klein creatively synthesises a good deal of the psychoanalytic and other literature about the way in which very young babies come to make sense of the world and, hence, the way in which we as therapists should approach the baby in us all. As she points out, there are many ways of trying to understand the emotional life of babies, and she has largely described and synthesised what has become known as the object-relations approach. The lineage she traces stems from Bowlby, Balint, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip on the one hand, and Kohut and Kernberg on the other, with a look along the way at some other authors such as Frances Tustin on infant autism and Marguerite Sechehaye's work with Renée, a schizophrenic girl.The book begins with a digest of some of the neuropsychological evidence about the way in which we form concepts and come to join our ideas and experiences together. I enjoyed this section of the book and found it a novel and useful inclusion in a work on psychotherapy. It has always seemed to me a pity that Freud's interest in relating psychoanalytical processes to biological ones has been seen as a kind of physical reductionism and has fallen out of favour. The physiology of emotions is much less understood than that of visual or cognitive processes. Many of the issues raised by the research are relevant to debates within psychotherapy -for example, the evidence that we are not born as whole selves, but are integrated by certain kinds of experiences. An imprtant aspect of the book is that it attempts to explain not so much pathological forms of experience but normal good-enough health, which in many ways is harder to describe. The author takes up Balint's distinction between those people who seek to merge with others and those whose tendency is to want to escape, to be free. She tries -not always successfully -to avoid value judgements about different kinds of personality in order to produce a more complex and differentiated account of health.Much of the recent work on the world of the very young baby has been summarised in Daniel Stern's book on the interpersonal world of the human infant, and it is a pity that it appeared too late to be incorporated into this book. In many ways it fleshes out what is described here and also suggests new ways of understanding just how the infant experiences (m)others (Josephine Klein's ingenious coinage). For example, the infant can be shown to react to and recognise characteristic patterns of movement and being moved, of qualities of sequences of movement as well as to smell, sight and sound. As it is, the author draws on extensive quotations from the psychoanalytic literature, poetry, and (for the visualisers) a series of diagrams based broadly on set theory to illustrate her points.It is always instructive to compare different writers' views of babies, those fascinating Rorschach blots. Whereas the Melanie-Klein baby often seems to be having rather a hard time, beset by demon...

This panel will report the results of a workshop and symposium on the technological literacy of undergraduates convened at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on March 26-27, 2007. The NAE advocates that all Americans become more knowledgeable about technology. Here technological literacy is defined as the broad understanding of all types of technological devices and process not just computers. The opportunity to utilize undergraduate education to further technological literacy of all students must not be neglected. Educators in Computer Science, Engineering and Technology have a responsibility to educate all students not just those intending technical careers. Despite the need for all Americans to become technologically literate, technical literacy is not likely to gain wide acceptance until the scholarly community develops standard courses that are supported by textbooks and other course materials. This National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored workshop sought to identify and define several models of technological literacy courses. In this FIE panel, short presentations about these models will be made by participants in the NAE/NSF symposium. This will be followed by a discussion with the audience. A goal of the discussion will be to seek the input from FIE participants on the technological literacy course models.

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