Martin Stanton

This is a first person narrative written by an Army officer who's unit was deployed to Somalia in the early 1990's. He was NOT part of the the whole "Black Hawk Down" operation or even near Mogadishu. Instead, his unit operated in a area of less population, small cities and smaller towns. The book actually starts off with his description of coming home from a previous deployment to Kuwait then undergoing training, followed by the preparations for deployment. So it's not for several dozen pages before the author is actually in Somalia. At this point the book gets more on point and we learn how things actually operated as the US Army, plus forces from the other services and indeed other nations supported food distribution and peace keeping. The author is up front about some poor decision making he made as they attempted their tasks. They were somewhat successful at times, but often it was more a case of trying to hold back the tide. His narrative works best when he is describing the actual day to day operations and at times it's fascinating to see how they tried to implement "operations other than war" which I believe is the correct phrase. He is a decent writer who gets to the point and provides the reader enough detail to follow the story without dragging it down with a lot of non-essential tidbits. Still, there's not much meat to the book which is a shame since it's a subject that too often is left to pundits and journalists to discuss. The viewpoint of an actual participant provides some interesting insight. Recommended for the casual military reader.… (mais)

Freud's discovery of the unconscious a century ago, and his proposal of how to work with it, faces substantial critical review in the context of mental health care in the next millenium. This book reviews the clinical contribution of psychoanalysis to the treatment of mental disorder and suggests that the future of psychoanalytic work lies in researching the complexity of the unconscious process, particularly its "out-of-orderness" - that is, its intrusion in the set narratives that supposedly construct the "meaning" of life. The book introduces some fundamental issues posed by clinical work in psychoanalysis for all interested in the current and future treatment of mental disorders.

Martin Stanton is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich, London, Director of the Centre for Psychoanalytic studies at the University of Kent, council member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, and author of Outside the Dream (1983) and Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention (1991).… (mais)