Social workers and others concerned with social welfare seem to be increasingly aware that their view of the client's situation may not coincide with the client's own view. There is also increasing acknowledgement that this discrepancy is not always a result of professional values and expertise. At times it is merely the result of a different set of personal values. If we are to really respect the client's right to self-determination we must constantly be aware of his values and our own.

Reading this latest work of Bowlby's gives us a sense of completing an inevitable circle. Here he deals fully with what has always really been his core concern—the nature of the child's tie to his mother. We associate his work, however, mainly with the rupture of that tie. His fruitful work on separation of mother and child, with its only partly intended results in the care of sick and separated children, has materially affected the work of other researchers and practitioners. In the interim between the publication of his famous monograph, “Maternal Care and Mental Health” and this new book, we have had from him and many others increasingly refined analyses of the effects of maternal deprivation on children of various ages and in various situations. In fact the literature was becoming too large and repetitive for the ordinary practitioner.

Casework, and to a lesser extent groupwork, has long acknowledged a debt to psychoanalysis. As Hamilton1 has remarked, those who lived through the era which saw casework incorporate the concepts of Freudian dynamic psychology “lived through a mind and life-shaking revolution”. We in a later generation are faced with the task of incorporating a rapidly expanding frontier of knowledge in the social sciences, which is proving to be perhaps just as challenging, albeit in another way. This, however, in no way disturbs the fundamental contribution of those concepts and insights of psychoanalysis which have stood the test of time.

By the time this appears in print, a most ambitious venture into the field of social action will have been undertaken by the Victorian Branch of Social Workers' Association, in collaboration with the Victorian Council of Social Service.

An earlier study of migrants discharged from Callan Park Hospital seemed to confirm the strong impression that Yugoslav migrants have an unusually high rate of admission to that hospital. This, however, raised the further question as to the relationship between the high admission rate and the number of Yugoslav migrants actually living in the hospital's catchment area.