996 Book Reviews

of community psychology are adeptly presented and provide real insight into the modern day challenges facing service users and providers.

Far from being a unitary concept, child and adolescent therapy spans a wide theoretical and clinical spectrum which the editors bravely set out to condense into one volume. This they do with varying success and this book is surely a must for trainee mental health practitioners, with some useful and provocative pointers for more experienced professionals. The editors express the hope that this text "reflects the excitement and confusions that currently impact on therapy services" and is a timely reminder that we cannot bury our professional heads in the sand, that clients and purchasers now have a more proactive role to play in the uptake of services offered, and that the systems involved in such services must be shown to be effective in meeting the needs of their clients in a multitude of settings.

MICHELLE NEW

JON KABAT-ZINN: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hyperion, New York (1994). xxi + 277 pp. $19.95

Kabat-Zinn's writings are the fruits of his clinical experience gathered in his practice at the University of Massachussetts Medical Center. The scientific work of the author has been published in authoritative journals (e.g. Kabat-Zinn, Massion and KristeUer, 1992). The present book is more of a day to day guide, a successor of the earlier bestseller "Full Catastrophe Living". It is divided in three parts and 70 small chapters. Each one of them can be read at random, while most chapters contain a suggestion for an action oriented assignment, a poem or a nice citation to contemplate upon.

The author 's endeavours require admiration in several respects. He not only conducts excellent research, he also challenges academic conformism by going beyond its traditional confines. Kabat-Zinn has the guts just to pioneer in the mental health field without bothering to become marginalized in the psychological/psychiatric community. The reason may be that his basic discipline is that o f a molecular biologist, a natural scientist who is ardently involved in meditation since his early twenties. The day to day manual is performance based, but does not necessarily breathe a coguitive-behavioural orientation, which seems to be largely unknown to the author, perhaps because of his background.

However, this Buddhist inspired book imbibes a cognitive-behavioural atmosphere, without explicitly referring to the latter. Indeed, many of the Buddhist teachings have a striking resemblance with a cognitive-behavioural position, and I even dare to state that many of the prescientific Buddhist and cognitive-behavioural views are compatible. For instance the notion that one chooses one's own emotional destinies (see de Silva, 1990). The beautiful title o f the book indicates the essence of any meditation, id est to be in the 'herenow' instead of unproductive dwelling in the past (causing depression) or in the future (causing fear). But why bother about awareness of the present moment, if not in agony?

The ultimate rationale for training meditation is to prepare for the utmost moment in life and the only absolute certainty a human being posesses: death. To die peacefully is a legitimate wish for most of us. And if one lives in the unfortunate condition of being ill or stressed, as many of Kabat-Zinn's clients, the experience of physical decay is not exceptional. Except of learning therapy, which is obliged for some psychotherapists in training, a therapist can choose to care for his/her own mental health by meditating. Mindfulness meditation is a practice to celebrate life (memento vivere) as well as to celebrate death (memento mori). To live meditatively is to prepare oneself for the last breath.

To close, the term mindfulness strikes me as a misnomer, if we consider meditation as a process of watching or witnessing. In my opinion 'mindemptiness' would be a more suitable term, because it is the mind--where the machinery of thinking resides--that the meditator wants to eliminate. Kabat-Zinn seems to sense this as he also applies terms like 'heartfulness' and 'wakefulness'. But 'what 's in the name' after all? The message is to be there wherever you go, and this book is a fine medium for clients and therapists, non-doing doers who like to take the effortless effort to practice.

MAURITS KWEE

R E F E R E N C E S

de Silva, P. (1990). Buddhist psychology: A review oftbeory and practice. Current Psychology: Research Reviews, 9, 236-254. Kabat-Zinn, J., Massion, A. O. and Kristeller, J. (1992). Effectiveness of a meditation-based stress reduction program in

the treatment of anxiety disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 936-943.

JEAN KH A L FA (Ed.): What Is Intelligence? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1994). 207 pp. £19.95

What is intelligence? The obvious answer is of course that it is a scientific concept, defined empirically, and having considerable practical usefulness. This, however, is not what this book is about. Indeed, it is not clear what the book is all about--certainly none of its authors is identified with the classical body of knowledge that constitutes the essence of our textbooks. Each views what he considers 'intelligence' from a very odd and unusual point of view; it is this that makes the book both interesting and infuriating. It is as if you bought a book on "What is gravitation?", only to find chapters by an upholsterer concerned with the way cushions react to different-shaped bottoms, or a balloon manufacturer who was concerned with the art of releasing thousands of balloons simultaneously at a concert. There is hardly any reference to established facts. Penrose can write a lengthy chapter on 'mathematical intelligence' without ever referring to the Lubinski & Benbow studies of mathematical talent, or Weiss's work on the genetic determinants of mathematical ability. For anyone interested in mathematics, this is a fascinating chapter, but without any real relevance to the alleged topic! Like much else in the book, it is philosophical and introspective, not empirical or psychological.

There is a curious arrogance about the various chapters; they seem to say: "Psychological experiments and arguments are so unimportant. What I think, regardless of the facts, is much more interesting!" Some of it is downright absurd. Gregory precedes a gratuitous attack on IQ tesiing with: "As Sir Peter Medawar and others have pointed out, the IQ notions of intelligence as a single dimension along which to judge children and adults, is among the most personally and socially