determined, the product of biology, culture and context, which interact toproduce unique outcomes and meanings for a given individual at a particularpoint in time. There are risks of disadvantage and oppression in discourseswhich deliberately construct polarities.

A second recurrent theme in the text is the need to highlight the existenceof paradox in human behaviour. If you hold the belief that ‘love and hate areimpossible to disentangle’ (p. xiii), then you might be inclined to notice, writeabout and thereby affirm their inevitable co-existence. It is not revolutionaryto note the adaptive function of dishonestly and exploitation in the repertoireof individuals who are surviving in various difficult and unpredictable life cir-cumstances.

The book as a whole uses a considerable number of words to make somerelatively uncomplicated observations. In my view, the dark–light metaphormight best be situated in the realms of entertainment rather than social psy-chological empirical discourse, which rather restricts any recommendationwith regard to potential readership. If the text were to be left unopened in ashady place, I doubt the boundaries between light and dark in human rela-tionships would be any less well differentiated.

Estelle MooreBroadmoor Hospital

Crowthorne, Berks andInstitute of Psychiatry

University of London, UK

The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives

Edited by J. Reid Meloy. Academic Press Limited, Sidcup, Kent DA14 5HP.May 1998, 384pp. Hardback £39.95 ISBN 0-12-490560-9.

Stalking emerged as a major social issue in the last 10 years. Stalking is a newway of labelling and constructing intrusive and harassing behaviours which pro-duce fear and distress in the target of the unwanted attentions. Stalking rapidlyprogressed from a media neologism, to a widely recognised social problem, to aspecific form of criminal conduct and finally to both an area for behavioural sci-entists to study and therapists to enthuse over. Now stalking receives its firstcomprehensive scholarly consideration with this collection of papers edited by J.Reid Meloy. Reid Meloy has been a leading figure in the development ofresearch and theoretical consideration of the emergent topic of stalking and inthis book he brings together contributions from most of the major NorthAmerican figures in the field. The result is a compilation which, because itreflects the current state of knowledge in stalking studies, warts and all, is essen-tial reading for anyone seriously interested in this fascinating phenomena.

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Like most edited collections there are distinct fluctuations from paper topaper of style, of approach and of quality. This variability is inevitably morethan usually marked given that these are often ground breaking contributionswhich have no established literature, let alone approaches, on which to fallback. At worst this results in old wine in new bottles in which well establishedand familiar tales are retold with the word stalking interposed at intervals. Atbest we are offered a fascinating glimpse of work in progress with novelresearch and new ways of attempting to understand stalking and its impact onvictims.

Reid Meloy’s essay on the psychology of stalking provides an excellentintroduction though personally I would have happily foregone the preliminaryhomily on Princess Diana. Reid Meloy regards stalking primarily as an expres-sion of anger or hostility towards the victim. He favours a psychodynamic for-mulation of what he prefers to call obsessional following. A contribution fromGlen Skoler expands on Meloy’s views of the psychodynamics of violentattachments in general and stalking in particular. This essay, which drips liter-acy quotations and allusions, concludes that ‘the modern archetype of stalkingis truly symptomatic of a psychodynamically and psychosexually troubled col-lective unconscious’. Though other contributors appear less influenced by psy-chodynamic models there appears a broad area of agreement that stalkers areoften drawn from those with what Americans call Cluster B diagnoses, espe-cially borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.

The contribution of major mental illness to stalking, particularly the ero-tomanic syndromes, receives extensive coverage in several chapters most par-ticularly in an enlightening one from Lloyd Goldstein. Though only a tinyproportion of stalking in our community is referrable to psychotic preoccupa-tions historically it is within studies of erotomania that the richest clinical lit-erature on persistent following and harassment has been generated. Initialattempts by mental health professionals to conceptualise stalking were overinfluenced by considerations of erotomania but, it must be acknowledged,most clinicians currently still see stalking most frequently in association withthe erotomanic spectrum of disorders. This may change if courts are persuadedthat mental health professionals have any substantial contribution to stoppingor even ameliorating stalking behaviours.

Stalking is a problem because of its impact on those exposed to suchbehaviours. This book provides appropriate coverage of the impact on victims,not only in the chapter specifically on victims by Doris M Hall, but in severalother chapters which examine specific types of victims such as clinicians andthose caught up in violent domestic relationships. It was a courageous, butentirely proper, editorial decision to include a chapter on false victimisationsyndromes in stalking. This chapter provides a possible framework for think-ing about false claims of having been stalked but is, not surprisingly, somewhatshort on concrete clinical examples particularly as it was written prior to thefirst published study of the topic (Pathé et al 1999).

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This is the first scholarly book on stalking and it sets a substantial bench-mark for subsequent attempts to traverse the area. The literature on stalking isgrowing exponentially. Stalking has not been a nine day wonder, but hasestablished itself as a social, legal and now psychological category which willcontinue to attract interest. At least I hope so as one of the authors of a forth-coming book on the subject (Mullen et al., 2000).

Paul Mullen Forensicare (Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health)

Monash University, Fairfield, Australia

References

Pathé, M., Mullen, P.E. and Purcell, R. (1999) Stalking: false claims of victimisation. BritishJournal of Psychiatry, 174: 170–173.

Mullen, P.E., Pathé M. and Purcell, R. (2000) Stalkers and Their Victims. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Stalkers and their Victims

By Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé and Rosemary Purcell. CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000, 310pp, Paperback £24.95. ISBN 0-521-66950-2.

The combination of admirable scientific rigour with absorbing page-turninginterest in their scholarly account of Stalkers and their Victims confirms thethree authors as international leaders in their field. Had the enthusiasm theyhave for their subject not been so highly infectious one might suspect thatthey were showing off. The subject matter is fascinating, topical and of greatconcern to professionals and to society in general (as recent media interestdemonstrates). This must be a good start for any contemporary book on stalk-ing. However, this example stands way ahead of the field: the text is elegantlywritten and thoughtfully constructed. I suspect that anyone who will read itwill immediately want to read it all over again.

The authors’ account of stalking arises from their own clinical and researchexperience gained in their outpatient forensic clinic in Melbourne, which hasattracted hundreds of victims and stalkers from the state of Victoria. As aresult they have been able to pepper their text with case examples, which fas-cinate as well as inform. There is something in it to please everybody. Theyhave traced the origins of this phenomenon in literature through to the recentemergence of stalking as a social, cultural, legal, criminological and psycholog-ical issue. They reviewed how stalking as a behaviour can be defined, classi-fied and give an account of the current knowledge of the epidemiology ofstalking. The experiences of victims, which essentially provided the initial

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