This cannot be an ordinary book review because it is a response to an extra-ordinary book.  It will therefore not be an account of content (for even this is beyond my capacities,) but simply a description of my encounter with an original work and a thinker of original thoughts. 

When I first read the book I was flooded with hope – not an everyday experience!  It was on reflection, a complex wave of emotions, that comes when something vital has been preconsciously known, is made more fully known and described by another.  A true "home" has been found: a proper mating has resulted in a realisation.

At every third word it was imperative to stop and think: associations, memories, half ideas, relationships of past, present and future, internal and external, all crowding into the mind, expanding and stretching almost beyond endurance.  Equally imperative was the internal demand to go faster, to know, to discover, to be taken over by the beauty of the "music" of his ideas.  Images of the "Dawn Treader" arose, with Reepicheep's cry of "Further in and further up" as he set off for his final journey alone in a coracle amidst the overpowering scent and proliferation of lilies.

Eric Rhode invites us to find our own journey in our own coracle with open eyes: like him to "sail off to map this mysterious internal world……as the fearful narrator of a journey on the edge and beyond the horizon" (Nachmani). He courageously and imaginatively describes the process of his own path through the lily ponds, and through the barrier between the Known/Unknown.  The maps that exist for him are those of Klein and Bion and Meltzer, but Rhode goes beyond these in trying to discover and describe the dangerous areas of intuition and hallucination, and to throw a form of light upon their meaning.

During the third reading I found that my thinking and emotional response to patients was beginning to change: qualities of attention and receptivity had altered in me.

.....An often silent adolescent eventually tells me he does not speak because he is "comfortable".  He is drifting, he says, but he is not sure where.  He seems to be in a basket but cannot see over the edge.  There is a rocking motion - he rocks his body.  Sessions later he tells me of a dream of Ancient Britons going to sea in coracles.  We discover his basket/coracle is on the Atlantic ocean. 

He is alone and has no compass.  He is lost.  He has defended himself against terror by not looking over the edge.  (He has a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome and can only look side ways).

.....To a phobic adolescent who has suffered recent bereavements which have ossified her already evident addiction to near psychological death, I ventured a half thought about a dead twin envious of her capacity for being emotionally alive.  Her response affirmed Rhode's development of Bion's idea.  Why, she exploded, had I taken so long to realise that the child whom her mother had miscarried years before her birth has this powerful, deadening, meaning in her internal world?

......A mute African girl, traumatised in infancy by the sudden absence of her mother and then presence of a mother with no memory, uses felt tip, brush and water to produce a painting of what I thought initially to be sky.  But there was just sky, and I realise that she is asking me to perceive the quality of blueness and its stunning beauty.  Time and again she covers the painting with a blank sheet, pressing ever more firmly. 

The copies are faint and faded remnants of the beauty which in the end disappear altogether, accompanied by wave upon wave of sadness in the counter-transference.  How is it possible to hold onto a fragment of the link to the meaning of the beauty of blueness?  How does one move from two to three dimensionality unless someone notices the mute attempts to be "taken in"?  (I am reminded of Kandinsky's picture "Sky Blue", where it is the quality of blueness which is the striking feature: whilst the amoeba-like creatures, however colourful, seem simply to be a sign that the surface of the painting is not flat.  These creatures float within the thin membrane - an attempt to indicate three dimensionality).  There is now a blank void where there was once a beautiful mother who could take in her baby's emotional experience.  The void is the open mouth from where no sound comes.  It is filled with the unheard scream.  As I interpret this, she points to her earlier cut-outs of bats and spiders, then to her mouth.  I feel nothing.  The terror is still too great yet to be felt, but we have made a beginning in a new way.  Rhode develops Bion's idea of Religious Vertex, indicating that from the void something creative can come if we can bear to know it.

..... A very ill adolescent "abandoned" by a seriously ill mother as a toddler, talks of everyday things in his session but as I open the door at the end, the every increasing space around the edges of the door become a void.  He raises his eyes and arms, smiling a silent welcome to the "shapes" and shades that are always there to greet and sustain him.  The Bionic "beam of darkness" that Rhode elaborates with astonishing helpfulness, shows us a way and gives us some words to describe these extra-ordinary experiences so that this patient and others need not feel lost in an unknown non-place, but can cry out with the dwarf in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel": "Found, found, found".

This is a painfully disturbing book.  It is less alarming to read than Psychotic Metaphysics, but it does require that the reader "takes his own reading seriously" as Nachmani describes in the forward to the book.  This foreword is what should be read if you want a discrete and comprehensive overview of the content of the book.  Hopefully many readers will venture further into the work than this.  It is scholarly in the realms of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociological theory, theology, anthropology, and concerning the links between them. 

It is astonishingly and vibrantly alive in the realms of human endeavours to be and to become.

In starting this review I likened Rhode to Reepicheep journeying beyond the edge of Space and Time.  The other image is of Kandinski's "Blue Rider" urging his charger faster and onward between Earth and Heaven, beyond Sanity and Madness, bravely and foolishly going on.  Dare we catch the movement of the wind behind his tails, and in our mind's eye, follow him in our imagination through the stars whilst knowing that we are not one: trusting only our frail link towards Internal Objects?  We owe Eric Rhode a considerable debt for his scholarship, imagination and above all for his courage.  We can both begin to repay that debt, and to become more indebted, by reading his book.

Mr B Truckle

Copyright © 2000 British Psychoanalytical Society & Institute of Psychoanalysis.

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