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“If psychoanalytic intuition does not provide a stamping ground for wild asses, where is a zoo to be found to preserve the species? Conversely, if the environment is tolerant, what is to happen to the ‘great hunters’ who lie unrevealed or reburied?”
In these two volumes, James Grotstein, an author whom Bion would certainly include among the “great hunters” of recent decades, embarks on an enterprise I am tempted to call epoch-making, and brilliantly carries it off.
The first major obstacle is also the question the reader asks himself while picking up these volumes for the first time: How to advance in the Kleinian/Bionian landscape without losing one's bearings? Right from the titles Grotstein promises to identify a “Kleinian/Bionian Mode,” a single perspective, so to speak, capable of bringing under one umbrella what appears to many as a confused, quarrelsome motley of authors who would be at pains to recognize themselves as belonging to a single current. The very first pages dispel the notion that this is a work to be added to those which—very profitably in some cases, such as Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable (Tuckett et al. 2008)—offer a comparative method to navigate among different points of view, or to those which give a historical description of the evolution of the Kleinian or Bionian schools, such as the important work of Riccardo Steiner (2000a; 2000b). In his preface Grotstein makes it clear that, unlike other works dealing with the broader ramification of psychoanalytic technique, his work aims to be “a handbook of specific suggestions of ‘how to …’:… how to approach, how to listen, both actively and passively, how to think about the analytic situation, and how to intervene with the analysand”