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Much like reading Bion himself, Grotstein's new volume may be most usefully experienced as a meditation on the psychoanalytic process. As such, he invites us to inhabit a porous realm in which all things are possible. This, to my mind, is the realm of nonverbal communication—the level of engagement in which our attunement with another offers profound and multi-faceted information. Although this information may not be easily digestible, we do absorb it and over time discover that we have been learning a great deal without necessarily being able to articulate this knowledge in rational, verbal language.
Grotstein, like Bion, is not easy to read. Part of this difficulty lies in the attempt to articulate nonverbal experience in verbal language, which entails recurrent confrontations with unresolved paradox. In following the progression of Bion's writings very closely, Grotstein invites us to share his obvious love for and appreciation of the wealth to be mined therein. To make this journey, however, we must be able to tolerate our feelings of confusion and resistance sufficiently that we might join in a search for psychoanalytic “truths” that cannot be imparted by another but only learned through our