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By Donald P. Spence. New York: Norton, 1982, 320 pp., $8.95.
We live by metaphor and the mind is a poetry-making organ. (Lionel Trilling); and a myth-making organ; and a history-making organ. Past infancy we have a deep need for synthesis, continuity, and causality. The worlds within and without our minds may be inherently unknowable. But however relativistic and inadequate our senses and our memory, there is a reality out there and there are absolutes; there was a past and what has happened has happened, however imperfectly we have registered it and however impossible it is for us to communicate it or recapture it completely. Death — the idea of death — forces us to common sense that can violate philosophical consistency. After reading this book, I feel deep sympathy for that champion of common sense, Samuel Johnson, who tried to counter the metaphysical proposition that "the real" exists only in the mind by kicking a stone, saying "Thus I refute Berkeley." But Berkeley cannot really be refuted. Nor can his psychoanalytic descendant, Spence.
There is current controversy in psychoanalysis that is addressed in Spence's complex and contradictory book—controversy that, unfortunately, seems to drift toward extreme positions. Recently we have had the oversimplified "assault on truth" from Jeffrey Masson (Spence would call it an assault on "narrative truth," on the pathogenic power of our fantasies). Masson's book reduces what our minds make of