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If an autobiography is a person's account of their own life, and a biography is someone else's account of that person's life, then it occurs to me that Grotstein's preface to his new book, “Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?”: A Study of Psychic Presences, serves as a comprehensive “auto-review” of his own book. I am now charged with the third-person assessment of whether or not he has achieved these objectives.
The final sentence of Grotstein's preface reads: “In all the chapters I am merely [merely!] presenting differing ways of viewing the ineffable, preternatural, subjective, and ultimately personal essence of ‘I’ in its mystical (more than we thought) relationship to ineffable O.” His self-set task is to explore subjectivity—the nature of “self” experience and “I-ness.” As he states in his preface, this quest has been the concern of philosophers and others long before there were psychoanalysts.
For psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, however, encounters with these issues and problems are the bread and butter of everyday clinical work. But Grotstein fears that we “take these entities so much for granted that we overlook their mystery and wonder.” Readers of this book with preexisting awareness of the mystery and wonder of the complexities of our human minds will find much that is familiar in it, and will enjoy the concentrated and sustained exposure that it offers to these profound questions. Others with less tolerance for imagery and poetry in their consideration of internal worlds will have less patience with Grotstein's approach.
Grotstein himself has been a well known contributor to the psychoanalytic literature for over twenty years, and can be fairly said to be one