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Michael Robbins, a Boston-based psychoanalyst, has published extensively on theoretical issues ranging from creativity and linguistics to the nature and treatment of borderline and psychotic disorders. The present volume embraces all these issues in a comprehensive treatise on the role of what he calls the “primordial mind” as it manifests itself in persons,
sick and well, in Western and non-Western cultures. As he defines it, “Primordial mental activity (PMA) is a normal way that mind works that is qualitatively different from thought. … PMA is fully functional at birth and is the ‘normal’ form of expression and learning in infancy. … PMA does not transform into thought. Rather, under ordinary circumstances thought comes to have regulatory control over PMA …” (pp. 208-209). PMA is central in “spiritual” and “creative” mentation and has a dominant role in “non-Western” cultures, while “thought,” which develops later, is characteristic of Western societies.
Robbins is explicit and extensive (at times repetitively) in tracing the development of his concepts from a wide scope of influences, particularly psychoanalytic ones ranging from Freud, Klein, and Mahler to Kernberg, Bion, Matte Blanco, Jung (!), and, more recently, Daniel Stern. In his thoughtful chapter comparing and contrasting the theories of Freud and Klein he attributes to both the view of infancy and childhood as a “psychotic state.” This would, I think, more accurately apply to Klein than to Freud. He blames Freud for “trying to create neuroscientific terminology” (p. 31) like id and ego, unaware, apparently, that it was Strachey who with that aim in view coined these terms in his translation of Freud's “Es” and “Ich” (properly, as in Makari's Revolution in Mind [2008], “it” and “I”).
More immediately, he cites at length his indebtedness for his cross-cultural understanding to a Maori shaman of his acquaintance who serves as a therapist in an unnamed mental health clinic and who has educated him in the ro