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This book's intriguing title links psychoanalysis, Homer's epic of heroic adventure, and, oddly, painted guinea pigs. The moment's surprise gets
explained quickly, but the effect is genial, implying fascination, challenge, and pleasure to come—a prospect the book indeed fulfills.
Guinea pigs figure in a nursery school child's question when, after his class's beloved pet “Guinny” died, their teacher, a few days later, brought a new one in, somewhat different in color. Puzzled by Guinny's death and struggling to understand, the little boy asked, “Who painted him?” The incident focuses attention on how children of that age might manage such a loss, or manage not to. The youngster and his mates took in a puzzling, saddening change but not, as yet, death. So Guinny must have been painted. And thus we join an odyssey of development and inaccessibility, discovery and fear, self-protection and exploration, realized experientially by child and adult analysands and their analysts, alert to the mind's complex workings and wonders, and each mind's uniqueness.
Mahon's book engages as it explains, guides one lucidly through basics of psychoanalytic thought, and illustrates with arresting clinical examples. It offers paths—or in the author's odyssean metaphor, ports of call—through such central psychoanalytic dynamics as repression, transference, play, working through, dreams, screen memories, symptoms, psychological character, and sublimation: the last exemplified by Freud's mourning his father's death, interpreting his own and others' dreams, and formulating the oedipus complex. Yet the book does not read like a textbook. Its prose is sprightly. Fresh perspectives emerge. Mahon writes of insights (whether the patient's or the analyst's), for example, being transgressive, because they undermine defenses that have been relied on. Clinically, therefore, even after having been accepted as true, they often prove forgettable. Established defenses, after all, don't crumble easily. He d