Staring into the Abyss: Encountering and Transforming the Unrepresented and Inaccessible: Bion and Meltzer’s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life: Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis. By Avner Bergstein. New York:  Routledge, 2019,  xvi + 204 pp., $160.00 hardcover, $46.95 paperback.

Bion's journey in thinking about an ineffable psychic reality, starting with his depiction of a psychotic part of the personality up until his conceptualization of an ultimate reality which he denotes as O … is a path leading from the notion of a part of the personality that lacks the capacity to be in contact with emotional reality and truth, to an apprehension of an ineffable, unthinkable psychic reality which is beyond the reach of human capacity.

It is hard to imagine a concept more central to psychoanalysis than that of the unconscious. Indeed, Freud believed that affirming the existence of unconscious mental processes was an obligatory cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory.1 While few, if any, in a psychoanalytic audience would doubt or question that assumption, after more than a century of analytic practice, we continue to find ourselves debating the very nature, organization, and structure of the unconscious, as we struggle to fully explore, operationalize, and describe all that we mean by this foundational term. The expansion and elaboration of our understanding of the unconscious to include the unrepresented and unrepresentable, and the implications of

this expansion for analytic theory and technique, are at the heart of this extraordinary book by Avner Bergstein.

For a large part of our history, across a broad range of psychoanalytic geographies, languages, and theories, the unconscious was seen as equivalent to the repressed or dynamic unconscious: a repository of thoughts that were fully formed ideational elements of the psyche, but were not directly accessible to consciousness because they produced anxiety, were d