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Reviewing Thomas Cole's book, No Color is My Kind, was both trying and rewarding. These two experiences alternated from the beginning to the very end. The question as to whose story is told in the book became sufficiently resolved for me when I invoked the work of Wolfgang Iser (1989), a literary theorist, George Steiner , who wrote on the process of translation, and Melanie Klein (1946), who wrote of the psychological process of projective identification. The fact that the book began as an autobiography by Eldrewey Stearns and later changed into a biography of Stearns written by Cole is important. We are told that difficulties in finding an interested publisher led to the change which was suggested by the present publisher, University of Texas Press. This manifest explanation would seem to make the question of whose story is told quite moot but it does not for reasons that will be made clear below. The latent issues surrounding the problem of whose story it is will indeed be of tremendous interest to psychoanalysts.
No Color is My Kind is a book in three parts. The first is an account of Stearns’ involvement in the launching of the Civil Rights movement in Houston and the adversity and triumphs he and his collaborators faced; the second is the story of Stearns’ upbringing with poignant issues of loss and attempted repair of important objects in his internal world against the backdrop of external strife and extreme hardship in segregated Texas; and the third is Stearns’ surrender to the law and to the mental illness of manic-depression. In this third part the book ends with Cole's attempt to recover the separate selves of himself as a subject/author and Stearns as the Other who is simultaneously the object of this biography and the subject whose story made the book worth writing. Cole begins the book in the following way:
This is the story of a man whose soul is not rested. I met Eldrewey Stearns in September 1984. I was teaching at the University of Texas Medical Bra