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This book aims to bring together ‘new and original contributions to an understanding of primitive object relations and of those highly charged emotional states which present the maximum challenge to the group psychotherapist: the “Ring of Fire” (p. 2). Seven of the 11 authors are from the States, three from Britain, and Resnik is the only contributor from outside that Anglophone alliance (based in France, writing about work he did as a visiting analyst in Italy).
Resnik's chapter is on ‘Glacial times in psychotic regression’ and is the crowning glory of a good book. Resnik describes a group for psychotic inpatients watched from behind a one-way screen by staff members. The material crackles with the eponymous ‘fire’ of psychotic delusions and hallucinations but also shows the glacial retreats which defend against psychotic anxieties. A patient comments, pointing to an old scar on a finger, ‘This is the scar from an old wound. Before awakening an old wound, you doctors ought to know the coagulation time of the patient’. In their foreword to the chapter Schermer and Pines suggest that readers may find Resnik's use of depth interpretation in acute psychosis controversial. I did not. What I found controversial was that Resnik makes little of the possible relation between his approach and the completed suicide of a young female member of the group. His quoting the other patient on possible psychic exsanguination shows his sensitivity, and mention of the observing group providing intermittent practical containment of the patients suggests that he and the watchers were alive to the dangers. I suspect that one suicide in the lifetime of this group is not statistically improbable in comparison with more conventional treatment programmes but I would have liked Resnik to have said more about the group's, and his own, processing of the death.