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In grappling with the rich complexities of this text, I was reminded of a passage in Dostoievsky's Diary of a Writer which vividly illustrates the operation of the so-called ‘restricted code’ where, such is the rapport between members of the designated group, that the repetition of the same single (unprintable) noun by each in turn, with varying tones and inflexions, conveys a world of meaning and, concludes Dostoievsky, ‘without uttering a single other word, they repeated that one beloved word six times in a row, one after another, and understood one another completely’.
For me, Rhode's rhapsody in blue covers has a similar effect in that its associative mode is seemingly addressed to a select band of cognoscenti for whom the links in a process of thought, essential for the mediation of meaning, are suppressed, apparently deemed unnecessary, producing the impression of a private soliloquy.
The source of this difficulty in communication might possibly also lie in the intense subjective reality for Rhode of the concept of ‘positions’ and the ‘threshold’ between them, almost ignoring the fact that these terms began life as descriptive metaphors for observed clinical phenomena rather than as experiential absolutes. Yet it is as virtually concrete realities that they appear in Rhode's treatment, with the mushrooming of a complex accompanying mythology, so tortuous, so esoteric that, no matter how well accredited and researched, it is hard to imagine such material becoming the stuff of meaningful communications to the patients described. And it is perhaps ironical that the most fascinating parts of the book are those which explore and expose the ancient antecedents of the symbolic in the form of signs, as opposed to symbols, idols as opposed to icons, masks as opposed to faces, and the anti-symbolic nature of the fetish. Thus Rhode broadens our understanding of the deadly lure of the literal, while actual communication is somehow immured in the concrete of the paranoid/sc