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This is an original and thought-provoking book which deserves to be widely read, pondered on and discussed. The subtitle gets it right: Josephine Klein has given us 11 more or less free-standing essays which lay the groundwork for an exploration of the ineffable within the context of contemporary psychotherapy.
The book is addressed to mental health professionals generally, but perhaps particularly - given the body of theory on which it draws - to analytically oriented psychotherapists and counsellors who are interested in thinking about experiences of ‘love, wonder, awe, joy, inspiration, and particularly the feelings that seem to give us a sense that there is something beyond what we can easily find words for - ineffable feelings’ (pp. 1 f.). Numinous feelings are ‘not so very rare’ yet, Klein feels, they:
are not normally regarded in the consulting-room - unless they can be called psychotic … Their exclusion shows also in the lack of reference to them in the indices of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and other mainstream psychotherapy journals - no mention there of awe, worship, numen, devotion, etc. Yet these feelings exist and are presumably at times felt and spoken about in psychotherapeutic sessions. Alas, perhaps we stare out of countenance the feelings that do not fit easily into the theories we have so far constructed. (pp. 75 f.)
This is fighting talk, but Klein presses the point. Discussing the adjective ‘blithe’, with its cognate meanings of ‘jocund, gay, sprightly, merry, joyous, cheerful, glad, happy, well’, she comments:
At the time of writing … psychotherapists are tending to ignore expressions of such positive feelings in the expectation that they cover other feelings, thought to be more genuine, of depression and anger. Are those psychotherapists always right about this, or are they projecting their own experiences of darkness on to a world that, whatever its appalling atrocities and occasional preference for dreariness, is yet at many mom