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What are our geographical boundaries for reading? Mostly we read British analysts, perhaps going across the Channel if we are Francophiles. But do we read more widely, say from Scandinavia, South America, and so on? The author of this book is a training analyst from the vibrant Israeli Psychoanalytical Society. He has written an interesting and important book. The subtitle is Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis. It brings to mind, historically, André Green's address to the IPA conference in London, some time back (in ) about broadening the spectrum of psychoanalysis, beyond the neurotic spectrum, and his work on the Negative.
We are used to thinking about psychic representation, and almost taking it for granted. Nevertheless, Bergstein's focus throughout this significant and thought- provoking text is on how experience and affect does or does not get into representation. This is what he means by the infra and ultraviolet spectrum, metaphorically, that he wants to draw our attention to—the realm of invisible, unverbalizable psychic reality for the patient. If the patient cannot verbalize his experience, how can we hear, or ‘see’ it?
The clinical work described in the book concerns a different sort of unconscious to the one we are used to thinking about and dealing with. It is not the robustly represented repressed unconscious that is amenable to classical analytic interpretation. Levine, Read and Scarfone (2013), Mitrani (1996, 2001) and Eekoff (2019, 2022) have written about such presentation. The patients that each of these authors describes are forced to present, rather than represent their psychic life. The analyst, via their counter transference, has to turn the patient's void/negative into a positive representable reality.
Bergstein expands on Bion's question ‘Can we make some extension of our mental capacity to take in a little bit more of the … invisible aspects of the spectrum’ (p. 55)—that is beyond the verbally communicable. One of the strengths of the book