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Paul Williams opens his book, The Fifth Principle,1 with a question, “How do you know…?” With this begins a ride, if you can hold onto a vehicle, maybe your mind, as he drop kicks us into a world without form or anchor of time, place, or person. We begin somewhere in the mind of a child in the mind of an adult trying to speak the unspeakable experience of trauma, his own, and maybe our own, if we can discover the courage to imagine it. We are introduced to a mind, an interior, without knowing exactly whose mind it is or, indeed, if it is a functioning mind. This opening makes a bid for us to question exactly how do we know what we experience, how do we come to know the minding of our experience, how do we find a mind that can think about this experience? Within the form of his writing, Williams puts a challenge to us: not to read about this tragic experience, not to follow the story, not to think about psychoanalytic ideas, but rather to allow this experience to implode within us and forge a place to live. This is much more difficult than it sounds, and yet it is what we try to do with our patients every day.
In conversations with colleagues about this book, I have heard how it was agonizing, frightening, unwieldy, unthinkable, invaluable — how they have been unable to read it, unable to finish it, unable to put it down, have stayed up all night reading it, had to read it in small doses, had to read it with a group — each experience intimate and idiosyncratic. Having read this book before, when I. began to reread it for this review I did not expect to be thrown again into the kaleidoscoping emotional unhinging. Apparently,