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This complex, creative, occasionally prolix but never dull book has been written in the form of a discursive meditation on the clinical, cultural and mythological significance of change as an experience of catastrophe. The author is a Kleinian psychoanalytical psychotherapist whose work is clearly influenced by Bion and Meltzer. He draws upon these writers and anthropological accounts of social change, including the work of van Gennep on rites de passage, to illustrate how, in a state of transition from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position functioning, mind is required to confront its psychotic robbing of life from ‘good objects’. Anton Obholzer, in his commentary on the book, describes the necessary consequence of this developmental theft as an ensuing ‘exploration of a geography of binary division, an underworld to which it [mind] has banished its counterpart, a twin foetus and its mother, whom it must come to acknowledge as the rightful inheritors of life’.
The catastrophic nature of change has occupied the thinking of a number of psychoanalysts, of whom Bion is perhaps the most influential. Donald Meltzer, introducing Rhode's book, notes how bouts of turbulence in ourselves and others are visible products of personal development. Goethe,