Mental Space. : By Robert M. Young. London: Process Press. 1994. Pp. 200.

This book is an extended Essay? Meditation? Credo? on the idea of mental space. Bob Young has an allegiance to some thinkers within the Kleinian Tradition—Melanie Klein herself, Wilfred Bion, Hanna Segal, Bob Hinshelwood, Donald Meltzer, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Elliott Jaques—as well as to some more unclassifiable psychoanalytic spirits—D. W. Winnicott,

Margaret Little, David Rapaport—and to some other figures—Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich—who will take those of us of a certain age back to those heady days when a synthesis of psychoanalytic and social theory seemed both possible and the only basis for imminent societal change.

Bob Young was previously a historian of science, who worked on the theory of cerebral localisation and on Darwinismus. He is also a psychoanalytical psychotherapist and the founder of Free Association Books, a publishing house, and several associated journals that have done much to publicise psychoanalytic and radical philosophical and historical ideas in the United Kingdom and North America. Many of his references are to the group of writers associated with Free Associations.

It seemed impossible to review this book without beginning with its author, whose personality dominates and permeates it so thoroughly, and with his enthusiasms, since, as he says, the book is concerned to encourage the reader to explore further the literature which has fuelled his ideas rather than to develop his argument in detail. We learn a great deal about Bob Young in this book: about his struggles to emancipate himself from unconscious racism, about his distress at institutions which become sclerotic and punitive, his ambivalence about the psychoanalytic establishment, his attraction to and alienation from the seductions of market capitalism. It is a brave attempt to try to relate together his intellectual and emotional lives and see them as a product of his history, and he is aware of the likelihoo