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There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown (Freud, 1900).
Gardez-vous de comprendre [beware of understanding] (Lacan, 1956).
The only point of importance in any session is the unknown (Bion, 1967).
The poetics of metapsychology are ephemeral, and we easily mistake metapsychology for fact in order to serve omnipotent wishes to know what we cannot know. Almost none of our metapsychology theorises beyond the knowable, although the work of Bion and Lacan comprises two notable exceptions. Each writes of emotional experience beyond representation (for Bion, the concept of O, and for Lacan, the register of the Real), meaning that each is faced with the impossible task of writing about, or representing, the unrepresentable.
James S. Grotstein joins Bion and Lacan with this book, a synthesis and reworking of papers published over the past twenty years. He begins with a story. One morning, Grotstein arose after ‘witnessing’ an extraordinary dream. He realised that he could not possibly have been the one who created, or dreamed his dream, because he had been asleep at the time. Who dreamed it? Who was the Dreamer who dreamed his dream? As Grotstein asks, Who is the unconscious? And, therefore, What is the nature of the self?
Grotstein organises his book around answering these questions. It is an audacious, inspiring, at times wild and wildly successful effort, that, for me, often evoked a sense of truth and wisdom about human beingness. At its best, Grotstein's book reads with the depth and scope of epic poetry. He draws not only on psychoanalytic thinking (primarily Freud, Bion, Klein, Lacan, Matte-Blanco, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Ogden) but also on theology and philosophy to evoke visions of the indescribable, unknowable, infinite and ineffable unconscious and self. I also found it wildly frustrating during times when it reads like a first draft. Core proposals and themes become diffused