The growth of mind: by Neville Symington, London and New York, Routledge, 2019, 118pp. £22.49, ISBN: 978 -1-138 327832 (pb), 978-1-138-32781-8 (hb), 978-0-429-44907-9 (eb)

It is not an easy task to summarize this book, which, in nine lectures and an introduction, covers a series of complex thoughts, bringing together a lifetime of thinking about the practice of psychoanalysis and the nature of the mind. Neville Symington writes clearly and in a way that engages with the reader, taking them gradually into the depth of his thinking. One feels by the end that there has been a worthwhile journey, opening up areas of thought often not considered, at least in print, by psychoanalytic authors.

Symington summarizes the ambitious goal of his book as coming to an understanding, “of the mind in general and its capacity to discover the truth and to establish this as the foundation stone for our judgement and critique of the human world” (1). His field of exploration lies in the psychological processes encountered in the consulting room. He makes the point early on that his mode of enquiry is different from that generally taught in psychoanalytic institutes, including where he was trained in London. Instead of an approach to psychoanalytic treatment based upon a school of some kind, with various techniques, doctrines, and theories of interpretation with the hope of some “scientific” respectability, he proposes a more open-ended approach responsive to each individual’s unique subjectivity, or what he describes as a person’s “creative core.”

Thus,

Central to this book is the statement that the core of the mind is a creator but just as in the external world there are different products issuing from the creator like paintings, sculpture, and poetry and music so also this creator is able to fashion mental realities that are detached from the senses, or at least from the tactile senses. (17)

This creative core for Symington remains essentially unknowable, though we can know its productions. Thus, the creative core produces assessable dreams and reverie but we cannot assess the creative core itself. For him, this is the unconscious, the creative core of the