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The experience of reading this book was for me the mental equivalent of a challenging mountain climb, steep but exhilarating. It rewarded me en route both with views of familiar terrain, seen from different perspectives, and with vast new landscapes. When I began to flag, the figure of Henri Rey, the exuberant teacher, seemed to beckon me ever
onwards, pointing out the complex links between his vast clinical experience and the range of theoretical thinking he draws on to explain and describe mental phenomena. Yet, having struggled to reach the summit, I found that some of the scenery remained hidden from view, shrouded in a mist of confusion and leaving me frustrated and tantalized by what I felt I was missing. The journey is best undertaken at a leisurely pace, with pauses to take in the expansive panorama.
This volume is a compilation of Henry Rey's writings, spanning at least thirty years of research and clinical work. The eighteen chapters cover a diverse and fascinating range of subjects but the core of his work is the elaboration of his original ideas about the structuring of the internal world of borderline and psychotic patients. The additional sub-title ‘Factors of Space-Time and Language’ hints at the weighty intellectual matter within, and announces Rey's central preoccupations. These concern the relationship between the infant's early construction of external and internal reality (according to Piaget), and how these early constructs of space and time relate to the development of language and thought. In turn, Rey shows how these primitive concepts of space and time can help us to understand the mental experiences of borderline/psychotic patients, whose confused and unstable sense of identity in space and time resembles those early stages of childhood development.
In Chapter 2, ‘The schizoid mode of being’, Rey describes Piaget's ideas on the early organization of space, movement and time in infancy and early childhood, and applies these to the world of h