Experiencing endings and beginnings

To approach the task of writing this review is rather daunting. A relative newcomer – very much at the beginning of a career in child psychotherapy – making notes and comments on the work of someone who has attended to the experience of beginnings and endings for the last 60 years or so seems rather at odds with the scope of the book. This is very much a life’s work and when the reviewer’s life experience goes little beyond the realms of chapter 10 (there are 13 chapters in all) then one should probably simply suggest to the readership that this book, along with life itself, just needs to be experienced. However, despite this clear discrepancy there is a great deal to say about this book and a good deal one can learn both from what it tells us and how these messages are delivered.

This book is written with seemingly effortless fluency. Turning the pages comes with equal ease, aided by the rhythm of a voice whose tone is deeply understanding at the same time as being alive to the world and gratefully optimistic. It is of course concerned with beginnings and endings and there are several examples embedded within its chronological structure as well as the personal narratives that run throughout. However, for me the binding thread of the book is a motif that emerges at various points along the way and draws our attention to how these beginnings and endings are ‘experienced’. As Isca writes, ‘at every turn, as Bion (1962) says, we have to choose whether to avoid emotional pain or to face it; to live with lies, or to live with truth, which he calls “the food that nourishes the mind”’ (11).

The choice either to face our fears or avoid them sounds oddly straightforward and yet the optimism with which this book is written appears to confirm that despite all of our unconscious and conscious resistances, to stand face to face with true experience and its emotional ramifications, is nevertheless possible. And more than this, to do so, while painful, leads to greater fulfilment. A