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This is a distinctly refreshing book. That means it should be read by tired analytical psychologists with minds open to re-discovering that taking the psyche seriously is the first thing, but that a close second is to combine humour with seriousness when the analyst is considering himself. ‘St George’ is a reference to the author's admission that ‘the hero archetype is a particular pitfall for me’ (p. 30). When patients have very frightening needs and he has to mobilise the whole of himself ‘to accompany them and to match them’ he can find himself ‘being taken over by the St George image’ (Ibid.). The image gives him ‘a kind ofjolt; it's like a squirt of monkey glands. It gives me the ability to do a lot of things and to have all sorts of strength and courage that normally I don't have. But it is also a very fearsome thing; it's a bit like putting a Porsche motor in a Volkswagen’ (Ibid.). The other half of the title is an image of the state of his ego many years before he became an analyst: ‘When I first went to Zürich, I had an ego that was … in about the same kind of shape as a dandelion that's gone to seed. If you went FWOOSH, it blew to the four quarters of the earth’ (p. 9). It has seemed important to begin this review by showing how the author's idiosyncrasies are about deeply important matters: how the analyst draws creatively from the archetypal sources in himself when confronted by the patient's extreme states, grows more conscious of how he uses himself as the years go by, and discovers the need for both the ego and the concept of the ego, whether that ego be what he says his once was, ‘loosely put together’, or the more reliable and flexible one of his present state. If the seriousness of this book were not pointed out, the reader who has not met the author in the flesh could be put off by some of the mannerisms, and imagine that the comment, ‘You're joking’, could write him off. He cannot be dismissed so easily.
Jo Wheelwright is a disarming author: of co