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‘It is the Black Hole that gives depth to personal relationships’ (p. 270). Intensely personal, this wide-ranging book is autobiography. However, it is neither a linear account of the author's life, nor does it contain factual detail—the autobiography lies in the development of ideas and, especially, of feelings which disclose the man. The book explores rather than traces the ideas, experiences and encounters which led to its writing. True to his Jungian roots, Hobson describes a circular journey and says in the ‘Acknowledgements’ that he finds what has emerged was already contained in the journals of a seasick surgeon-lieutenant on Arctic convoys in 1943, and even earlier in the stories he shared as a boy with his brother.
The volume is made up of three books. The first, ‘The true voice of feeling’, is 160 pages long and begins with stories of encounters early in Hobson's psychiatric career with two difficult to reach adolescent boys—in a sense the rest of the volume could be seen as the working out of the implications of these early meetings.
Much of Book One is devoted to exploration and careful definition, in