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This small book is a word-painting, faithful in style to the relationship woven between a woman and her dream-images as she approaches the transition we call death. Ulanov, the analyst-author creates a tapestry out of first the warp and woof of conscious and not-conscious, then the worlds of theology and psychology, that of word and image, analyst and analysand. Ultimately she returns us to the transcendent function, the underlying mystery of the Self's capacity to reconcile all.
Nancy, the analysand, is deprived of language by a terminal brain tumour. Her analysis and individuation, then, necessarily take the form of paintings rendered primitively by her increasingly impaired bodily dexterity. The analysand's devotion to her process is a leitmotif throughout the text and is paralleled by that of the analyst who, one suspects, has offered this book in part as an act of homage.
The difficult task Ulanov works with here is to articulate the ‘gap’ between God and human, what she calls ‘that creative in-between space where imagination and our sense of God's presence are born’ (p. 26). Nancy's dream images mediated the Unknown as it moved toward her consciousness and functioned, therefore, as God-images. This book is successful on several levels, but most engaging to this reviewer was a sense of being pulled into the deep exchange between ‘the other side’ as it approaches and becomes more and more familiar to the dying ego. At this level it reads like a true mystery story. Faithfully reproduced colour drawings make the mystery palpable, and to the whimsically inclined, provide clues to the process of resolution. The intermingling of the two dimensions, one of time/space and the other not, is conveyed through the drawings without which the reader might have been held at a distance, blending life into death as one's mortal end appears in consciousness. With the images available, however, we feel the event happening and are brought again to the reality that soul's image relat