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Paul Ashton is an intrepid voyager of the void who constantly encounters new archipelagos in his ongoing explorations. His book often feels like a notebook or journal describing his experiences of and reflections upon ‘void states’. Like an explorer in the New World he, fascinated and fascinating, compiles and relates the multifarious phenomena of ‘the void’. In his view, voids are ubiquitous—in fragmented selves, in developmental lacunae and autistic states, in borderline conditions, following severe trauma, during Dark Nights of the Soul, in notable personal experiences such as the author's circumnavigations in his self-built yacht, and in many other large and small senses of ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothing’. The very abundance of examples is, at times, a bit overwhelming.
The ‘void’ seems to serve as a ‘floating’ signifier that endlessly shifts with regard to what it signifies, inviting us to note voids everywhere. However, what the term signifies cannot be finally represented in thought, and only by allusion in symbol. A major difficulty with this work is that the theoretical matrices that the author employs—mostly developmental/object relations and classical Jungian—fail to provide an adequate perspective for the omnipresent void phenomena that he depicts.
For instance, in psychoanalysis is the ‘void’ something that we should ‘treat’ quasimedically as something to be ‘cured’, or does it reflect an aporia at the core of human existence?1 Should the focus be ‘hole repair’ (Kinston & Cohen 1986), or does the void signify a mystery that always defies final integration?
If ‘the void’ is indeed aporetic, the assumption by the analyst that it is a ‘soluble’ dilemma may be distinctly untherapeutic and indeed foster defensive reactions to the enigma. One defensive reaction is teleological, the view that voids or other aporias serve a ‘higher’ purpose; in Jungian terms, this purpose is usually ‘individuation’. For instance, Ashton cites (p. 61), ‘the mystic's return from his or her