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Pickering takes the question ‘what is the meaning of my life’ as the starting point of her book. To analysands who ask that question, she may say ‘perhaps this is something we may discover, slowly, together’ (pp. 1-2).
To find meaning, Jung prescribed a religious outlook on life, and Bion recommended experiences of ‘reverence and awe’ (p. 2). And to this end, Pickering posits the important question of whether psychotherapy could also be a form of spiritual practice.
I found the whole book to be an ode to these questions, written in smaller topics that evocatively help open our consciousness to some of the most challenging and transformative aspects of the psyche. Occasionally, I found myself asking whether i really wanted to read some of the sections that were more foreign to me, but as I did, I realized how all the subjects of the book worked together as an intimate call to inspire more, to be more, to experience more, and to a realization of how this journey can aid us in our work as psychoanalysts.
Through the use of scholarly sections that are intellectually provocative, other sections of prose that are also poetic, and many powerful clinical vignettes, we are ultimately gently led on a path into the realms of philosophical alterity, Buddhist ‘emptiness’, mystical apophatic confrontations with ultimate reality, and Bion's O.
The journey begins gently with the idea, practice, and what Pickering calls the ethic of hospitality. It is an attitude of open-heartedness and openmindedness, where the therapist becomes a suitable vessel to receive and contain the deepest being of the analysand (p. 27). The space of therapy is seen as a temenos, the analyst as a host who welcomes the patient into both the outer temenos of the consulting room and inner temenos of the analyst's heart and mind. The spacious mind of the analyst is also a ‘dwelling place’ to receive and contain the patient's psychological matters, while the consulting room serves as a physical sanctuary, sheltering