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Devotees of the work of Bion—and Annie Reiner is one of them, as his ardent student—will find it exciting to read her erudite explorations in this book. Using her own detailed analytic treatment data, which she characterizes as revealing the organization of a False Self and its development due to severe childhood deprivation, Reiner describes what she calls the birth of the mind. She believes that her analysands have also experienced this emergence of the mind, a part of the True Self. The True Self demonstrates its range of affects, its less grandiose and rigid morality, a more nuanced and useful holding of the self's own value, and a tolerance of variations in interpersonal capacities.
Although this book also attempts to study the development of a religious perspective in human beings, its major thesis is to demonstrate the deep involvement of the processes described above in an individual's ability to think without distortions, without lies to self or others, and how this leads to the development of a mature conscience. Reiner contrasts this mature conscience with a primitive grandiose conscience. She asserts that Freud's concept of the superego is crucially and developmentally different than the mature conscience, which has roots not only in infancy, but even in utero, and is derived from “unconscious experiences and unsought thoughts that reflect proto-mental states” (p. xviii). Here she closely follows Bion's thinking.
In chapter two of The Quest for Conscience and the Birth of the Mind, Reiner discusses the construction of the False Self and its primitive grandiose conscience, indicating that her conception sometimes agrees with, and at other times differs, from the work of other contributors to the field of early infant development. The concepts she discusses include Klein's primitive aggression, projected in phantasy; Winnicott's False Self; Fairbairn's understanding of the development of the infant's bad self; Rosenfeld's articulation of the grandiose, mean,