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Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion is an invitation by the author, a remarkable analyst, into his consulting room as he struggles to comprehend the prerepresentational mental states of his psychotic patients through a combination of empathic merger and thoughtful reflection. In so doing, he assists them in learning to bear and cope with their existential distress in more mature and thoughtful ways. Lombardi successfully challenges the common “wisdom” that the psychoses, the most prevalent and crippling of the mental ills, are beyond the scope of psychoanalysis. In so doing, he rejects traditional, simplistic definitions of what psychoanalysis is.
Lombardi is a creative therapist, an impressive psychoanalytic theoretician, a person of broad cultural background and knowledge, and above all, a deeply caring human being. These attributes illuminate the book and make reading his clinical vignettes a pleasure.
The book is a compilation of nine journal articles published over a ten-year span between 2003 and 2013. It is equally clinical and theoretical. Rich clinical vignettes, apparently taken from verbatim transcripts