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Even though The Chamber of Maiden Thought does not make things easy for the reader, it offers a profoundly moving description of mental life as “a Vale of Soul-making.” Underlying this very rapid trip through literature—from Shakespeare to George Eliot, by way of Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Emily Brontë—is a post-Kleinian theory of projective identification as formulated by Wilfred R. Bion. Nowhere in the book, not in Foreword, Introduction, or text is there an exposition of the pertinent concepts of either Klein or Bion. Not unreasonably, the authors assume rhe reader's knowledge of Melanie Klein, but given their frequent assertions of the difficulty of Bion's texts, they might have cosseted us with a brief early presentation of the concepts on which they rely so heavily.
We must make the most of tantalizing bits scattered here and there, surprised to find the most useful not in the beginning but in the Epilogue, where we learn that contemporary psychoanalysis “focuses on patterns of internal communication between the self and its objects: not with a view to attaining a plateau of normality, but rather to establish a mode of development which will carry it through further ‘catastrophic changes’ [Bion's term], as yet unknown and unsymbolized” (pp. 184-185). The catastrophic change marks a “creative death” of obsolete versions of the self to make way for more appropriate new ones.
According to this theory, the mind continually creates itself by enriching, modifying, and clarifying its internal objects and relations among these objects and by adjusting its own relationship to these objects. Soul-making, then, is a lifelong process of “fledging” the mind according to its needs and symbolic capacities at countless major and minor stages of the life course. “In establishing