I should confess from the start that I found this a difficult book to review. For starters, I have no idea who Eric Rhode is, and the book offers me no information to help me to overcome this presumably vincible ignorance on my part. From the content of the book, I can judge him to be a man of considerable learning and creative insight, with a gift for the poetic and symbolic discourse. I presume him to be deeply versed in classical literature, anthropology, and psychoanalytic thinking, and someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with the clinical setting and psychotic process. I also presume that he is on the clinical staff of the Tavistock Clinic and that his name is familiar to British analysts since the work is introduced by a brief foreword by Donald Meltzer.

The second difficulty I encountered was that I was thrown off stride by the title. While it was clear that the content dealt with psychotic experience, the meaning of “metaphysics” escaped me entirely. The term, as used here, has little or no reference to anything