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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
—John Keats
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fine American University, one with many different traditions. There are many intellectual paths that emanate from the university, and Harold Boris has taken one of the paths opened in recent years to clinical work—he is an
unapologetic subjectivist. Taking Bion to a contemporary turn different from that of modern Kleinians he forges a unique foundation for understanding how individuals reveal themselves. On this path he has reconceptualized the way people experience and what that experience means. Part of the confusion that surrounds Bion's genius is caused by a failure to understand how he extended Kleinian thinking. Bion contributed to that confusion (intentionally or not) by his unusual use of language. Boris stands on Bion's metaphoric foundation to evoke quite a different model of human interaction that fits both his relational bias and his understanding of recent evolutionary theories (Edelman, 1987) that have found a home at Harvard. I am not sure Bion plays well from this perspective.
Boris uses ordinary language to describe some of his ideas then he places them into powerful dialectics. Growth (undefined) depends on the outcome of competing claims. If this kind of logic is vague to you, it is to me as well. And if you enter this book's terrain you will spend some time rereading. For example, it is unclear what grows and becomes the object of the claims. Does the self grow? Adaptive strength? Compromise? Doubt? Or are these terms theoretically superfluous. Into this mix are thrown such competing and compelling terms as the couple, the pair, and the group.
The selection (pair) principle and the pleasure (couple) principle direct both experience and action along certain object-relational lines. Certainly this turn of theory may feel more comfortable in the shadows of Harvard, where the “anthropological, ethnological and biological backdrops are sufficientl