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This is the author's second book, following two years after The Shadow of the Object. The book is in two sections, the first of which is a series of chapters describing two closely linked themes. The first theme concerns the analysand's development of parts of himself by making use of the analyst in a way which expresses the analysand's personal ‘idiom’. The second theme concerns the author's view that a person has a potential from birth which is probably specific enough to justify the term ‘destiny’, and that there is something like a drive to fulfil that destiny. However, a developing person needs receptive others for use, and in this area they may run into serious difficulty which adversely affects their development. The second part of the book is a collection of essays developing the ideas of the first half in a number of specific contexts. The clinical examples are clear and a much-needed anchor for the theorising, and although I would personally have found more clinical examples helpful I think the balance between the two is made acceptable by the readability of the prose style and by the additional vignettes from the author's own life.
To some extent the author is developing and extending on understanding first described by Winnicott, with the addition and further integration of work by Heimann, Klein, Bion, Lacan, and others. Much, however, is also original. I found Bollas's ideas and perspective thought-provoking in a way that brings new ideas to my own work. The style of the writing has an amiable quality which carries the reader along into ideas which are highly conceptual and require shifts of framework not reached by straightforward logical argument.
Leaving to one side the question of whether one agrees with the book's basic orientation, there is little to find fault with. A minor irritation is the way that