The poet’s voice in the making of mind

Russell Meares has been working as a clinician and researcher in the field of psychotherapy for over thirty years, with a particular interest in the psychopathology of personality. Together with Dr. Robert Hobson, he developed a psychotherapeutic intervention called a Conversational Model of therapy, (Meares & Hobson, 1977) and assessed its efficacy with people suffering from BPD. In this book, he builds on a lifetime of thinking about disorganised minds to set out a theory of how the Self develops in childhood; what can go wrong; and the implications of this theory for psychodynamic psychotherapy.

This is an incredibly rich book, which draws on Professor Meares’ wide interests in philosophy, neuroscience, quantum physics and linguistics. Of the book’s many strengths is how he manages to make many complex ideas accessible, and to knit ideas from different disciplines together. He looks for complementarity as well as difference in ideas across time; it is valuable to be reminded that many of the most salient questions in psychotherapy have been asked by classical thinkers such as Aristotle and more contemporary thinkers such as Wolfgang Pauli.

The central questions that Professor Meares wants to address are, what is a Self? And how does it develop over time? The introduction sets out the basic framework of his answer: the Self is not a thing but a process that develops out of a neural substrate which in turn develops out of linguistic interaction with earliest caregivers. During infancy, we learn to ‘Self’ by engaging with a carer in a ‘game’ that uses proto-language structures. The infant has affective experiences that are physical but not psychological, as it were: the carer ‘re-presents’ the infant’s experience back to them in a way which conveys meaning to the child, and fosters the development of symbolic language. The use of symbolic language allows the infant to ‘play’ with experience, and develop skills in make-believe or what we might call ‘let’s pretend’ comm