Robert M. Young

Mental Space by Robert M. Young. Process Press, 1994. Pp.viii+200. £15.00

What enhances and constricts mental space – space for reflection, for feeling, for relating to others, for being open to experience? The author offers reflections on key concepts in philosophy and psychoanalysis that bear on these issues, e.g., culture, mind, body, transference and countertransference, the analytic space, psychotic anxieties, projective identification, transitional phenomena. He draws on various traditions, always seeking to be as accessible as possible.

‘Your book is precious to me. It is superb... Your writing is in every way outstanding... In Mental Space you have written a formidably erudite book, a book rendered accessible to my pedestrian mind by the unusual clarity with which your book is written.’ Harold Searles

‘I have now finished reading your book, finding it quite fascinating, readable and important. There are not many people like you who combine a real knowledge of philosophy, the history of ideas, sociology, etc. with psychoanalysis, so that so many ideas that I had touched on were richly filled out. It also resonated of course with the idea of the collective unconscious but brought down out of the cloud of mythology into human existence... it is so full of information that I expect to be referring to it frequently.’ Michael Fordham, Jungian analyst, co-editor of The Collected Works of Jung, author of The Making of an Analyst