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defences. It emphasizes unconsciousfantasy as truly psychological and Iapplaud its understanding of the developingchild’s way of protecting the self fromunbearable reality that will determine thepatterns of being and behaving that presentin the adult in the consulting room. For mea weakness of the book is that the clinicalimplications of these vital insights areimplicit rather than explicit and illustrativecase material is sadly lacking. It is left tothe clinician to make the links. This isredressed to a certain extent in the penulti-mate chapter where the process of changein analysis is addressed.

I would like to conclude by quoting Knoxwho says ‘the developmental model of themind that runs like a thread through thisbook is that emergence provides the key toreconcile biology with psyche’ (p. 205).This thread is indeed the creative heart ofthis book. It enriches and clarifies Jungianarchetypal theory in a way that is congruentwith empirical science but more impor-tantly enriches the understanding of allpractitioners concerning the emergent,developmental, intersubjective process ofcoming into mind.

Gilbert P. ‘Biophysical approaches and evolution-ary theory as aids to integration in clinical psy-chology and psychotherapy’. ClinicalPsychology and Psychotherapy 1995; 2 (3):135–56.

Jung CG. ‘The role of the unconscious’, CollectedWorks, vol.10. London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1964.

Lazarus R. Emotion and Adaptation. New York andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Margaret Wilkinson5 Edge Mount View, Bar Road

CurbarNr Calver

Hope ValleyS32 3YX

ANOTHER EVOCATIVE OBJECT

Dark at the End of the Tunnel. ByChristopher Bollas. London: FreeAssociation Books, 2004. £16.99 pb.

What can psychoanalysis offer in the wakeof 11 September 2001? Some answers areperhaps offered in Christopher Bollas’srecent Dark at the End of the Tunnel, apolitically daring, complex, and affectingnovella focusing on the character of anunnamed psychoanalyst with more than apassing resemblance to Bollas, coming toterms with his own mortality and life moregenerally in a fictional world similar to ourown. This is a world in which there hasbeen a significant terrorist attack upon thedeveloped world, in which much of thecountry seems to be under water, in whichthere is a nightmarish level of extinction, in which people are too busy to be ill, and inwhich religious fundamentalists areincreasingly homicidal, if not genocidal. Ifall of this sounds too depressing to contem-plate, Dark at the End of the Tunnel is actu-ally that rare thing: a genuinely funnycomedy with a credible happy ending. Forexample, the novel provides a wittydescription of a certain kind of metropoli-tan middle-class life where Osama dineswith Mirabel at the Café on the Green, andwhere characters discuss the meaning oflife over a new recording of the GoldbergVariations or a fashionably adjective-ladensupper of ‘wild sturgeon with honey-roasted horseradish sauce on a bed ofwilted lettuce’; a dinner that, not inciden-tally, nearly kills one of the characters. I say‘not incidentally’ because the pressingreality of death is at the heart of this novel.This is both as a consequence of the psychoanalyst’s ruminations on the bigquestions of life and because of the psychicimpact of the ‘Catastrophe’ on the vastmajority of the novel’s characters. As a

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result, symposium scenes, such as the oneto which I just alluded, are simultaneouslycomic, nostalgic and satiric. They arecomic because someone nearly chokes todeath on food straight out of Nigella orJamie; nostalgic because like Eliot’s WasteLand or Pound’s Cantos, Bollas here elegia-cally documents a culture that may soon behistorically anachronistic; and indulgentlysatiric because the novel’s various charac-ters dine out whilst much of the world isexperiencing the kind of abject poverty andinjustice that the psychoanalyst believescaused ‘the Catastrophe’ in the first place.

Indeed, one of the most impressive thingsabout Dark at the End of the Tunnel is thedaring way in which the novel wears itspolitical heart upon its sleeve, even thoughits author knows that, in so doing and in thecontext of legislation such as the PatriotAct, he risks being ‘filleted alive’ by hisless sympathetic readers and runs the riskof ‘deeply upsetting’ the victims of ‘theCatastrophe’ and their loved ones: a possi-bility Bollas dramatizes in a difficult-to-gloss scene in which, having overheard histheses in a shop, the psychoanalyst isgripped by a woman whose son had died in‘the Catastrophe’, who has a ‘look of pro-found possession, as if something insideher had taken control of her mind and herbody’, and who, with a ‘strange kind oferotic aggression’, seemed to be about tofuck the analyst ‘in ways as yet unknown to the species’, as if to somehow convey tohim in this way that he should ‘burn in hell’for his views. Put simply, and at the risk ofcaricaturing Bollas’s complex position, thepsychoanalyst’s beliefs are these: that thoseresponsible for ‘the Catastrophe’ werethemselves the victims of ‘evil actions’;that terrorism was probably their ‘only wayof overturning their oppression’; that notall of the victims of ‘the Catastrophe’ wereunequivocally good people; and that the

‘Alliance’s war’ is really ranged against‘the poor of the earth’ and represents amanifestation of Western ‘greed’, ‘murder-ousness’, and ‘lack of love’.

The novel dramatizes a variety of poten-tial responses within the analyst’s circle andneighbourhood to those beliefs. One char-acter is ‘running to ground’ because of hisanxiety that ‘figures from the underworld’have a ‘contract out on his life’; a patientfrom New York finds that his life has lostall meaning, whilst the analyst f indshimself thinking particularly hard about aparadigmatic contemporary analysandwhose life constantly seemed to be‘careen[ing] from one crisis to another’,was ‘too immersed’ in events to ‘thinkclearly’, and whose future seemed to be ‘aseries of catastrophes-in-waiting’. In such asituation, and faced with the simultaneousnecessity of some form of action and needto avoid the often overpowering temptationto respond to ‘the Catastrophe’ in violent orhateful ways, Dark at the End of the Tunnelrepresents a subtle and ambitious attemptto provide an alternative mode of being andrelating to that exemplified by the womanwho finds the analyst’s views so unpalat-able. The novel does so through its presen-tation of a range of ideas that, at f irstreading, seem like local textual, politicaland personal concerns, but on secondreading reveal themselves to be precise andpotentially powerful responses to thepresent political climate. For example, in acontext of increasing political and religiousfundamentalism, there is something potentabout Bollas’s decision to write a comicnovel that seeks to ‘crack up certainties’and ‘pose rather than answer questions’. Inthe context of increasing political dictator-ship in the US, UK and beyond, there issomething equally appealing about Bollas’sdistaste for the inherently ‘authoritarian’quality of the traditional scholarly essay,

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and his belief in the Novel’s dialogic abilityto include more ‘truly opposite points ofview’, ‘multiple voices’ and a ‘more robustexchange of ideas’. In addition, the novelincludes a timely meditation on the experi-ence of objectif ication, encouraged byBollas in the case of gaining a more self-conscious perspective upon one’s own life;but whose tragic effects he emphasizes in arange of moving fictional case studies ofindividuals who suddenly find themselvesobjectified by their friends and loved ones;related to only as things, rather than people,‘incarcerated’ as an object in their formerbeloved’s mind, ‘denied the right to speak’,‘with no representation’, ‘no court ofappeal’, and unable to reverse the situation.In case the reader is left in any doubt herethat Bollas is employing the personal as aneffective way to address the political, and isalso tacitly discussing the situation of thosedetained without trial in the so-called waron terror and those who are the victims ofsuicide bombers, his vocabulary makes itclear that the consequences of objectifica-tion are ‘aggression’, ‘envy’, ‘murder’, and‘assassination’, maybe metaphoric from apersonal and psychic perspective, but bru-tally realistic from the global perspective.

In response to such dangerous politicaland psychic phenomena, Bollas proposessome simple, perhaps naïve-sounding, butpotentially politically powerful alternatives.For instance, believing that ‘theCatastrophe’ is the ‘triumph of object-hood’, and in relation to the present objec-tifying regime of both the Bush/Blair axisand Al-Qaeda regarding their supposedenemies, Bollas suggests something assimple as ‘hang[ing] out together’. And ifthe idea of Osama and Mirabel taking teatogether at the Café on the Green is easybut dangerous to ridicule, in the service ofthe idea of ‘life as something held between

us all’ Bollas also describes an equallyslight, but potentially utopian scene inwhich his protagonist presents someforeign menu cards he has collected whilstabroad to some very ‘primal’ local f ish-mongers when he gets home, who were‘quite taken’ with the way in which theirforeign counterparts also ‘obviously cele-brated fish’.

However lightly handled such importantideas are, though, if Bollas hadn’t indicatedon the dust jacket that Dark at the End ofthe Tunnel was a comedy, readers might beforgiven for thinking that the novel was atragedy at the end of the book, in which itlooks uncertain whether the psychoanalystis imagining the end of Western culture aswell as his own life. And yet, at the heart ofthe book, and of Bollas’s project as a writer,analyst and activist, is something pro-foundly optimistic: his belief in the creativeand curative capacities of the unconsciousin even the darkest personal and culturalsituations. Thus, if the kind of life thatBollas has described with delight through-out the book seems distinctly threatened, bythe end of the novel its author is character-istically able to see this as ‘a good thingand an awful thing at the same time’: a situ-ation that individuals ‘had to face’, but inwhich they did not have to be fearful. Thatis because in Bollas’s fictional theoreticaland political world, we are always ‘lookedafter by our unconscious’. At the end of thebook, therefore, in the wake of the catastro-phe, in spite of the fear that others thatmust come, that the therapist is faced withhis own death, and despite the fact thatvarious people close to him have died, thereis an absence of both ‘deep grief’ and fear.For example, when asked if he thinks thedeveloped world is finished, the psychoan-alyst is able to assert that perhaps even ‘theCatastrophe’ might ‘allow us to rise above

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our ordinary circumstances’ into some-where new and potentially interesting.However, if we could all use a little hoperight now, particularly in the midst of arange of ideologies asserting that the‘destruction of [the] body is ennobling’,and in a period that has witnessed thereturn of a militaristic imperialism amongstthe US and its allies that is equally carelessof human life, perhaps the best reason toread Dark at the End of the Tunnel and tore-read Bollas’s other work is because it isso plainly enamoured with life, with whatBollas characterizes as the potential ‘rich-ness’ to be found in the ‘apparently irrele-vant details of everyday life’, whether thatbe the alienating but weirdly appetizingfish on display in an Islington fish-shop,the free association of a fictionalized psy-choanalyst, or the ‘slightly grainy-yellowlook of fresh dog turd’ on his shoes.

Jason EdwardsDepartment of Art History,

York UniversityHeslington

YorkYO10 5DD

United Kingdom

TYPING THE BIGGER PICTURE

Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to aFuller Life. By John L Giannini. GainesvilleFL: Center for Applications of PsychologicalType, 2004. 597 pp. $29.95 pb.

This is an ambitious and wide-rangingwork by a Jungian analyst with many yearsof clinical experience. Although doublespaced, it is a long book. There are twomain themes.

Giannini has further developed Carl GJung’s four couplings: sensation-thinking

(ST), sensing-feeling (SF), intuiting-feeling (NF), and intuiting-thinking (NT)and the two attitudes, extraversion andintroversion. His first main theme is thatthe ‘function couplings are the four arche-typal modalities through which the Soulperceives and judges the “outer” and“inner” worlds. The couplings togetherconstitute the four directions of the typemandala . . .’ (p. 7). Type and archetypehave now been integrated and their placeidentified in Jung’s theory. There is also adetailed and well-documented discussionof Jungian typology as further advanced byIsabel Myers Briggs, the Myers-BriggsType Indicator (MBTI), and MaryMcCaulley at the Center for Applicationsof Psychological Type. Giannini drawsfrom his own practice additional illustra-tions of the various types and their pathologies. An illuminating discussiontraces Taoism’s influence on Jung’s typol-ogy, and a lengthy chapter provides a criti-cal, but balanced, review of threecompeting typological systems, the FiveFactor model, the Keirsey-Bates model,and the Singer-Loomis Inventory ofPersonality (the SLIP). The author alsoexplains why there are two separate world-wide Jungian communities, the analystsand the typologists. Many factors accountfor this, but he sees the central cause as the‘failure to holistically harmonize the typeswith the archetypes by both Jung andJungian analysts . . .’ (p. 475). This may betoo strongly put, but there is little doubtthat a ‘professional alliance of the twocommunities would significantly advancethe influence of Jung’s psychology’ (p.470).

The book has also what Giannini calls a‘hidden agenda’ (p. 509). It is a leitmotivand constitutes the second main theme,which is the application of Jungian typology

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