...the Botellas are ... astute clinicians and their book is illustrated with clinical vignettes and case examples from adult and child analyses. While they may reason at a metapsychological level of complex theoretical and philosophical abstraction, they repeatedly return to the clinical moment to illustrate their main thesis: that a theory of psychoanalysis and mental functioning that assumes the capacity ... Read morefor representation and an intact, symbolizing ego is insufficient to account for the clinical phenomena and therapeutic exigencies encountered in an ordinary psychoanalytic practice! What they insist is needed instead is a theory capable of addressing and accounting for what Michael Parsons, in his very helpful introduction to the English language edition, describes as that aspect of experience which will not 'go into words' because it will not, so to speak, 'go into thought' in the first place. (p. xvii). Put another way, the Botellas are attempting to create language and theory to describe the action of converting proto-elements of thought and feeling into something that is mentalizable and potentially articulatable and representable. - Howard B Levine, Psychoanalytic Quarterly Show Less