Process Press is proud to present the re-issuing of one of our founder's, Bob Young's, later works: Mental Space.

What enhances and constricts mental space–space for reflection, for feeling, for relating to others, for being open to experience? The author addresses this question in the light of two sets of issues: how we locate psychoanalysis in the history of thought about nature and human nature, and which psychoanalytic approaches are most useful and resonant with our experience, as contrasted with scientistic versions of psychology. He turns to concepts which bear on these issues: culture and cultural studies, transference and countertransference, psychotic anxieties and other primitive processes, projective identification and transitional phenomena. In each case he gives a careful exposition of the history of the concept and the debates about its scope and validity in individual and social terms, including group relations, racism and virulent nationalism. Particular attention is paid to the kinds of accounts of human experience which are most enabling, as opposed to those which diminish the richness of experience. This is a book about the problematic idea of mental space and about the concepts which the author has found most helpful in understanding what enhances and threatens it.