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Bachelard is very difficult to talk about or review. It's not that his writing is difficult, but rather that his subjects are so elusive, and he never shies away from avoiding specific conclusions; in fact, to specify conclusions would be contrary to his intent. Trying to specify a conclusion in his writing would be like trying to describe the shape of a flame (an easy simile but it's apt). His writing is like a flame (but somehow a soft flame that would never burn too terribly) in that there is a general shape but no specific shape, it's there and not there, an immaterial materiality. Yet behind all this gauzy unspecificity is an active needle-sharp mind, probing and probing, obsessed with origins and the root of all things.

The title of this particular book is somewhat deceiving. It's not that he politely asked a flame to lay on the couch and proceeded to question it about its tyranical mother. Rather the psychoanalytical subject is the human conceptualizations of fire, our subjective (masquerading as objective) responses to it. And through this study he lays bare the fallacy of scientific objectivity, the impossibiltiy of it, because we are simply too ruled by our passions and our loves. When we look at something such as a flame or a fire, no matter how determined we are to remain detached and objective, a revery is induced that causes our emotional body to project itself onto the flame, which in turn alters our conclusions.

Using historical example he shows that this process is very much like the experience of old time alchemists who dreamed wildly while monkishly ensconced among their flames and their alembics, and took these wild dreams as objective scientific conclusions. But I don't think Bachelard is disparaging these alchemists as he uses them as examplars. I think he uses them as an extreme example of what happens inside each of us as we gaze upon all the living objects around us.