Chapter 1 The evil and the good

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

I'm waiting in my room for a new client, a fifteen-year-old boy named Joseph. His mother, an American diplomat who separated from Joseph's father a year or so ago, rang last week to see if I would see him. 'I'm worried about him socially,' she said. 'He's doing well academically at his small independent school, but he seems to be lonely and he doesn't make friends easily with kids his own age. He never has. We've been in Canberra just on a year and maybe it's just a matter of settling in, though this has been his pattern ever since kindergarten, apparently doing all right but at the edges of the group, sometimes teased, and occasionally doing strangely anti-social things.'

‘What kind of things?' I asked and his mother told me that there'd been an incident at a school in Amsterdam where Joseph, then aged twelve, had been discovered one wintry afternoon digging what he later called 'traps for little kids' along a path near the local kindergarten. He was reported to the school authorities, the parents were contacted, but no further action was taken. His parents were at a loss as to how to understand or respond to this incident. "We didn't really talk to him about it,' she said, 'I guess because we didn't really know what to say and were hoping that it was just a passing thing.'

But she'd found herself remembering the incident when she saw the way Joseph was with his middle brother William who is 13. 'They fight a lot,' she said, 'and it really upsets me, Joseph can be quite cruel. The fighting's got worse recently.'

'He's the middle brother?' I asked.

'Yes, I've got another son called Davie who is just 5, very much the baby of the family. Joseph is very protective towards him, especially if there's conflict with William, though even with Davie Joseph's lost interest recently. He spends more and more time in front of the computer screen or the TV. He seems to be withdrawing, but won't talk about it, not to me anyway. I was hoping that maybe you could bring him out a bit, see what's bothering him.'

'And the marriage breakup, was that difficult for the boys?' I asked.

'It was so hard to tell,' she said, 'maybe because it was so hard for me and I wasn't as available or as attentive as I might have been. There was another man, someone who has since come over from the States and is living with us, and the breakup was actually very sudden, though the seeds of it had been there for a long time. Joseph said that the breakup didn't really bother him but I don't know, I should have spent more time with them I guess, but you know how it is.'

***

'So, tell me what's brought you here,' I say as Joseph settles down next to me on the couch in my room, his large brown eyes looking faintly bemused, as if to suggest that if this is a place for kids who have problems then he doesn't belong here. He is ginger haired, fine boned, carefully and fashionably dressed (more formal than the majority of his peers) and with a cultured American accent.

'Oh I don't know,' he says with a smile and a shrug. 'I thought I'd give it a try.’

‘You thought you'd like to give it a try.'

‘Yes ... maybe it would help me.'

‘You think it might help.'

'It might.'

‘I wonder what sorts of things it might help with,' I say.

‘Well, there are problems at school sometimes,' Joseph says, his tone now less airy. 'There's this boy in the class at school called Russell who's always teasing me, he calls me things, he can be really nasty sometimes.'

'He can be really nasty.'

‘Yes, he gets the other boys against me, he whispers stuff to them and they snigger and sneer, and so I find myself putting up a kind of barrier between me and them to keep the nastiness out.'

‘You put up a barrier.'

'Yes, but then it feels lonely on my side of the barrier, because none of the other boys in the class are on my side of it.' I'm surprised, given what his mother has said, how quickly he's talking about his distress.

‘You feel cut off from the others.'

'I do stuff on my own, but sometimes I'd like to be doing more with the other boys in the class.'

'The barrier protects you from their nastiness, but it also cuts you off from what's going on in the group.'

'Yeah, and the fact that I go to a small school in a wealthy suburb also makes me feel cut off a bit. It's like our little school is protected from the world out there, there's a barrier there too.'

‘There are two barriers then. The one between you and the other boys, and the one between your school and the outside world.'

'Yes, so I worry about being ready to face up to life when neither of these walls is there to protect me.'

'The walls give you a sense of safety, but they also feel overly protective.'

'I've tried to do something about the first wall,’ he says. 'In the last couple of days I've made a decision to just walk up to Russell and the other boys and join in with whatever they are doing, and that's been working pretty well. I'm also thinking that maybe I'd like to move schools and try a government high school.'

'You'd like to try another school, something less protected,' I say.

‘That's right,' he says.

‘You'd like to get out into the world a bit more,' I say. There's much more worldly energy here than I'd expected. So many of the young people I see are passive, withdrawn, wanting to retreat from the world in some necessary but developmentally problematical way. Joseph, on the other hand, seems to be wanting to get out there and into it.

'I want to, but I worry about whether I'll be able to cope,' he says.

We sit in silence for a while. He's articulated his difficulty very quickly and clearly, though for some reason I have a sense that something is being left out or by-passed. I decide to suggest a second way into things.

‘You see the figures over there,' I say, pointing to a book case full of tiny figures and objects, the kind of array usually available for sand-tray work. 'I wonder if you might use some of them to create a scene on the carpet.'

'A scene?' asks Joseph. 'What kind of scene?'

'Anything,' I say. 'If you like it could be something which corresponds in some way to what it is that we've been talking about, or it might be something that simply forms itself out of the figures and objects you find yourself drawn to.'

Joseph nods and goes over to the shelf. He takes down two groups of figures and two boxes, and then spends about ten minutes carefully arranging them on each side of a space on the carpet.

'There,' he says. 'The carpet there, the space between the two groups, that's the sea.'

"What I'd like you to do now,' I say, ‘is to tell me a story based on the scene that you have just created. Imagine yourself as a storyteller. I'll type as you tell me your story.' I go over to the computer and turn it on as he prepares himself.

'OK, he says when I give him the signal. 'There's the evil and the good, and between them is the sea and at each end of sea there are two boxes of mystery. At one side of the sea there are the good things, the sweet smelling, the comfortable and the good ruler. On the other side, there is the evil and it's all enclosed in bushes, a sense of not letting the rest of the world know what's going on inside. There are the sour smelling things, the funny and evil kind of things, and an evil kind of a ruler. And also on the evil side there is a part that the good side has conquered, and its armour is being taken off and it is being exposed and converted to the good. And in the middle of the sea, and between the two sides, there is a sun which is a meeting point, not very high where neither will fight, like a conference area where they talk.'

As he tells me his story, I feel myself drawn into the imaginative world that he is creating. I'm particularly taken with the juxtaposition of the two sides and the way the sweet is separated from the 'sour smelling things' by the ocean barrier. This erecting of a barrier is a strategy that I know well from my own school days, from my own childhood response to teasing. I used to take a book to my boarding school bed, draw the covers over my head after the lights had been turned off, switch on my torch and lose myself in the adventures on the page. As I type Joseph's story I lose myself in my own reverie. I know about the soothing realm of the imaginal. I know its restorative powers. I feel the two of us erecting the barriers together, shutting out the painful tauntings from Russell and his friends.

‘That's a wonderful story Joseph,' I say as he finishes. 'You've created a very rich and dramatic scene there and I feel your story has laid out for us some of the places we might explore together: the good and the evil places, the sense of evil being won over to the good, the meeting place which is the sun. It's wonderful. You've laid out the territory which is full of mystery, the territory for us to explore.'

Joseph beams. 'That would be great,' he says.

There are just a few minutes to go, and I ask Joseph if he has had any dreams recently.

'I dreamt this last night,' he says. 'There was a girl from my class, and she was sitting on the amphitheatre steps playing with something she usually plays with and that she's been playing with for the last few days, and Mr Rogers the geography teacher gets really incensed by what she is doing, and I was looking on with my new found friends and we were talking and saying, "She isn't doing anything wrong," but Mr Rogers was getting angrier and angrier about something that wasn't wrong at all.'

'So,' I say when he's finished, conscious that our hour is up but feeling that I need to make some response to the dream, however inadequate, 'you and your friends know that the girl isn't doing anything wrong but the teacher is getting angrier and angrier.'

'Yes, that's about it,' he says. He's looking enlivened and engaged, quite different from how he was at the beginning of our time together.

But I'm aware as Joseph leaves that I'm relieved that our time has run out, that I'm feeling oddly in awe of the material he's brought along, the story in particular, but also the dream. It's as though someone has given me carefully wrapped artefacts of great value and significance, and I'm not sure what to do with them, how to unwrap them or contemplate them in a way that will be therapeutically useful. I feel myself to be witness to some kind of mystery. I actually feel a little useless, which is strange given the obvious effect of the session on Joseph's demeanour.

***

Later in the week I ring my supervisor Giles Clark (1), having already sent him some notes about the session. As is our custom, we begin with me outlining what it is that I'd like help to think about. My preamble is often lengthy and discursive.

'I want to talk about Joseph today Giles,' I say, 'and about our first session. In particular I want to talk about the story he told me about 'the Evil and the Good' and about how I felt as I was listening to it. It was like I was being taken into a world with only tenuous links with the world of everyday realities ... I've been reading Hillman's Dream and the Underworld (2) this week so I want to talk about Joseph's story in relation to some of the ideas in that wonderful book. And I also want to put these things side-by-side with my feeling of uselessness at the end of the session, a feeling I don't understand because the session itself was so obviously an enlivening one for Joseph himself.'

'Fine,' says Giles.

'Maybe I can start with Hillman,' I say. 'I assume that you don't much like him, given what he's said about developmental psychology!"(3)

‘On the contrary Steve, I like Hillman. He's imaginative and rigorous, always stimulating and seems to me to be one of three thinkers - the other two being Klein and Bion - who have most to say about psychosis, to have had the deepest feeling for madness.'

'But you'd have significant squabbles with him?'

'Let's not be diverted just yet from what you're wanting to think about here. If it's relevant, perhaps some of my differences with Hillman - actually it's more with some of Hillman's followers - will come out. But do go on.'

'Well,' I say, 'I've been reading Dream and the Underworld and I find it exhilarating reading. It's Hillman's view - and this seems to me connected to Joseph's story and why I felt so in awe of it - that our waking lives are shaped by the dynamics of this underground world, the world of our psyches, about which we know so little directly but which manifests in our lives in the vivid images of our dreams, in the things we find ourselves almost unaccountably doing. Our lives, says Hillman, are shaped and ordered less by the past (as traditional psychoanalytic theory has it) than by what goes on in this internal world, this underground populated by the gods. 'All daylight consciousness begins in the night and bears its shadows," he says (4). 'What goes on in the life of the ego is merely the reflection of one's deeper essence contained in the shadow' (5) ... Dreams have no father, no call upwards. They come only from Night, and they have no home other than in that dark realm' (6)... No longer: Ego casting Shadow after it; instead, a shade literalizing an ego in front of it and behind which it can remain hidden." (7)

'And you're saying that this is connected to your response to Joseph's story,’ says Giles.

‘Yes. As I listened to Joseph telling me his story, I felt drawn down into the Underworld. It was like I was being invited to view with him an intrapsychic drama of great consequence, a story fashioned by the complexes and gods of his psyche. It was like I was being invited to follow Joseph down into the Underworld and I suppose I found myself operating out of the assumption that this glimpse of the Underworld - or perhaps the journey that we were taking together into those regions - would reveal meanings, directions and would tap into something that might be healing or restorative or energising in some important way. It's like being given a glimpse of the contents of the collective unconscious, of an archetypal pattern which is being enacted deep in Joseph's psyche, so that the worst thing I could do would be to interfere too much in the process.'

'Your experience was one of being awed. It was awesome.'

'In a sense, yes, though maybe that's not quite right because there was concurrently a part of me that was saying that this wasn't real. I suppose I was moved and sceptical at the same time. Or not so much sceptical as unsure. I suppose that's what I want to talk with you about today?'

'And not only unsure but also useless,' says Giles.

'Yes, and it wasn't only because I wasn't sure about what was being revealed. I also had this sense of not having a role to play, of being superfluous. I mean, what do you do in the presence of material that feels numinous in some way?'

Instead of responding directly to my question, Giles is quiet for a while.

'I think,' he says at last, 'that one of the less helpful legacies we Jungians have been saddled with is what seems to me to be a one-sided emphasis on the intrapsychic, together with a way of talking about the intrapsychic as if it were a physical space. There's a kind of fascination with images that leads us to miss what might actually be happening with the person in front of us. You find this in some of Jung's writing and amongst the Hillmanians.'

'You're saying that when I listen to Joseph's story through ears somehow attuned to Hillman's prose, I'm missing something of the actual Joseph sitting in front of me?'

'I want to talk more generally for the moment, because I don't want you to come away from our conversation feeling that I'm in any way critical of your deep listenings to dreams and stories. I see you in some ways as an evoker, maybe even as revealer, a fierce revealer, and a defender of people's deeply important treasures ... no, not treasures, that's too static an image... their stories. What's happening when Joseph tells you his story is crucial, it's therapeutic, it's an abreaction, an opportunity to express, to confess, to let it all out. That mustn't go in any attempt to relate more actively to Joseph, to be a more useful therapist. This 'safe place' or haven idea is important too: therapy can only take place where fears and frustrations can be safely expressed, in conditions which must be different from the intolerable repressions or missings that occur in the outside world. So providing Joseph with a haven is no mean thing; this also mustn't be thrown out with whatever bath water you're wanting to replace or cleanse or get rid of. But feeling useless... now that's another thing!'

'Feeling useless implies that I'm missing something?'

‘Not at all. Or at least not in itself. There are many times when we therapists feel useless because the client needs us to feel useless. They either need to disable us because we're a threat, or they need us to know in our bodies how they themselves are feeling, which might be useless.'

'I don't think I was particularly threatening during our first session,' I say.

'You are a fierce revealer, or you have that capacity. Perhaps Joseph sensed this.'

'Or perhaps he needed me to feel useless. Or to know uselessness because that's what he feels in the playground.'

'Or in relation to the disintegration of his parents' marriage,' says Giles. 'There was nothing he could do, presumably, though his world was split apart as a result of it.'

'How can you say that Giles? How can you know that he felt split apart? His mother told me that it hadn't seemed to have affected him much.'

"I cannot know these things,' says Giles, 'but I can allow the imagery from his stories and dreams to inform my sense of him. His story is about the sourness of evil and his dream is about some problematical anger. It would be missing something essential in Joseph if we were to ignore the possibility that these are descriptions of his experiences of himself.'

'Jung said that the collective unconscious was unconnected to the personal events of a person's life,' I say. (8) ‘You're saying that this story and the dream are not manifestations of the collective unconscious.'

'I think that too great an emphasis on the intrapsychic, whether it be in terms of the collective unconscious or the underworld or the gods or the archetypes, can lead to a missing of the patient. Hillman brings alive the primordial depths, but it can be too general. The question we're needing to ask ourselves here is not, 'What is the Underworld like?' but ‘What is Joseph's Underworld like?' And we need to remain mindful of the probability that Joseph's Underworld is telling us something essential about his experience of the world.'

'Hillman would say, wouldn't he Giles, that the characters in Joseph's story have their own autonomous life, their existence in an Underworld which is at one and the same time non-personal and profoundly important in the unravelling of our own destinies.'

'On the contrary, these characters are intensely personal! Though it's early days and we cannot know yet how Joseph's early life is connected to the images in this story, connected they most certainly are! Joseph is at present hoping that the good and the sweet smelling has the capacity to unmask and convert the evil and the sour smelling. This is about you and the therapy, and about what he feels oppressively about his internal realities. He wants to be rescued by you, he feels rotten inside.'

'Maybe it's like there are two processes at work here' I say, for the moment attempting a reconciliation of Giles and Hillman. 'On the one hand there's a kind of inevitable human experience which Joseph would encounter in his waking life or in his dreams whether or not his parents had had this messy ending to their relationship on the one hand, and on the other there's the working out of the consequences of that real life event.'

'Mmm,' says Giles. My attempt has failed so I revert to my anti-developmental perspective.

‘But Hillman would say that this is to look in the wrong direction for the meaning behind this story,' I say. 'As soon as you try to make a connection between historical event and present psychic image, you're allowing yourself to be seduced by the developmental fantasy that our psychology is caused by some historical happening. No doubt Joseph's family circumstances are giving his present dreams and stories a particular shape, but it would be more fruitful, perhaps, to look not to the past but in a sense to the future, to what it is that Joseph is becoming. Hillman's acorn theory of life. (9) Joseph is going to become a dancer, or a writer, or ... well, we don't know what yet ... but we do know (from looking at the lives of others) that childhood experiences are as much a preparation for 'becoming the oak tree' as they are the unravelling of childhood trauma in a developmental sense. So that looking at Joseph's story more as a glimpse of what is emerging, respecting that, paying attention to it - watering it or providing it with sunshine, if we're going to continue the metaphor of the acorn - is more helpful to him than seeing it purely in terms of the tensions set up in him as a result of historical events.'

'For god's sake, Steve,' exclaims Giles, 'can't you see how far you are straying from what is before your eyes! These reflections are all very soulful, all very poetic, but they're nourishing your psyche, not Joseph's. Joseph is crying out for a particular kind of attention, something disciplined and rigorous and specific, and it's to do with having someone understand that his need to be physically close, his digging pits for kindergarten children in Amsterdam and his story about the two worlds are all different versions of the same cry, a sense of being abandoned, unheld, ignored and unseen while those who he feels should be holding him are so immersed in their own pain that they cannot see what is happening. Here is a boy who is hurting because he has been evicted from the Garden of Eden, and his behaviour is saying, 'Help, listen, I need my pain to be noticed right now, and if no-one is going to notice then I'm going to go to some pretty extreme lengths to bring the focus back onto me.'

'Giles I can see that and I worry all the time that I'm tending my own wounds and not his, but ...

'For what it's worth, I don't think you're over-expressing your internal world here, otherwise Joseph would be behaving as if you were stealing from him. I was venting my spleen on more narcissistic and unknowing therapeutic stances than yours.'

'OK, but all this still begs the question of what kind of focus it is that Joseph wants. Does he want to talk about his parents and the separation and his own feelings at the time? Does he want the focusing to be that direct? Maybe instead he just wants to have time each week when the focus is unequivocally on him ... whether that's on his dreams, his stories, his drawings, his musings, the events of the week, working with the figures. What I like about Hillman is his insistence that we need to pay attention to the spontaneous images being thrown up by the psyche. This isn't Joseph wanting the focus on him, Hillman would say, but the gods clamouring for some elbow room. Joseph himself isn't especially aware of what's going on. He's on the deck of the ship and it's all happening down there in the engine room.'

'But you're leaving yourself out of this picture,' says Giles. 'If he's on the deck of the ship and the gods are down in the engine room, where are you?'

I have the uncomfortable thought that I'm some kind of albatross hovering around and watching, but can't bring myself to admit this to Giles.

"You're saying that Joseph needs me to be more involved,' I say. 'He wants me to be in the picture.'

'Not just in it, Steve, but doing things. You sometimes say to me that you're worried about imposing your own stuff onto your clients, but a much more immediate danger is that you'll be too passive, too much simply a listener. You worry about using your authority to influence your clients' behaviour, and perhaps as a result you hang back too much and don't influence them enough. Joseph requires specific things from you. He wants you to understand things that he feels overwhelmed by and which he feels he cannot grapple with alone, he wants you to be in there helping to push back the armour of the evil side so that it can be converted to the good. This is why he's telling you the story, this is why he's taking you so quickly into the painful world that he experiences at school. Perhaps my main problem with some Hillmanites is that their extreme inwardness and fascination with an image can be symptomatic of an analyst's schizoid fear of messy, emotional intimacy, of desire, love and hate.'

'You feel I have to be more active,' I say.

'More involved, less the observer,' says Giles. 'Closer to the action.'

'I'm missing things at the moment,' I say, knowing that Giles is touching on something essential about my feelings of uselessness and wanting to understand exactly what he means, but finding it difficult to let go of the soulful poetry of Hillman's evocation of the depths.

'I'm not sure why I'm saying this,' says Giles, 'but perhaps you're less missing something in Joseph than missing something in yourself. Your dreams, the ones you've told me about, are full of rage and longing and yet I don't sense these things present at all in your work with Joseph. You're being moved by it at some level, but overall I'm most conscious of how careful you're being. Where are your rage and your longing? Where are your healthy passions? You've got this fierce task here, and you need to be in touch with an anger which your dreams know but about which your waking therapist self is unaware. I'm talking about a raw energy which can get angry with the self-effacing you.'

'If I were more in touch with it, I'd be more active?' I ask.

'I don't know about what comes first. I can't say anything more about the relationship of the healthy passions with activity, not as it applies to you and Joseph at the moment. I just think that Joseph is needing you in there connecting, personalising, differentiating, grounding, so that he knows that you see him.'

'Someone once said that the trouble with having Jung as your analyst was that he saw archetypes when what you wanted was for him to see you.' (10)

'Yes, it's something along those lines,' says Giles. 'An overly intrapsychic focus can lead to a terrible missing of a patient's real needs. Of course this is terribly complex stuff we're working with but thinking of our work as being present at a mystery can marginalise us, render us powerless. It's just a job. Perhaps thinking about it in more everyday terms is not a bad idea.'

'Giles,' I say suddenly, 'T've just remembered a dream I had this week about Joseph.'

'You've just this moment remembered it?' asks Giles.

'Yes, and it seems connected to what we're talking about here. In my dream I'm taking part in some very big ceremony. I'm one of two leaders and we're preparing Joseph who is about to be sacrificed. But he doesn't realize this, he thinks he's being prepared for something great. I play on this grandiose feeling by telling him that only he, of all the boys in the community, is ready for what is about to happen. Joseph is listening intently and I realise that my words are getting him into the right psychological state. But my co-organiser keeps butting in with his or her own way of talking to Joseph and it's not in the same spirit as what I am telling him. Still, we're getting closer to being ready, even though it's taking much more time than expected. I cut up some apples, which have poison in them, but which are there just for ceremonial purposes. In fact Joseph is going to be burnt to death with very hot water. My co-organiser whispers to me that he doesn't think Joseph has understood what we've been saying to him, and so he doubts this is going to work as planned. I say it doesn't really matter, the event is in bigger hands than our own.'

'Goodness, says Giles.

'It's all there, isn't it!' I say. 'Avoiding the painful realities in order to feel better, feeling that I'm powerless because it's all in bigger hands than my own, getting poor Joseph into hot water which will be fatal!'

‘Reification can be a dangerous thing,' says Giles.

***

'I want to tell you about a dream I've had,' I say to Giles at the beginning of a supervision session the following week. 'A dream from a couple of years ago.'

‘You want to tell it to me because of something we've been talking about?'

'Well yes and no,' I say. 'It's a very big dream and I've talked a lot about different aspects of it with my therapist. It's been like getting to know an unfamiliar part of myself, seeing its relevance to all sorts of areas in my life, and now I'm thinking that the dream has got a connection to the work we're doing in this supervision, maybe with the rage that you were talking about when I first told you about this new client Joseph. I've been wanting to tell it to you for weeks but until now I've resisted the impulse. But it won't go away.'

'Fine,' says Giles, 'tell me your dream.'

‘I dreamt that I'd gone to Pentridge Jail in Melbourne, along with two friends and my baby son. Have you seen Pentridge Jail, Giles?'

'No, it's in Melbourne you say?' Giles has recently settled in Australia from England.

‘Yes in Melbourne, an old jail with big black stone walls, it's where Ned Kelly was hanged. It's a dark and brooding kind of place and in my dream I've arrived carrying my baby son and two journalist friends and we're here to interview a criminal whose name is Hannibal.'

'Hannibal,' says Giles. 'Like the Hannibal in the film Silence of the Lambs?'

'Yes, though I hadn't seen the film when I had the dream. It was such a shock when I actually saw the film, Giles, the character of Hannibal, the chilling atmosphere in the prison... they were so like what I experienced in the dream ... Anyway, we are let into the prison and we adults are immediately separated, and for a while I find myself wandering around the corridors. I begin to feel edgy. Then I rejoin the others and we are taken to Hannibal's cell. It is a big room and I can see that it's crowded with prisoners and warders. There is a big man in a brown tweed jacket sitting with his back to us. He's playing chess and I know that this is Hannibal. He comes out to meet us - he's enormous, over seven feet tall and immensely powerful. I shake his hand and he's very polite in a Mafiosi godfather kind of way. He's got a hair lip so that when he speaks his words are indistinct. I'm holding my baby as we speak. Some of the prisoners and all the warders leave, and there are about ten left in the room, Hannibal's closest colleagues. We chat for a while, and then the three of us start to ask questions. The first question is personal, but Hannibal avoids all personal stuff in his answer. Instead he twists the answer so that he can talk about his 'organisation', which is some kind of a business or political party - existing either inside the prison or outside, I'm not sure. I'm beginning to be concerned about my son and try to keep him on my knee, but he crawls off and under the furniture and so I have to get down on the floor to fetch him. Then one of my colleagues asks Hannibal if the fact that he always vomits after eating is connected to what he did to the baby and I suddenly realise that his crime was murdering and then eating a baby. The atmosphere in the cell switches from polite to chilling and Hannibal is suddenly furious. He says that we are determined just to write terrible things about him. He stands up and silences some loud music that's blaring away in the background, and then the lights go off and we're suddenly in pitch blackness. It's hellish - me with my baby son, not knowing what the prisoners will do, wondering where they are, where the warders are. I have my son in my arms and I'm rocking and making soothing sounds to him even though I can sense that he's not upset at all. I feel the prisoners moving around me and one of us screams. I keep worrying that Hannibal is looking for us, that he'll come for my boy. I think this will never end, and start praying and silently chanting for the warders to come. Then the lights go on. I'm unharmed, and Hannibal is sitting quietly at a piano, hunched over it but not playing. We leave hurriedly out into the pouring rain. I tuck my son under my jacket to keep him dry. Then we get into a car.'

'He's sitting by the piano,' says Giles.

'Hunched over it, looking really sad I think, his great heavy shoulders hunched over the piano ... as if he wanted to play, as if he had lots of music inside him but no way of getting it out.'

'Yes indeed,' says Giles.

'It was terrifying though,' I add. 'The dream itself woke me up - that's rare for me - and I remember lying in the dark aware that my back and neck and face were wet with hot sweat. My first terrified thought was that Hannibal was in the room, it took me some time to realize where I was.'

'And you had this impulse that wouldn't go away to tell this dream to me,' says Giles.

'Yes, I wanted to tell it to you because you're my supervisor and I have a feeling that at least one aspect of it is connected to my professional life at the moment.'

'Go on,' says Giles.

‘Well just recently I've found myself thinking about the kind of therapist I've become,' I say. ‘I've always prided myself on my thoroughness, on my reliability I suppose. I've always had this as part of my make-up, being the eldest of three children and having found a place for myself in the world as the responsible one.'

'So you're thorough and reliable,' says Giles.

'I'm organised too. I think a lot about the clients who come to see me and I write up long notes after sessions ... but there's something missing. All the thinking and talking with my analyst about this dream has helped bring something a bit closer to my awareness which I'm imagining might be connected to this sense of something being missing.'

"Which is ...?'

'It's to do with a feeling that there's a part of me imprisoned, like Hannibal, a part of me capable of extensive organisation which has a controlling aspect to it, controlling and limiting, somehow connected to the shutting out of feeling which is present in the dream. In my personal life I go through periods of intense feelings of being shut out from life, of not having the charisma of my brother or the worldliness of my sister, of being trapped in some world which is in some ways a world of my own making and is lonely and frustrating and full of rage. These rages have been increasingly coming out in my personal life, almost like an accumulation of frustrated energy concentrated in some fury in order to blast down barriers, but the barriers keep surviving. I'm conscious of a cruelty I'm capable of in these moods, and the image of Hannibal eating babies, killing off potential life, is unsettlingly apt. And then there's that final image of Hannibal sitting at the piano, hunched over it, wanting to play. That's how I feel. About a year ago an adolescent client of mine told me a story of himself as a prince trapped in a prison and hearing music coming in from the outside world through his cell windows, and how this experience led him to focus his energies on escaping from the prison. For me it's the music I have inside which I want to get out, Hannibal at the piano wanting to play so that those outside can hear him. It's something to do with making connections with a bigger world outside the confines of the prison. Beyond the self. I'm a thorough therapist, self-contained in a way, but there's something missing.'

"You're wanting to play the piano so that others will hear you,' says Giles.

'And I'm wanting to get rid of my extensive organisation so that I can experience others more fully,' I say.

‘You're wanting me to know that you've had this dream, that you're feeling this frustration.'

‘I suppose I'm wanting this dream that has got into me to get into you too,' I say, remembering some of the discussions Giles and I have had about Kleinian mechanisms. 'I'm wanting it to be a part of what we can talk about together.'

‘You're hoping that telling it to me is going to shift something,' says Giles.

'I guess that's why we tell our dreams to others isn't it?' I say. 'I guess that's exactly why we tell our stories to others, in order to shift something, to make a difference.'

'To shift something ... to change something,' says Giles. 'Or to keep things the same when they're being challenged.'

'Stories as progressive, stories as conservative,' I say. 'You often emphasize the negative Giles.'

'It must be my innate pessimism,' says Giles.

'Or your instinctive reaction to my innate optimism,' I say.

Notes

(1) Because Giles lives in Sydney and I live in Canberra, all of our supervision sessions are done over the phone.

(2) Hillman (1979)

(3) I knew from a reference in Andrew Samuels book on the post-Jungians (p20 Samuels, A. 1985) that Giles was considered to be from the Developmental school of the Jungian tradition. Hillman said the following about the developmentalists (p 234 Hillman" 1990):

We have been initiated into the myth of developmental psychology: that all life moves in one direction starting in infancy (but not before, not beyond). Moreover, the simplistics of our myth say that this one-way direction in time is causal: a person is caused by history, and the earlier the history the more powerful the cause. So, childhood has been declared the source of all our disaffected behaviour. This tale told by dynamic and developmental psychology says childhood is basically miserable. Every therapy session searches memory for traces of unhappiness. We do not turn there for beauty and joy, but to uncover the curses of abuse, shame, and fixation on that abuse and shame. Bad mothers, absent fathers and envious siblings are the demons and ogres in psychology's fairy tale. The serpr curses the family with a psychology of blame instead of honor. It also curses the pleasurable world and the origins of the libido in sensuous joy.

(4) p5 Hillman (1979)

(5) p56 Hillman (1979)

(6) p33 Hillman (1979)

(7) p59 Hillman (1979). Hillman also says

Here a difference with Freudian and Jungian praxes becomes most obvious. I mean the relation between the dream and a person's remembrances, or anamnesis, is different in our way of working. Although Freudians have always paid especial attention to dreams, and Jungians have categories called "initial dreams" and "big dreams" that they use as decisive, predictive images, neither take the radical bridge-burning step that our attitude forces on us. While they put the dream in the patient and his life context, we place the patient and his life in the dream. Our first psychotherapeutic move is to imagine him in a dream. His dayworld stories are regarded as further places where his dream is dreamt, his problems further analogies of his images. These images are his psychic context and his psychic reality, which we, as therapists of the psyche, consider to be our first and last concern. Our image theory means that we have nowhere to place the patient except in his images, in the midst of his 'material', and both of us must stay in the underworld, foregoing whatever metapsychological aims the dream might be serving: ego development, integration, social interest, individuation.

This means forsaking anamnesis in the sense of case history, the usual gathering of a context of social realities and personal experiences in which to put the dreams. To our perspective, none of this is more important that the dream or even helps to understand it. The phenomenon to be saved is the dream, saved from its dayworld links, which distort the images in personal recollections. Our anamnesis is the dream itself, and we get to know the patient through his dreams, from below, turning to his psyche before his dayworld life. This move constellates the underworld from the beginning and initiates the whole analytical procedure as a descent into unknown space.

pp195 - 196 Hillman (1979)

(8) see for example Jung 'Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious' CW Vol 9 §3 reproduced in Four Archetypes Ark Paperback London 1989 pp 3-4, where Jung writes:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscous. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal: in contrast to the personal psyche, the collective psyche has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.

(9) See particularly Hillman (1996)

(10) It was Fordham who thought if Jung "got on be track of an archetype he tended to lose sight of the person in whom it was active" p 33 Astor (1993).