Chapter 10 Disgusting and unnatural

Part B: Attempts at mating

‘So you don't want to talk about that last session?’ said Giles when I rang him afterwards. ‘There's lots in it.’

‘Not right now,’ I said. ‘I know something happened in that session but …’

‘... it certainly did. Lots of things...’

‘... but just at the moment I don't want to look backwards. I want to prepare myself for what's to come.’

‘You're worried about what's to come?’

‘It's not that I'm worried Giles. It's something else. I get the strong impression from Joseph that this will have to be our last week together, that he won't be able to bear any more. He's wanting to get on with things.’

‘He's feeling very exposed. What was it he said? "I feel like I'm on a stage and the audience might see something in me that's not natural." You can't stand on a stage feeling like that for very long.’

‘So it's like we've got this final window of opportunity, this final intense week.’

‘You're having two sessions a day, is that right?’

‘Yes, except for today. He can only make one today. But for the rest of the week it's two sessions a day.’

‘Intense stuff.’

‘So I'm wanting to focus on this coming week, to prepare myself for it.’

‘To get yourself in the right frame of mind.’

‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘I know we're close to the end and yet it still seems we're on the edge of unfamiliar territory. I don't know what we're about to enter.’

‘It's a dark place. You're wanting to bring a candle with you.’

‘You're remembering my dream Giles. I had another one last night. There was this teenager in last night's dream setting off fireworks, big spectacular fireworks ... big explosions, showers of falling flames ... but spectacular rather than dangerous. Anyway, as I was watching this I heard a voice very clearly, and the voice said, that which is created doesn't have to be destroyed but can be played with.’

‘Very Winnicottian!’ said Giles.

‘It is isn't it! I've been thinking about Joseph in relation to this dream .. and about our last session ...’

‘ ... I wondered if we might return to that last session!’

‘ ... and I thought about the things Joseph creates .... the anger which comes and goes but is so often inaccessible and so can't be played with ... his exhibitionist impulses which he wants to destroy with the Zero. I've also been thinking about the way my clever thoughts sometimes destroy his creations ... then yesterday someone quoted Yeats to me. God guard me from the thoughts men think in the mind alone ... do you know it Giles?’

‘He that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone.’ Oh yes, Steve, I know it and I believe it!’

‘So I've been thinking about the coming week and about Joseph's creations and how they're so often destroyed and how I might play with them.’

‘How you might still your conscientious mind,’ said Giles.

‘It used to be much easier for me Giles, when I was a teacher.’

‘There are times when it sounds as though you miss teaching Steve.’

‘There are aspects that I do miss.’

‘Things like?’

‘Well, like the fun of it! The bodily involvement, if you like, a kind of involvement that seems less possible when I'm sitting opposite a distressed client. The fact that as a teacher I could follow my instincts, my passions! I could read the stories I loved, play the games that I enjoyed, sing and play the drums and make up plays and indulge in adventurous and imaginative large-scale projects that had me up late at night reading about medieval towns. There was physical contact ... wrestling, children on the knee, hands on the head ... and lots of playing! And there was a sense of community, as we lived our school lives together, met crises, made plans and had our rituals and celebrations. Of course I'm over-stating it, romanticising the past! But I'm also trying to reach somewhere for something that's missing from the present.’

‘Perhaps you're implying that your Hannibal dream is a message to you as a therapist, about a kind of music-making that was once present in your life but is no longer available.’

‘Maybe that's what last night's dream is about too,’ I said. ‘Maybe it's about reclaiming something that I've allowed myself to lose over the past decade as I've moved into being a therapist.’

‘Your ability to engage playfully, more lightly, less seriously.’

‘It's a paradox, isn't it, that the more difficult the territory, the lighter the footfall.’

‘We're not talking about being less involved or subtle here, or even less intelligent.’

‘We're talking about more embodied. Less earnest. More intuitively on the ball. Thinking in a marrow bone. The therapist's chair too often encourages in me a kind of arms-length engagement and I'm seeing more clearly, I think, that Joseph needs my warm engagement with him.’

‘The audience in front of the stage is less likely to be intimidating if he feels you warmly engaged. Or hotly, as you were in the last session.’

‘Yes that was a bit of a shock! I didn't expect that.’

‘That was speaking from the marrow!’

‘It's odd the way it didn't destroy anything. Or didn't seem to. He was more engaged afterwards.’

‘Probably pleased that he'd made the bully lose control!’ said Giles.

‘Probably! Also pleased, I think, that I then took a step back and wondered if my anger was connected to his.’

‘It's Winnicott again Steve. Joseph has attacked you and you've survived. You talked to him after the destruction. You played with it.'

‘Winnicott has written about this, hasn't he. What's the passage? Something about the subject saying to the object ...'

I'd clearly touched on one of Giles's favourite passages as he then quoted by heart the following:

The subject says to the object: 'I destroyed you', and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: 'Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy. (1)

‘I love that,’ I said. ‘Both things are happening at once. That's what's happening all the time with Joseph, both things, the loving and the hating ...’

‘... the creating and the destroying ...’

‘... the opening up and the shutting out. It's not one or the other. It's both at the same time, like two parallel lines running through our sessions ...’

‘... parallel and intertwined.’

‘Yes. Creating, destroying, playing ... surviving ... You know how I said a little while ago that in today's session I was wanting to prepare myself for what was to come?’

‘You want to make sure you survive.’

‘Yes, and for me that means to stay in there, not to give up, not to let things drift because they're too dizzying or because "it's out of my hands anyway"... There's something unclear in all of this about faith.’

‘About faith?’

‘Mmm. About faith … It's like I've had too much of one kind of faith and not enough of another, something like that.’

‘Say some more.’

‘Well Gles, this isn't clear, not at the moment, so I don't know if I can tell you what I mean ... I've always felt that I've had a kind of faith, and I guess my optimism has been based on it, but I've come to feel that this kind of faith is not especially grounded, it averts my gaze from what's happening in front of me, it leads me to disengage … to put things in the hands of some 'higher power' ... to trust that it will all come out OK in the end, no matter what I do, no matter how dizzied I am ...’

‘And you've been making moves away from this kind of faith.’

‘I have, but not away from faith itself ... I'm trying, at the same time, to have faith in something else. I think you have a deeper faith in the reality of the psyche than I do. You expect that things will be connected, that spontaneous images and dreams will be relevant. You believe in the reality of the transference.’

‘You don't?’

‘I do, but more in a theoretical way. My faith is more ... panicky!’

‘Panicky?’

‘Yes panicky ... When a client ... when Joseph tells me a dream, my faith in the dream's meaningfulness isn't strong enough for me to sit there, as I imagine you would do, and say, 'Well this dream is going to be connected, it's going to be important in some way, let's just allow the images to communicate with my marrow bone and see what comes up!' That's faith! What happens with me is that I start to listen to the dream and my mind gets a bit panicky, it gets overactive ... it starts to say, "Shit, this will be important! On your toes Steve. Somewhere buried in the dream you might be able to see, if you're clever and alert enough, the faint suggestion of a connection. You might, if you're extra clever, grab hold of a possible link."'

‘Ah,’ says Giles, ‘Now I see what you mean. Yes, a less panicky faith. This is Bion's "faith in O."(2)

‘A belief that things are ultimately meaningful, that there's a pattern in there, that it's not all random and unconnected. I'm talking about this now, Giles, because I don't want to forget it during this last week. All these supervisions and reflections about Joseph have taught me, I think, to have a greater faith, to see that there are connections and patterns, that his imagery is meaningful.’

‘And that one sees the connections through one's involvement in the process, rather than through standing back and directing the gaze elsewhere?’

‘Whether that be towards the heavens or one's own belly button!’

'Hullo’ says Joseph breezily as he comes in. ‘Here again!’ The black cloud of our last session seems to have moved on.

‘Hello Joseph,’ I say. He moves over to his seat while I draw one of the curtains, as I do at the beginning of every session.

‘Well, I've had a good weekend,’ he says. ‘I'm feeling pretty good.’

‘You're feeling good,’ I say, allowing myself to be infected by his sunniness.

‘Yes, I've been spending time with my mum's friend Annie and her family. You know about Annie, don't you, I'm sure I've talked about her before.’

‘You've told me dreams that she's been in,’ I say. ‘You've told me before how much you like her.’

Yes, she's fun!’ says Joseph. ‘I like being with Annie. There's always mucking around and laughing when she's around. She's a lot of fun.’

‘So the two families have been spending time together,’ I say.

‘No, just me actually. I've been sleeping over there at Annie's place the last few nights. Mum's boyfriend is leaving Australia soon so it seemed a good idea for me to go over to Annie's place. Which was really good. I've been helping Annie out with her telephone and computer connections, I like doing that kind of stuff, I like being useful in that kind of way. They know nothing, just nothing, about computers and telecommunications!’ For some time Joseph chats about Annie's family and about his interest in computers and telecommunications. Again he is performing for me, showing me his good side. I try to keep my eye on what the chatter might be covering up without dampening his performance, though I catch myself worrying at intervals that the whole session might be taken up like this. An opening will come, I say to myself, and if not there'll be another day. Joseph himself doesn't want the week to pass without some kind of resolution.

‘You enjoy being useful’, I say when at last there's a long-enough pause.

‘Yes, it's fun. It makes me feel good.’

‘And you like spending time with Annie. She's an important person in your life.’

‘Yes, I guess so.’

‘Your mum's pretty preoccupied with her friend leaving.’

‘I guess so.’

There's something about Joseph and connection to his mother in all of this, and I can feel myself crouching down beside the safe, starting to wonder about what combination might open the door. Keep it light, I say to myself. Allow the Joseph who is here today to reach me.

‘Perhaps you're feeling more comfortable with Annie than with your mum at the moment.’

‘I suppose so,’ he says airily. ‘There's more to do there. It's more fun.’

‘You're mum doesn't have a lot of spare time.’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘I wonder how that feels.’

‘It's fine,’ he says. ‘I understand that she's needing to spend time with her friend.’

‘I’m wondering if Annie is the kind of person you could talk to about what's been happening in your life,’ I say.

‘Oh, I wouldn't talk to Annie!’ he says quickly. ‘I wouldn't talk about that! By preference I wouldn't talk to anyone.’

‘Not to your mother or father,’ I say.

‘Not to anyone. They know of course, both of them. They know what happened, but I don't want to talk about it with them because of how it might change the way they saw me.’

‘Talking to them might change things,’ I say.

‘They both know what happened and I get the feeling from the way they are with me at the moment - I talked to Dad on the phone a while ago and he sort of referred to what had happened - that they're both working very hard to show me that it hasn't changed anything. Everyone's going about things as normal, we're all trying to be as normal as we can?’

‘It sounds slightly tense,’ I say.

‘I suppose so. I suppose I feel tense about it in some way, about what they're thinking.’

‘So it might be a relief to talk about it instead of pretending that everything's normal.’

‘I don't want to talk about it. I'd much rather be silent.’

‘You want to keep things to yourself,’ I say.

‘What I did was unacceptable and disgusting,’ says Joseph, almost shuddering. ‘I wish really I had punched someone rather than have done what I did. That would have been more acceptable somehow. What I did was just disgusting ... that sort of thing should be done in privacy ... because what I did involved another person it was just ... well, unacceptable... I don't like talking about it, not even here. Why is it important that we talk about it?’

‘Because it happened,’ I say. ‘Because the motivations are so hidden from us. Because whatever motivated you is probably still there. A part of you was trying to express something. The way it did it has been awful for you, it has filled you with shame. But it's still there.’

‘I'll never do anything like that again.’

‘The chances are greater if we leave this part of you in the dark. If we don't talk about it.’

Joseph is quiet for a moment, looking troubled. Perhaps there's resistance and anger there, but today it's much more than that. I have felt his pure resistance in the past, and this is different. Perhaps there's a tangle of feelings, a struggle between different Josephs: the respectable Joseph who was simply revolted or full of shame about what had happened, the rational Joseph who insists that he has learnt his lesson, and the worried Joseph who wants to get to the bottom of things.

‘I'm not saying it's pointless, talking about it,’ he says. ‘It's just that I can't see where it's going. I don't feel us getting anywhere.’

‘The feeling of getting somewhere comes and goes,’ I say.

‘Yes, sometimes it feels like we're getting closer. I guess we have to keep going.’

‘It feels too hard sometimes,’ I say.

‘It just feels that what happened was unacceptable. It was disgusting.’

‘It feels disgusting because someone else was involved,’ I say.

‘Yes. Something like that should be private.’

‘Joseph in the library didn't want it private.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To you, sitting here, it was a disgusting act, an unnatural act, something that you can't imagine doing ever again. The Joseph sitting here doesn't understand it, is cut off from it. But the Joseph who did it, who at the moment feels like another person, did it and wanted an audience.’

‘I guess so.’

‘Having an audience was important.’

‘Yes’'

‘Presumably the Joseph who did it wanted his act to have a particular effect on the audience.’

‘I suppose so.’

Joseph's responses are not sullen or unalive. He's letting me carry him somewhere.

‘I wonder what Joseph wanted to do to that audience,’ I say.

‘I don't know.’

‘Perhaps he wanted to shock it ... or frighten it.’

No response. Joseph's eyes are half closed, as if he's trying to get in touch with something

‘Maybe he was wanting to excite it,’ I say.

Still no response.

‘Maybe the Joseph who did it wanted to humiliate the boys who were there.’

Again he was quiet, then he said, ‘Humiliate sounds close. It's not exactly it, but it's close.’

‘Perhaps you'll find yourself thinking about this business of humiliation before we meet tomorrow, I say as we wind up. Feelings you have about wanting to humiliate. Times when you've felt humiliated yourself. Perhaps that's where we'll start tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ he says.

After Joseph has gone I sit for a while by myself. I'm aware of battling a deep fatigue as this final week begins. We've got eight more sessions to go, two each day for the rest of the week and I'm wondering how we're going to manage the intensity of it. Perhaps Joseph is feeling a similar fatigue, his weariness compounded by the worry that something vile and unnatural is going to be revealed.

Giles and I have agreed that we'll have some shorter supervision sessions this week, just ten minutes or so snatched at various times when both of us can talk. I won't be talking to him until tomorrow, after the first of my two sessions with Joseph, but I'm feeling the need for some kind of focussing of my energies and thoughts.

I want to do a kind of meditation. It's too easy for me to objectify Joseph, to see him as some kind of puzzle to be solved or chess game to be played. I want to try to put myself back in touch with him being much more than that, of him being a person living a complex and evolving life. Who or what is Joseph? I'm going to take a slow and meandering route into this.

This morning early, before Joseph came, I wandered around the garden with a cup of tea, just as I remember my father used to do.

What is our garden, the garden that Jo and I have been working on for the past six years? Last night I was looking at the photo that Jo had taken, soon after we moved in, of me turning the compost heap. The photo captures something true, something worth remembering, some essence of our experience of the garden. I remember turning the compost heap, seeing the steam rise, feeling the life of the heap, the countless millions of lives, the bacteria multiplying in its foetid moist wormy fresh woody centre, feeling I owed my recovery from Chronic Fatigue to these turnings of the heap and immersions in the garden. But the compost heap isn't in the same place any more, and the whole garden is different. What is our garden? It's not the compost heap, or the rose garden which is just beginning to bloom, or the enormous cork tree which we reckon is the biggest in Canberra, or the kitchen garden with its herbs and tomato bushes so freshly and deeply green and growing bigger every day in their sheltered and sunny spot. It's not the excavations out the front where we're putting in a sunken garden and a pond and where Jo's hand-built, child-sized woman will spout water through the nipples of her six breasts. It's not the deck with its pots of annuals, or the bird bath and the iron Buddha, or the lawn with the kids' swings, or the paths where our young son Oliver rides his bike back and forth, back and forth, for hours. It's not even all these things put together. It's not even what it was when I walked around it ten minutes ago. It's an incomprehensibly complex myriad of life processes dynamically evolving in a balance not confined by our boundaries, a mix of becomings and dyings, growths and decays.

And its complexity doesn't stop us from working in it!

In fact what makes it our garden is our involvement, we're a part of it, our love of it is part of what it is. Our garden wouldn't be what it is without summer evening meals on the deck, without expletives from Jo when the neighbours' cats shit in the freshly turned soil, without Oliver's squeaky wheeled bike rides, without the daily spring ambulations to see what's happening, without the sight of the first red rose which reminds me of my daughter Ruth because it first came out when she was travelling through a European summer, which in turn makes me think of my other daughter over in Seattle right now. Our garden wouldn't be what it is if, every time I sat in it, I excluded memories of how it once was or visions of how one day it might be. Memories, plans, associations. Our garden can never be captured in an image, though our photograph album contains hundreds of meaningful images that each seem to hold some essence.

I can have an active part to play in something that is complex and dynamic beyond my ability to comprehend. It sounds so banal to say this, but it's been an enormous issue for me as a therapist.

Fantasy, said my favourite educational writer in the 60's, is not an escape from reality but a reaching out towards it. (3) It's this question about the nature of fantasy which the conversations with Giles kept circumambulating. To what extent are the stories we tell to ourselves and to others an attempt to connect us to the world and to what extent are they an attempt to insulate us from it? Do they move us closer to or further from Bion's 0? From a therapist's point-of-view, are there stories which help and stories which hinder, or are all stories potentially therapeutic?

Winnicott seemed to think that there were useless stories, stories best ignored or surgically removed because they got in the way of real living. He describes a woman patient who is doing nothing in her life except fantasying; playing patience, imagining herself in places and times other than where she actually was. Her fantasying, says Winnicott, was not just nothing in terms of living, it actually interfered with it.

... fantasying interferes with action and with life in the real or external world, but much more so it interferes with dream and with the personal or inner psychic reality, the living core of the individual personality. (4)

He's making this clear distinction between dreaming and living on the one hand, and daydreaming or fantasying on the other.

With unexpected clarity, dreaming and living have been seen to be of the same order, daydreaming being of another order. Dreams fit into object relating in the real world, and living in the real world fits into the dream-world in ways that are quite familiar, especially to psychoanalysts. By contrast, however, fantasying remains an isolated phenomenon, absorbing energy but not contributing-in either to dreaming or to living ... (5) fantasying interferes with action and with life in the real or external world, but much more so it interferes with dream and with the personal or inner psychic reality, the living core of the individual personality. (6)

Further exploration of the differences between fantasying and dreaming led Winnicott to link dreams with poems:

I said [to the patient] that fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning related to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about herself. It is this poetry of the dream that is missing in her fantasying and in this way it is impossible for me to give meaningful interpretations about fantasying. I do not even try to use the material of fantasying that children in the latency period can supply in any quantity. (7)

I'm not sure where to start with all of this. I can see, of course, that there's something essentially right and important about it: the woman's card playing and fantasying about places and times was dead-ended, dissociated and aspects of a rigidly fixed defence organisation. And there's a whole list of solitary retreats into fantasy that might be added to card-playing: arcade games, poker machines, the television soapy, chat show and the 24 hour sports channel and even certain kinds of reading.

But I feel uncomfortable about his distinction about poetic value being in the one (dreams, life) and not in the other (fantasying). Clients with heroin and gambling addictions tell me about their rage and their yearnings in ways which bring us in touch with frustrated grounds of their being. Joseph's fantasies (his stories, his visions of himself as in control and 'not bothered') have poetic value if we define it as Winnicott has done, as having layer upon layer of meaning related to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [him]self'. I cannot see, either, a distinction between the 'poetic value’ of Joseph's stories and his dreams. All present poetic layers of meaning connected to inner and outer, past and present. I can't see how you can put one group of activities in one list (unpoetic, therapeutically dead-ended, unuseable) and another in another list.

Surely the difference is not in the poetic content of the form but in its relationship to the everyday world of action and relationship. Again it's a question of thinking about verbs rather than nouns. The question is not, Does the fantasy have poetic content? but Does the fantasy insulate or connect? And if it is serving to insulate, to deny, to cut off, how can I as a therapist - and this surely is the real question - encourage or facilitate something different, something which connects, activates, enlivens, invigorates, animates, relates?

This all seems linked to where I started in this thesis when reflecting on Hillman's Dream and the Underworld. When I get seduced by the material, it's because I'm not using it, I'm not connecting the here-and-now transference to it. I'm watching, being passive, being entertained or being swallowed up by, being sucked into, and I'm offering no real resistance. I'm not working with it. Winnicott says that therapy is the overlap of two areas of playing, (8) and when I'm in too-Hillmanish a mood, too swallowed by my own interior perhaps, I forget to play. I just watch someone else playing.

Fantasy is not an escape from the essential story of our lives as fantasy is always connected to the main plot. Yes, we can disappear into an internal drama which insulates us from realities 'on the outside', realities which just won't go away. And it's true that coming to terms with those realities is essential. But coming to terms with reality is actually about coming to terms with the fantasy in which our reality has become imprisoned. This doesn't mean solving it or or analysing it or letting it go; it means having a more vital relationship with it, knowing in our bodies that the issues expressed in the fantasy are a part of the fabric of our lives, part of what we will go on struggling with all our lives, part of the eternal moment to which we eterally return. Fantasy always contains useable images with the potential, if made part of the shared world of therapy, to link the client with a bigger world of relationships.

I want to explore this some more, using some of Winnicott's other thoughts.

There is in each of us a hidden part, a secret self which is hidden away from the glare of the outside world. Sometimes this hidden-away secret self seems the home of all that is authentic and soulful; at other times it feels more like a fantasy-self, a retreat from painful external realities.

Winnicott's extensive writings continually address the question of the nature of this self that was hidden from view, and he approaches it from a number of different directions. Talking for example about the existence of a 'true' and a 'false' self, for example, he writes:

When there is a certain degree of failure of adaptation, or a chaotic adaptation, the infant develops two types of relationship. One type is a silent secret relationship to an essentially personal and private inner world of subjective phenomena, and it is only this relationship that seems real. The other is from a false self to a dimly perceived external or planted environment. The first contains the spontaneity and the richness, and the second is a relationship of compliance kept up for gaining time till perhaps the first may some day come into its own. It is surprisingly easy, clinically, to miss the unreality of the compliance half of a schizophrenic child's technique for living. (9)

It is vitally important, says Winnicott, to hold this distinction in mind, and not to be fooled into bolstering up the 'false' and complaint system at the expense of the hidden and 'real'

Spontaneity and real impulse can only come from the true self, and for this to happen someone needs to take over the defensive functions of the false self. (10)

In another paper Winnicott examines his own reluctance to communicate which he suggests "was a protest from the core of me to the frightening fantasy of being infinitely exploited." (11)

I suggest that in health there is a core that corresponds to the true self of the split personality; I suggest that this core never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and that the individual person knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality... Although healthy persons communicate and enjoy communicating, the other fact is equally true, that each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound. (12)

How might this apply in the case of Joseph? Something is attempting to break through, something secret, something hidden away. Could this be the core of a 'true' self? Could this be where Joseph's spontaneity and richness are located, whereas in the compliant self that presents itself to the world there is an artifice that triggers parental exasperation and school-yard bullying (though it also gains him good marks at school)?

The difficulty with this line of thinking would seem to be the degree of alarm Joseph felt whenever we took steps towards what was hidden. It was as though we both unconsciously expected to discover not creativity and real impulse, but a sour-smelling landscape in which there dwelt a bleak and lonely being whose nature was at some level evil. (13)

I want to come at this apparent difficulty through another piece written by Winnicott. In one of his best known papers, 'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications', Winnicott again suggests the existence of two layers in the psyche of the patient, though this time he uses very different concepts and imagery. This time, instead of 'false' (closer to the surface) and 'true' (closer to the centre), he alerts the therapist to the existence of a psychotic core being hidden by a neurotic presentation to the world.

It is the analysis of the borderline type of case [says Winnicott] that one has the chance to observe the delicate phenomena that give pointers to an understanding of truly schizophrenic states. By the term "a borderline case" I mean the kind of case in which the core of the patient's disturbance is psychotic, but the patient has enough psycho-neurotic organisation always to be able to present psycho-neurosis or psycho-somatic disorder when the central psychotic anxiety threatens to break through in crude form. In such cases the psycho-analyst may collude for years with the patient's need to be psycho-neurotic (as opposed to mad) and to be treated as psycho-neurotic. The analysis goes well, and everyone is pleased. The only drawback is that the analysis never ends. It can be terminated, and the patient may even mobilise a psycho-neurotic false self for the purpose of finishing and expressing gratitude. But, in fact, the patient knows that there has been no change in the underlying (psychotic) state and that the analyst and the patient have succeeded in colluding to bring about a failure. Even this failure may have value if both analyst and patient acknowledge the failure. The patient is older and the opportunities for death by accident or disease have increased, so that actual suicide may be avoided. Moreover, it has been fun while it lasted. If psycho-analysis could be a way of life, then such treatment might be said to have done what it was supposed to do. But psycho-analysis is no way of life. We all hope that our patients will finish with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself to be the therapy that makes sense. Although we write papers about these borderline cases we are inwardly troubled when the madness that is there remains undiscovered and unmet. (14)

How might it feel, I wonder, if we forget for a moment that Winnicott is How might it fee, I wonder, if we forget for a moment that Winicott is talking about a particular type of patient, the patient with a borderline personality, and instead imagine that what he has to say applies in different degrees to everyone? To Joseph and to me, for example? Where might we be taken if, for example, we allowed ourselves to think that we all have a neurotic and partially contrived and constructed face which we present to the world, and that behind that face there exists a self which is alive, spontaneous, 'true' in the Winnicottian sense, and also dangerous and potentially psychotic? That we each have a psychotic core? That to deny this is to condemn us to being lived by the hidden but potent (and now distorted) psychosis, and to find a relationship with it is to allow us to experience some of the vitality and relational capacity previously denied to us?

To think like this certainly illuminates in an animating way my Hannibal dream, and it seems to explain the alarm which Joseph felt when we attempted to peek into one of his boxes of mystery. In my dream I'm visiting a psychotic landscape, a dark and menacing place dominated by a monster who eats babies and who is furious when we ask penetrating questions. The lights are suddenly switched off and we are plunged into utter darkness. I'm terrified. But my baby remains calm and the nightmare ends not in further horror but with the monster crouched over the piano, his fingers poised above the keys. It is in the prison and in the meeting with the monster, in the chamber of the psychotic core, that the potential for a spontaneous and rich expression of self is made possible.

With Joseph, too, this seems an image full of poetic relevance and resonance. The expression of much natural feeling has been unavailable to him, access to an alive psychotic core has been blocked, and yet erratic and persistent gestures from some deeper part of himself keep bursting through. There is an attempt to connect inside with outside, psychotic with compliant, what is suspected of being evil with what is assumed to be good.

There is a madness in both our lives. I use the term 'madness' not in any clinical sense, but here referring to a part of our being that is enlivened by its proximity to an undifferentiated and unmediated ground of beingness. This part of our being is also terrorised by its sense of not-existing in its own right and therefore on the brink of what Winnicott calls 'unthinkable anxiety' against which is must erect some kind of compensatory structure or sense of order 'to hold things together'. In this sense, the psychotic core has many attributes: it is enlivening, exciting, dangerous, alarming, animating, creative, terrifying, confusing, orgasmic, authentic, connected and potentially destructive or limiting. It inevitably finds its way into our daily lives either as a result of a painfully-won direct relationship that we manage to forge with it, or by way of messy seepings through cracks in defensive walls which sometimes collapse.

What I'm suggesting here is that it's not only with the 'borderline' patients that a healthy distinction between psychotic core and neurotic organisation can be made, and that it's not only with the more severely disturbed that a therapeutic eye on an animating madness is required. To be blind to it means to see and treat only what is being presented but is essentially defensive. And to treat the defensive, to plaster up the cracks and celebrate the heroic triumphs as the persona keeps the invaders out and the prisoner in, is perhaps to simply bolster up this 'false self' structure.

Both Joseph and I have been sensing in our lives a link with an underworld which is fraught, disturbing, fascinating, alluring and destructive of our hard-fought sense of being in control. Our fascination with story, myth and fantasy is not simply compensation for an uncongenial reality but (to use Kleinian language) an umbilical connection to a good object, an ideal which is real because it's at the root of life and being, it's the soil from which we grow (15). It is our connection to a Platonic form, a form which is beauty itself, a form seemingly denied to us by the harsh inadequacies of our dayworld environment yet found not only in our fantasies but also in our addictions and peculiar passions. "[Wounded wishes find a home in hallucination', says Michael Eigen. (16) It is our attempt to maintain what Hillman calls "the soul's need for beauty” (17).

Yet, as this thesis bares witness, the fascinations of the ethereal underworld realm of fantasy and myth can also align us to death, to the unsullied and unrelated world of the lonely brooder, to the impotence of a therapist who cannot make a real-enough connection to the fascinating dramas being played out on the stage in front of him. Fantasy nourishes, but it can also isolate. There is, as Winnicott has reminded us, people for whom environmental conditions have been so distressing that the mind has had to take on the caretaker role. Such people, both adults and children, end up relating to their own mind and thoughts rather than other people's. The mind, as Winnicott himself once put it, "takes on a life of its own" and becomes an object separate, as it were, from the self. Our fascination with the fantasy that was once the lifeblood can become a bloodless fortress that cuts us off from life.

Giles would say that there are bloodless fortresses that are impenetrable, unbreachable. (18) I'm suggesting here that the images in the fantasy that exists within these walls is historically linked to attempted connections, attempted matings that went wrong, and that the attempt still needs to be made to reconnect with these images, to give them some mouth-to-mouth ... which means introducing fresh air from the outside to the stale and lifeless air within.

ENDNOTES

(1) p 90 Winnicott (1971)

(2) see Endnote 1 for Chapter 9 above.

(3) Holt (1967)

(4) p 31 Winnicott (1971)

(5) p 26 Winnicott (1971)

(6) p31 Winnicott (1971)

(7) p 35 Winnicott (1971)

(8) p 35 Winnicott (1971)

Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with tow people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.

(9) p 109 Winnicott (1988) - footnote

(10) p 43 Winnicott (1988)

(11) p 25 Winnicott (1962)

(12) p 33 Winnicott (1962) These are Winnicott's italics.

(13) Winnicott himself [p 33 Winnicott (1962)] would have not been at all surprised by the alarm, the panicky sense of violation.

I would say that the traumatic experiences that lead to the organization of primitive defences belong to the threat to the isolated core, the threat of its being found, altered, communicated with. The defence consists in a further hiding of the secret self, even in the extreme to its projection and to its endless dissemination. Rape, and being eaten by cannibals, these are mere bagatelles as compared with the violation of the self's core, the alteration of the self's central elements by communication seeping through the defences. For me this would be the sin against the self.

(14) pp 219-220 Winnicott (1989)

(15) This is the argument put forward by Rhode (1994s) who suggests that the mind is connected to powers which come from 'somewhere else' (p 6), and that our experience of this metaphysical connection is sufficiently common, from one person to another, to suggest that there is are psychotic metaphysics, laws which govern the operation of the mind, and which can be coherently described. The mind, he says, has its being grounded in pain and the ideal [p 3]. An experience of suffering and an inviolable connection to beauty and 'the good' are inseparable from the existence of mind.

As a result, the following story is played out in our lives as part of this psychotic metaphysics. We experience a separation from a twin who, together with the mother, dies and like the placenta is banished to the underworld; we then (in ways that seems both temporal and timeless, spatial and eternal, experiential and metaphysical) crown ourselves omnipotent king and experience a kind of exhilarating paranoid-schizoid existence which is also lonely, frightening and limited (and incapable of symbolisation); a necessary but mutually-uncomprehending communication is set up between the paranoid-schizoid perspective and the depressive [p 25]; the banished twin maintains links with the good object [p 83]; the banished twin in the end (and through the painful passing through of the threshold to the depressive position) rises from the dead [p 84], destroys the ego's sense of omnipotence and allows for the first time an experience of the reality of others.

All of this works itself out naturally within the transference, says Rhode (p 2).

(16) p47 Eigen (1986)

(17) p 104 Hillman (1990)

(18) Clark (1982)