Chapter 11 Locked in a dark room

Part B: Attempts at mating

Joseph is tense as he arrives for the first of our two sessions today. There's no eye contact when I open the door, he responds to my greeting with a muffled grunt, and then he sits sullenly looking at his shoes. He's expecting, I'm guessing, a return to the painful world of humiliations and cruelty.

Do I wait to see what emerges? Or do I actively take him to some place he doesn't want to go?

As I watch him sitting silent and inward-turned, I feel myself alert and at a distance from him. The image of a sheep dog crouching in front of some brooding and unpredictable sheep again comes uncomfortably to mind. It's such a dreadful image and my immediate reaction is to flee from it by relaxing my concentration, by letting the sheep wander off where it will. Can I, in the split second that all this is taking, find some less confronting yet still focussed way of sitting with Joseph's discomfort? I remember Marion Milner's beautiful writing about the way she held her patient warmly in her heart during silences. (1)

‘I'm wondering,’ I say after a little while, ‘if you're wanting me to shake the rope a bit, or whether you'd rather we stayed quiet for a while longer to see what comes up?’

‘I don't know,’ he says. ‘I'm not sure.’ The silence that follows, though quite prolonged, is not a hostile one.

‘Perhaps there are some feelings or thoughts you've got following yesterday's session but it's difficult to find words for them.’

For a few moments Joseph seems to be trying to formulate something. His mouth opens a couple of times, he sighs, he begins a sentence but then stops.

‘I thought,’ he says at last, ‘that I had been humiliated so much, now it was my turn.’

His face is blank. I have no sense of how he is feeling as he says this.

‘It was now your turn to do the humiliating,’ I say echoing his words, deciding that the only way forward is to go slowly, to see what emerges.

‘Yes.’

‘It was a kind of revenge for cruelty you'd suffered,’ I say.

'‘ think that might have been it,’ he says. I notice the conditional.

‘As you were masturbating, you were enjoying the kids' discomfort. It felt good to be the powerful one.’

Joseph doesn't respond.

‘I wonder if that's how it actually felt.’

‘I don't know. It's hard for me to remember.’

‘It's hard for you to get in touch with the feelings,’ I say.

‘I don't feel them any more. I can't really tell you how I was feeling then because I don't know. It's like it happened to another person. But I thought that maybe it made sense to think about it in terms of it being my turn to do the humiliating.’

‘Maybe it made sense.’

‘It seemed to make sense. It's just that I can't feel it.’

‘As we speak now, I'm wondering if you can tell me about being humiliated, about what that feels like.’

‘No, I can't really. I can't feel it right now.’ Another silence. ‘I just can't seem to connect with it or something.’

Perhaps, I think, as we sit in the growing silence, a silence which has a quality of blankness, of no meaning, it's up to me to speak, to make sense of things, to bring a sense of a feeling life back into our exchange. I'm thinking, I suppose, of Anne Alvarez and her work with the autistic boy, where she felt that it was up to her to express the feeling that her patient could not express.(2)

‘You can't connect with it,’ I say, feeling that I'm taking a risk but not sure what else to do. ‘But it's there. At some stage in your life certain feelings have become so painful, so awful, so impossible to bear, that you've locked them away in a dark room somewhere.’

‘In a dark room?' Joseph says, looking momentarily startled, as if being jolted out of a reverie.

‘In a dark room,’ I say. ‘This is where the suffering you is, the Joseph who has been humiliated and hurt, who cries, the three-year-old who lost the teddy and wandered around the house at night, the boy who has been humiliated by school bullies. Maybe there are other humiliations too painful to remember.’

‘Things I don't remember,’ he says.

‘Maybe, who knows. But we know the humiliations have been painful for you, so painful that you've had to lock the suffering part of you away. You cannot connect with this part of you, but it exists.’

‘It exists? How do you know it exists?’ he asks quietly. He's not throwing this stuff back at me and I'm encouraged to go on.

‘Because it keeps escaping. Like in the library. Like at other times in your life when you haven't known what's come over you. This forgotten and disowned part of you keeps escaping. It cannot bear it in there, it escapes from its locked, dark place, and it does things out in the world. It has been humiliated so much, and now it wants its turn. This is the slug you told me about a little while ago,’ I continue. ‘This is the slug which is connected to malice.’

‘You mean there's a part of me that I just don't know about?’ he says, with interest but not with feeling. ‘There's some part of me that controls my actions without me knowing about it?’

‘Some of your actions,’ I say. ‘And it does more. It feels things in a way that you cannot often feel things. It feels things intensely. You have cut off your connection to it, but it hasn't cut off its connection to you.’

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But it's not real for me. I think I can follow what you're saying, but it doesn't feel real.’

‘And we don't really know,’ I say, ‘whether that's because it isn't real or you've lost your connection to it.’

‘It feels,’ he says, ‘as if my humiliated feelings haven't gone somewhere else. They've just evaporated.’

‘They don't exist,’ I say. ‘It feels like they don't exist any more.’

‘Or maybe never did.’

‘And yet a part of you wanted to humiliate those kids in the library,’ I say.

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I don't know.’

For a moment he sits thoughtfully. ‘I just don't know,’ he says almost sadly. ‘Maybe that's what happened.’

He's quiet for a while. Then he says, ‘You're saying I'm not in touch with my feelings, but I used to cry at the drop of a hat. Between Years 6 and 8 I was always setting really high standards for myself, always wanting to produce perfect assignments, and I would cry at home and sometimes at school when I couldn't meet them. I felt this terrible pressure, like the whole of my future depended on whether I did the work to the standard I had set myself, like it was sink or swim. It was awful. I didn't like the way I was then. I didn't like all the crying ... So I did something about that. I've changed all that now. I now aspire to things that I can achieve, and I'm doing much better.’

‘Things seem to work much better when you don't allow yourself to get all worked up about them,’ I say.

‘Well yes,’ he says.

‘It's awful when you feel yourself overwhelmed by big feelings.’ I'm thinking partly of his nightmares, of the huge quilt or lights which try to suffocate him.

‘It's better when I've got things under control,’ he says.

‘You feel less vulnerable when you're most in control,’ I say.

I notice that our time is up.

‘This is hard,’ I say, looking at the furrow on his brow. ‘It's not easy to take some of this stuff in. It's difficult to believe that it's real.’

Joseph murmurs and nods.

‘Let's just let it sit for a while. See what happens. What comes up.’

‘OK.’

‘We meet again this afternoon.’

‘See you then,’ he says.

'‘I'll see you this afternoon.’

‘How did you feel when you said that stuff about the locked room?’ asks Giles.

‘On the edge!’ I say. ‘But the words felt right, even though they didn't seem real to Joseph.’

‘There are times when we have to act as though we know better than the client.’

‘It's dangerous, isn't it?’ I say. ‘Thinking that you know what's going inside another person better than he does himself. It's Freud with Dora. Potentially persecutory and very damaging.’

‘There are times when we have to make these leaps, Steve. You can't be empathic all the time, just staying with what the client is giving you. This kind of empathy can be non-interactive. You've got to be different, think differently, go beyond what you've been fed, to have meta-thoughts. Otherwise you lie down together in a mutual wank.’

‘But it's so difficult to know whether in being different, in implying that there's something we can see that's true and which the client can't see, we're stifling curiosity or the growth of a tentative self. I worry all the time about encouraging a non-productive compliance. Joseph kept saying that he could see what I was saying but he couldn't feel it.’

‘We have to judge these things by their effect,’ says Giles. ‘He didn't withdraw. He wasn't angry.’

‘Just feeling that he couldn't connect with what I was saying. That he couldn't feel it.’

‘We have these moments as parents, Steve, don't we? There are times when we feel we know best and we act on that, despite what our child says.’

‘We have to,’ I say.

‘We must have an attitude of cunning,’ says Giles, ‘a willingness to look at the other bit, the idea that there's something being kept at bay that is hidden and bubbling. We must sit with what the patient brings and look for the hidden. ‘What am I not being shown?’ Not to look for these things are the sins of omission. Over the vears I've discovered that I've got to have a suspicious intuition. I think of the dangerousness of people. There's always a criminal or perverse dangerousness lurking around the corner.’

‘So I've got to keep prodding the sore bit ever so slightly, letting him know that I know that it's there... even if he doesn't consciously know that it's there.’

‘I'd be very surprised, Steve, if there's no consciousness of it. But we'll see. We see whether what we've said has the required effect. If not, we do something else.’

'‘he question is whether Joseph will be able to hear it, or be able to respond to it.’

‘Or whether it shifts something. It doesn't have to happen at a mind level, Steve. We're not looking for greater insight necessarily, but for movement where there's been none, or life where it's been dead. This next session will be interesting.’

‘Maybe he'll be different this afternoon.’

‘There's a danger, of course with what you said,’ says Giles, ‘that you might imply that Joseph is cut off from all feeling, that he's cut off from his feelings generally.’

‘He's capable of feeling shamed, obviously. And anxious.’

‘Humiliated is more problematical. And its converse, the wish to humiliate others.’

‘He can feel ashamed but not humiliated? These are very close aren't they?’

‘They don't seem to be in Joseph. He's ashamed of what he's done. It's what others do to him that he's cut himself off from. The humiliations. And what he wants to do to others.’

‘It's these he can't connect with.’

‘Except perhaps in relation to you Steve, and in relation to the present.’

‘In the transference. He's feeling things there, clearly.’ I'm thinking about the session last week when he was so angry with me.

‘The only interpretations that are truly mutative are the ones where it's brought back to you, to the intersubjective. Like when you told him in that session that his silence seemed to destroy attempts to get near and then he'd feel angry or lonely. You said something like that I think Steve.’

‘It's so easy for me to miss these things Giles. It's so easy for me to forget about Joseph's present and accessible feeling life. This is what I keep missing every time I allow myself to think too much in terms of static images set in the past rather than of an evolving and dynamic story which includes what is happening right now.’

‘When you think locked in a room rather than trying to grapple with Steve's image of being locked in a room'?

‘Exactly that. The fixed image excludes what he's actually feeling right at this moment. He is trying to grapple with something. He's feeling all sorts of things in relation to this attempt as he tries to take in what I'm saying. Disbelief, frustration, fear …’

‘And he's also probably struggling with the blanking out effect that shame has. It sounds like he's grappling with this. His sense of shame is such that he can't think, can't feel, can't respond. It deadens. Destroys. Splits up into unusable bits.’

‘It's the struggle, isn't it, between the part of him that wants to expose himself to me ...’

‘To expose himself and to frighten you ...’

‘To feel potent and alive ... it's the struggle between that impulse and the one that wants to keep it all locked away.’

‘Between life and death in a way,’ says Giles. ‘What's so awful for Joseph is that the life impulse, the one that's got some bite and hit and smash to it, seems to be leading him into areas which are shameful. It's awful for him to talk about this with you.’

‘But he hasn't given up, has he,’ I say. ‘He keeps talking about it being difficult but wanting to go on. And the connections between us keep come and go. Something's happening.’

‘We'll have to wait and see.'

'You're feeling pessimistic?’

‘Not at all. Aware though, Steve, of the unrelenting and cunning ways the disembodied bits employ to vaporise the good.

Three hours have passed and he's back. Immediately I'm struck by a shift in mood. Joseph is bouncy, chatty. Even if this is 'happy talk' to distract me as I fumble with the safe's combination, I decide that it's best to go with it.

‘After seeing you this morning I went to the Tuggeranong Mall. It's not much of a mall really, not intense enough. I like lots of people, lots of things happening. Belconnen Mall is more my kind of place, though even that's not intense enough. And every second shop is a women's clothes shop. Women's clothes are so expensive! Mum tells me about it whenever she buys a new suit. There's a mall back home in America at my grandmother's place which is more intense. Now that's what I call a real Mall! People crowded around, big shops, lots of colour and noise, lots of spending! I went into one of the shops, a CD shop, and spent thirty dollars! Thirty dollars!! I couldn't believe it! I'm rather tight with my money as a rule and when I realised how much I'd spent afterwards I was shocked, I felt remorseful. But it was fun at the time, it was certainly fun at the time! I was there with my two brothers and my grandmother and we got her into this games parlour. She nearly had a go on one of the machines! It was a real hoot!’

‘It sounds like lots of fun,’ I say. ‘An exciting release.’

‘It was, it was!’ he says, beaming. ‘It's often a lot of fun with my mum's family. There's always lots of laughing.’

‘Your mum's side of the family is full of fun,’ I say.

‘Yes, not like Dad's side. God no! My father's family is full of tension, full of secrets. Kind of intrigues, you know, where people aren't speaking to each other for years ... It's like a soap opera really! I think some of them are very lonely, sort of living by themselves and all wrapped up in their nasty intrigues!’

‘Cut off and unhappy,’ I say.

‘I guess so,’ he says.

‘I wonder if your parents are opposites in the same way?’

‘No, not at all,’ he says stiffly.

‘Yet they found that they couldn't get on,’ I say. ‘Presumably there was some basic incompatibility.’

‘I don't know,’ says Joseph, the prickliness gone as suddenly as it had appeared. ‘It was very sudden, from my point of view anyway. Maybe things had been building up for a while, but if they had I didn't know about it. They were both pretty upset when it happened.’

‘And you?’ I ask. ‘How did you feel?’

‘Confused mostly, I think.’

‘How are you feeling about it now?’ I ask.

‘I get really upset with Mum, though she probably doesn't realise it. Maybe she does. She's not always straight with me and that makes me angry.’

This is very different from his reaction the first time I asked this question a long time ago. He told me then that he felt nothing. Now he's talking about being angry.

‘She's not always straight?’ I say.

‘She tells us that we're the priority in her life but then she keeps doing things that show that this isn't true. Like she spends more time with her friends than with us.’ Joseph's eyes narrow, his voice becomes tight. ‘She's ruled by her feelings, by her whims. There's no logic there. Like the other day she told me that she had no money for this movie that I really wanted to see. I suggested we go together but she said no. I found out later that she then went and saw it with a friend of hers. I mean, it was pretty low not to tell the truth. And she's always got excuses, there are always reasons why she can't spend time with us or whatever, and half the time they're just things she makes up on the spot.’

‘You're very angry with her,’ I say.

‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘It's a strange sort of anger I guess. I don't shout or stuff. I don't explode or slam doors.’

‘It's colder,’ I say.

‘Yes, it's a cold anger,’ he says. Then, after a pause, ‘It's been there ever since the divorce... And I get angry with my middle brother, with William. Really angry. I'd cheerfully strangle him sometimes! But I don't just lose it with him. I control my anger with him.’

‘You control it with everyone,’ I say.

‘I guess I do,’ he says. ‘And it works with William, it really works!’ Joseph is chuckling as he talks, enjoying the sense of power he has over William, the ways he makes his younger brother's life a misery. ‘I can make William crazy with anger, really crazy! Especially when we're with Mum. I've got Mum wrapped round my little finger, she always trusts me, always believes me, and so if I tell her that some argument we're having is William's fault, then she'll tell him to stop it and William will storm off, slamming doors. There are doors in our house that won't shut properly now because he's slammed them so hard! Would you believe that!’

‘You get a real buzz when William loses control,’ I say.

‘Well, he's such a sook. He cries at the drop of a hat,’ says Joseph.

‘You enjoy humiliating him,’ I say.

‘I love it!’ he beams. ‘We've got this game that we made up together where, if we're ever sitting on a couch or on a bed together, then there's an understanding that one half is for me and one half is for him, and if you catch the other intruding into your half in any way, even with just a finger, then you can punch him. We've played this game for years. Anyway, the other day we were having a picnic with Mum and my brothers. William and I were sitting on this blanket and he wanted to hit me every time I reached over to get the food that was on his side of the blanket. I told him not to, that I didn't want to play, and Mum saw us arguing and told him not to, but he kept on doing it and so I hit him really hard in the stomach. Really hard! He was winded. He tried to hit me back but Mum stopped him, saying that he deserved it, that it was his fault. And it felt so good!’

It felt really good.’

‘Yes, the whole thing, everything about it, felt good. I keep wanting to replay it over and over in my mind! Standing up for myself! Having Mum stick up for me! Punching him really hard! It just felt really good.’

‘It sounds like something of a release,’ I say. ‘It felt good because she was sticking up for you.’

‘Yeah, and I was letting something out ... how much I hate William!’ he says.

‘It felt good to let it out,’ I say.

‘It sounds awful, doesn't it, but that's the way I feel some times. Weird. Mad. Families are mad. The way you're always competing for your parents' attention, always trying to get them on your side, and how good it feels when you succeed...’

‘It feels good when your scheming works,’ I say, but he's not really listening, he's off on his own train of thought.

‘You feel that your family is mad sometimes. Do you feel that? Do you sometimes get the feeling that your family is mad?’

I've been so shoulder-to-shoulder with him for the past while that this question throws me. Something else is happening here. Instinctively I defect the attention back onto Joseph.

‘You're feeling that things happen in your family that are impossible to explain rationally,’ I say.

‘Mmm. Whatever,’ he says.

It's obvious that I've missed the point here, or that he's feeling suddenly self-conscious that he's talking so freely. It's so different from this morning. It's gushing out, like a release of pent up feeling.

‘I didn't get that quite right, did I.’ I say.

‘What?’ he says. ‘Oh I don't know, it doesn't matter. I've just looked at the clock. We've gone overtime!’

‘So we have,’ I say.

‘God, I've been going on like an old chook today. Sorry! l just found I had a fit of the yabbers. Like an old chook!’

He's not looking at me as he says this, and while the words imply a self-criticism it's clear that he's enjoyed talking. He leaves with a big smile.

I watch him as he goes off to catch his bus. What's going on here? What's the meaning of all this happy talk, this being an old chook with an uncontrolled fit of the yabbers. Last time I reported something like this to Giles he said that Joseph was masturbating in front of me! He's feeling pleasure, that's for sure. He's less hostile and tight and he's speaking from his more immediate feelings about what makes him angry and what gives him sadistic satisfaction. If this is 'happy talk' then I don't know if it's a release that is taking us into somewhere new or whether is it what Giles called today a cunning ploy to vaporise the good, a distraction while I fumble for the keys of the safe. I don't know whether it's a reaching-out to include me in his world (and therefore to expand his own boundaries) or an attempt to stop me invading

Both I guess.

Yesterday I got a distressed phone call from my daughter Ruth who is now at university and struggling with chronic back pain. She had an essay proposal to write on the topic of Islamic beliefs and women's rights and she was being asked to review the literature, select an issue, comment on how it's been treated both in the media and in the arts and to summarise the different positions commentators and historians have taken - all in 250 words. She had an idea, which she outlined in the e-mail, but added:

I am finding this incredibly hard. I have lots of ideas and can't think how to summarise them, or the most important ones, into only 250 words. The medication I'm taking is making me so sleepy. I keep losing my train of thought.

I rang her immediately but there was no-one home. ‘Ruth,’ I said to the answering machine, ‘I got your e-mail and I'll ring you later on tonight. But I just wanted to say straight away a couple of things. First of course you're finding this difficult. This is an enormous topic, the kind of thing an academic would spend years working on before writing a book. I know the way you want to go deeply and thoroughly into things, to really understand the issues involved, and this is a mammoth project. Of course you're struggling, and would be even if there were no back pain and three other units that you're working on at the same time! ... And the other thing I want to say is that you most certainly do have an idea, it's expressed very well in your e-mail and I think you've got the 250 words for your proposal.’

When I talked to her later in the evening, she told me she had something more to read to me. ‘As soon as I heard your message Dad,’ she said, ‘I felt this sense of relief. It was partly that you seemed to think that I had an idea I could use, but it was also what you said about this being such a big topic. It wasn't just me. Anyway, as soon as I relaxed I found all these ideas coming into my head and I sat down and wrote them out. Can I read them to you?’

And so she read me her new version of the proposal. Where the first one had been sound, this was strong. It had momentum and I could hear her conviction and passion in it, I could hear her authentic voice. ‘It's amazing to me,’ she said after we'd talked about it, ‘that i need so much reassurance and support.’

The more I grapple with the issues that this thesis has thrown up for me, the less it seems amazing. It's to do with the location of life and meaning and order and vitality. Life is to be found in the interactive space between people. It is in that space that there is generation, birth and creation. As therapists, parents and teachers, we find life not by looking for it (me trying to find it in Ruth, for example, or in Joseph) but by participating in its co-creation. Ideas and feelings and meanings are felt and articulated by individuals, but they're given life in the interpersonal space created by relationship. This is connected, I think, to Winnicott's suggestion that there is no such thing as a baby, to Wittgenstein's dictum that there are no private meanings, and even to Bion's idea that there are thoughts in search of a thinker.(4) Coleridge, taking issue with a Newtonian perspective, expressed it as follows:

Newton was a mere materialist. Mind, in his system, is always passive, - a lazy Looker-on on an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's Image, and that, too, in the sublimest sense, the Image of the Creator, there is ground for suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system. (5)

It's this co-creation of life through our active involvement with the world that is so well addressed in the more recent writing about babies and mothers. Babies don't simply instinctively adapt to their mothers, and nor do mothers just respond to their babies. (6) Reality is to be found neither in the baby nor in the mother. Both play a part in the creative and vitalizing process which is the dance being co-created between them. Stern gives the following example:

Eric is a somewhat bland infant compared with his more affectively intense mother, but both are perfectly normal. His mother constantly likes to see him more excited, more expressive and demonstrative about feelings, and more avidly curious about the world. When Eric does show some excitement about something, his mother adroitly joins in and encourages, even intensifies, the experience a little – usually successfully, so that Eric experiences a higher level of excitement than he would alone. The cajoling, exaggerating, slightly overresponsive, eliciting behaviour that she characteristically performs are in fact usually enjoyable to Eric. Her behaviour does not create a gross mismatch, but rather a small one. His tolerance for stimulation can encompass it, but at a level of excitement that he would not reach by his own efforts. (7)

If there is no such thing as a baby, then nor is there any such thing as a client, a student ... indeed there is no such thing as a person! We imagine that the basic unit is the individual of the species, but there is no such thing as a unit, just systems generating life through the patterns of interaction between the parts. As the Jungian Zinkin puts it, ‘The patterns which can be discerned do not need to be thought of as inside an individual. They are made by two individuals through their need to communicate with each other.' (8)

Infant research, says Zinkin, has revealed that infant's world is intensely and subtly intersubjective, the timing and nature of the mother's interventions coming out of her attunement to the baby (her ability to pick up the baby's tunes!). This regulation by the mother comes partly through the things the mother does (presenting the breast when the baby is hungry, covering the baby when cold, holding it against her when it's distressed). But perhaps even more significantly, says Zinkin, it comes out of the way the mother acts and speaks.

... I would like to make a distinction between form and content. Regardless of what is experienced by the infant (the content), there is also the question of how it is experienced (the form). In so far as the baby's experiences are influenced by the mother, what the baby picks up is not only what the mother provides but how she provides it, her way of doing things. Whether feeding, changing, rocking or talking with her baby, the mother has her patterns and these are conveyed to the baby as invariants ... (9)

Stern, following the work of Tomkins has made a useful distinction between what he calls 'category affects' such as anger, sadness, joy, fear and disgust, and "vitality affects'. These are by no means the only patterns underlying the infant's experience. They are a special case which, I consider, has a special relevance to analysis because they deal with emotions which are not usually considered. The vitality affects cannot be classified in terms of these readily recognisable emotions and they do not have names, but they can be described in terms of the kinetic qualities such as 'surging', 'exploding', 'fading away', ‘acceleration' ... Vitality affects seem to me like the musical signs that are not of the notes to be played but indicate how they are to be played. (10)

It was only when I read Zinkin's important distinction between form and content, between what and how, between category and vitality affects, that I began to have an appreciation of the real limitations of my initial intrapsychic approach. This was a two-person system that Zinkin was describing, one where it was misleading to talk about the confusion residing in one (me) and the withdrawal residing in the other (Joseph). Joseph's icy certainties masked confusions which found their way into the intersubjective field, and his withdrawals implied failed attempts to engage. The confusion and withdrawal and subterranean shifts could be more usefully thought about as being ours. To the extent that I could tune in to Joseph's expressive undercurrents (in his actions and body language, and in the dreams and stories he described to me), and to the extent that I could respond out of the attunement that I consequently experienced (something in which, despite my conceptual confusions, I was – by training, childhood experience and temperament – reasonably highly skilled), I could promote a change that takes place ‘through the sharing of a vitality affect or shape or pattern of interaction’. (11)

Such interactions are very frequent in analysis, even if interpretations are being given. The patterns then lie in the timing, the pacing, the tone and inflection of the voice. Whatever words are used the important interaction is preverbal and presymbolic. A pattern is exchanged and shared, with feelings which can be recognised but not categorised. The pattern is a combination of a percept, an action and an affect and is very finely graded and regulated in its quality and intensity. Again, as in the mother with her baby, it all depends on being attuned.' (12)

So there was certainly an aspect of Joseph's manifesting shadow and my moments of unconnectedness (experienced as a kind of shame) which was to do with a renewal or re-energising of our engagement with each other.

I am talking here about a vital creative act and so I keep returning to the metaphors of the story-teller and the listener, the musician and the audience, the dancer and the onlooker, the lover and the beloved, each speaking from the heart to move the Other, each taking the inspiration from the Other to move the heart. The infant's mewlings and pukings, like the lover's sighs and sulks, are attempts to engage the beloved. As Alvarez puts it:

By demonstrating the baby's sensitivity to the form and quality of experience, observation and research have changed the conventional picture of the infant. He is no longer just a sensual, appetitive little animal seeking gratification and a passionately loving and destructive creature, finding and losing love and nurture. He is also, when the conditions allow, a little music student listening to the patterning of his auditory experience, a little art student studying the play and pattern of light and shade and its changes, a little dance student watching and feeling his mother's soothing movements or playful vitalizing activities, a little conversationalist taking part in pre-speech dialogues with his mother in the early weeks of life, a little scientist working to yoke his experiences together and understand them. (13)

I am talking here about love - felt, expressed, returned and frustrated. This is something about which art speaks more clearly than science. We see it clearly, for example, in the relationship between the young Tristan and his uncle, King Mark:

Then Tristan took the harp and sang so well that the barons softened as they heard, and King Mark marvelled at the harper from Lyonesse whither so long ago Rivalen had taken Blanchefleur away.

When the song ended, the King was silent a long space, but he said at last:

"Son, blessed be the master that taught thee, and blessed be thou of God: for God loves good singers. Their voices and the voice of the harp enter the souls of men and wake dear memories and cause them to forget many a mourning and many a sin. For our joy did you come to this roof, stay near us a long time, friend."

And Tristan answered:

‘Very willingly will I serve you, Sire, as your harper, your huntsman and your liege."

So did he, and for three years a mutual love grew up in their hearts. By day Tristan followed King Mark at pleas and in saddle; by night he slept in the royal room with the councillors and the peers, and if the King was sad he would harp to him to soothe his care. (14)

And what happens when the song is unheard, the love unreturned, the story ignored? Then the baby turns within for solace. The baby (or the storyteller, or the lover) begins to create fantastic inner worlds where a response is felt to be possible (and where it can be controlled). The creative impulse which would otherwise attempt to mate with the world, to have its way in public where it can generate something, becomes locked up and confined to an internal prison. This is the place where solipsism and narcissism are to be found. This (according, at least, to Coleridge) is where Hamlet gets stuck.' (15) It's where Hannibal sits hunched over the piano. All that is felt to be real is the boundaried self and its inner world.

Play, which is just another word for creativity, both articulates this and attempts to break through it. Play, as Winnicott continually reminds us, takes us to the edges of the not-me world, to that transitional space which is neither wholly inner nor wholly outer, the world of the overlap. It attempts to consolidate (bring greater order to, make more solid, reduce the chaotic feel of) the inner, and at the same time it flirts with danger, it moves to the edge, it attempts to find a crossing where some kind of push into unknown territory might be made. Play is ‘always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived.’ (16) This, says Winnicott, is why it is always exciting. This is where we are when we play with an idea, embark on some project, form a new relationship or risk an unfamiliar path. To return to one of Winnicott's poetic formulations,

In playing, the child manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling. (17)

It's through the medium of this kind of play (and which in the body of the thesis I have also called the act of telling a story) that the space between is made animate. I breathe life into the world which I find in the intersubjective space, in the transitional zone. The world I find there breathes life into me.

ENDNOTES

(1) Milner (1969)

(2) Alvarez (1992)

(3) See Endnote 6 Chapter 2 above.

(4) see for example p 165 Bion (1967)

(5) Coleridge S.T. letter to Thomas Poole, 1801, reproduced on p 273 of Richards ed. (1978)

(6) As Alvarez [p 63 Alvarez (1992)] puts it:

... there is more to mothering than the passive and mechanistic concepts of adaptation and fit, or receptiveness, would allow. Surely novelty, surprise, enjoyment and delight, in manageable quantitites, play as vital a part in the infant's development as their more peaceful counterparts - structure, routine, familiarity, lullaby.

(7) p 193 Stern (1985)

(8) p 60 Zinkin (1991)

(9) p 51 Zinkin (1991)

(10) p 52 Zinkin (1991)

(11) p 58 Zinkin (1991)

(12) p 54 Zinkin (1991)

(13) p 76 Alvarez (1992)

(14) pp 9-10 The Romance of Tristan and Iseult as retold by Joseph Bédier, translated by Hilaire Belloc and completed by Paul Rosenfeld, Vintage Classic, Random House 1973

(15) from Coleridge's notes, reprinted p 426 in Richards ed. (1978)

Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time, strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.

Or, writing about himself to his friend Godwin [and quoted p 314 in Holmes (1989)]:

You appear not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-encaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow.

(16) p 50 Winnicott (1971)

(17) p 51 Winnicott (1971)