Chapter 13 Stranded at sea

Part B: Attempts at mating

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When I open the door this morning I find that Joseph is not alone. He's accompanied by his mother's new boyfriend Allen.

‘Good morning Steve,’ says Allen. Joseph is silent, pointedly looking away and at the garden, deliberately absenting himself from the conversation that's about to happen. I look from one to the other, trying to read the signals. Allen is frowning.

‘Hi Steve,’ he says tentatively. ‘Look, I wonder if we can renegotiate tomorrow's appointment time which at the moment is for 10 o'clock? I've got things to do in the morning and if I'm to drop Joseph off here it would suit me much better to do it at 9. I hope this isn't inconvenient. Do you have a space earlier on?’

‘I do,’ I say. ‘9 o'clock.’

‘That's too early,’ says Joseph petulantly. ‘I can't get up that early! This is meant to be holiday time!’

‘Well 9.30 then?’ Allen towers over Joseph. He's a big man. But his voice is apologetic. ‘We could compromise on 9.30 couldn't we?’

‘I think 10 ơ'clock,’ says Joseph. ‘I think I could make it by 10 o'clock.’

Allen looks back towards me and shrugs his shoulders. ‘Would 10 o'clock be OK?’ he asks, perhaps forgetting that this was the original time and that there's been no change, no compromise.

‘Yes, I can see him at 10 o'clock tomorrow,’ I say. ‘That's fine.’

‘OK,’ says Allen. ‘I'll see you later Joseph.’

‘See you,’ says Joseph coldly. Then, as Allen leaves, he goes into my room and asks, his voice still steely though not as cold, ‘What's that tree you've got in the garden there? The one in the corner?’

‘It's an old oak tree,’ I say.

‘It's ugly,’ he says. ‘It needs to be chopped down or severely pruned. It doesn't suit the rest of your garden.’

‘I think you're right,’ I say. ‘But it belongs to our neighbours.’

‘It doesn't look good,’ he says.

‘That was an interesting exchange,’ I say as Joseph sits down.

‘What do you mean? About the tree?’ he asks, smiling.

‘Well that was interesting too, but I was thinking about the exchange between you and Allen. You're not powerless in relation to him.’

‘I guess not,’ he says.

‘I guess one way of getting at your mother is to make Allen's life difficult?’

‘Sometimes I feel pretty annoyed with her,’ he says.

‘Refusing to come here earlier tomorrow is a way of punishing your mother,’ I say.

‘You could say that I suppose,’ he says. He doesn't want to pursue this. ‘I've brought some things to show you.’

As we've been talking, I've been conscious that my mind's eye is flitting between two different fields. One is the here-and-now, the interaction between Joseph and Allen and Joseph's shifting feelings as we talk about this. The other is the spot where we left off yesterday, with my sense that we were about to enter some difficult territory which was connected with sex. I try to keep these two in mind as Joseph now produces what may be a third focus for our attention.

‘I've brought in some photos of when I was young,’ he says. ‘I thought you might like to see them.’ Joseph looks quickly up at me as he says this, as if wondering how I'm going to react to this move of his. I can't make out whether it's a defensive move towards safe territory to which he's hoping I'll turn a blind eye, or an attempt to find a way into something difficult and unknown for which he's hoping he'll find my support. Perhaps he doesn't know either. Perhaps it's both.

‘You've got some photos you'd like to show me,’ I say trying to sound neutral but not discouraging.

For the next thirty minutes or more Joseph shows me photos of his family during happier times

Joseph beaming up at the camera at his sixth birthday party, cake smeared over his face and icing dripping onto his white long sleeved shirt and tie.

Joseph pouring a bucket of water over his squealing mother on a hot day.

Joseph posing with his little-boy foot bearing down on an enormous snow shovel (‘my dad's shovel’), frowning in a way that conveys that this was important man's work that he was doing.

‘I used to follow Dad around the garden back home in the States,’ he says. ‘I used to take my toy shovel and clear the snow with him.’

‘Little Joseph being the big daddy worker,’ I say. ‘You look so involved, so serious.’

‘Yes, cute isn't it,’ he says, putting clear space between the idolizing little boy and the 16-year-old sitting in front of me.

As we look at the photos he tells me things about his family that he's not mentioned before. There'd been another child, he says, born before him but born dead.

‘How awful for your parents,’ I say. ‘You must have been especially welcome.’ Joseph just shrugs and quickly moves on to another photograph. He isn't wanting to let me 'work' with these photos; there's another agenda he's running here. Maybe it is defensive, after all. Maybe it's just filling in time, doing a 'show and tell' which is pleasurable in its own way but is really designed to fill the space between now and tomorrow when we're due to finish. I find myself looking for opportunities to bring us back to where we ended yesterday.

He takes back the final photo and there's a short silence.

‘I'm wondering if there's something on your mind at the moment,’ I say.

‘I didn't sleep too well last night,’ he says and rubs his temples to suggest that his mind is still foggy from tiredness. ‘I've got into this terrible holiday habit of staying up watching TV and going to bed really late, then it's a real struggle to get up in the morning. It's silly really, I don't particularly enjoy the programmes I watch but I can't help myself. Mum told me last night that I had to go to bed by 11 o'clock, but I got up after Mum had gone to bed and sat up again watching TV.’

‘I wonder if TV for you is like sex for the computer operator, a distraction without being satisfying,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’ he asks. The atmosphere in the room is suddenly more alive. We're both on our toes.

‘I don't really know,’ I say. ‘It's just that you're talking about watching TV in exactly the same way as you described that man at the computer going off and having sex with his secretary. It wasn't very satisfying, it was just a distraction.’

‘Possibly,’ he says. ‘But at least I got to sleep in the end.... You know, I've just recently had a letter from a friend of mine in America, a girl called Mel.’

A non sequitur. I'm now more confident that Joseph is trying to steer the conversation in a particular direction, that there's an intent here and that it's important that I give him his head.

‘Mel is the daughter of friends of my parents and we used to go visiting them in the old days. We still write to each other a bit.’

‘You enjoy the friendship,’ I say.

‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘We used to have fun, sometimes, when the adults were busy somewhere else.’

‘You used to have fun when the adults were preoccupied, when you weren't being observed,’ I say.

‘There was this one time,’ he says, now smiling in that familiar way which conveys both excitement and embarrassment, ‘when Mel and I were in this room together and all our parents had gone out. The babysitters were in the next room and the doors were shut so we thought we couldn't be seen or heard, but it turned out afterwards that there was a high window above the door that was open and maybe the babysitters could hear everything we were saying. It was embarrassing when we realised that.’

‘You were saying things that you thought no-one else could hear,’ I say.

‘We thought we were saying secret things,’ he says, ‘but they could be overheard by the babysitters.’

‘Secret and exciting things,’ I say.

‘Stuff we didn't want anyone to hear.’

‘And you don't want to tell me either,’ I say.

‘Don't ask,’ he says. ‘Crazy stuff.’

‘You'd squirm if you told me what you'd been talking about.’

‘I'm squirming just thinking about it,’ he says and then is silent.

I wait for a few seconds and then say, ‘So where are we now? It's like you've deliberately brought us to a spot but you're not sure where to take it from here.’

‘I'm not sure where we are,’ he says. ‘Where are we?’

‘We're sitting outside a room trying to make sense of what's going on inside,’ I say.

He laughs and then lapses into silence again.

‘It's been difficult, this,’ he says.

‘Talking about Mel?’ I ask.

‘No, the whole thing. Coming to see you. Mum and Dad both said to me that this was going to be an intense time, coming twice a day, and that I'd have to be strong.’

‘And has it?’

‘It's been hard to get up in the mornings. I'm so tired. But I guess having these sessions has given me something to get up for?’

‘I wonder if that's what your parents meant,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They're talking about it being emotionally difficult. You're talking about fitting sessions into a schedule or the effort of getting up in the mornings. It's as though you're leaving your feelings out.’

‘Well it has been emotional I guess, especially at the beginning.’

‘You felt more emotional at the beginning.’

‘I felt very anxious about what would happen. I thought that maybe we'd find something that I didn't want to find, that we'd be looking behind the scenes and there'd be something there I didn't want to face about what makes me tick.’

‘You don't feel that any more?’

‘No, that anxiety has gone away now.’

‘You don't feel that you need to Zero a bad part.’

‘No, not any more.’

‘You were worried that we'd be looking behind the scenes.’

‘Well we have I guess. I have felt more aware of things like anxiety and anger, my feelings I suppose. I'm more aware of them now I guess and I'm more conscious that I have to do something about them.’

‘You feel you have to do something about them.’

‘Don't I? Isn't that what you've been saying?’

‘Maybe being aware of them is the important thing. Being aware that behind the scenes there are some pretty intense feelings shaping your experiences.’

Joseph is not looking convinced. It's as though there's something puzzling him, something about our conversation that hasn't touched the essential thing. We sit a little awkwardly without speaking, me watching Joseph's face and him frowning and looking into his lap.

‘I'm not sure why I'm telling you this,’ he says at last, ‘but there was a moment in one of our earlier sessions, right at the end, when we were talking about something and the time had ticked past the hour and I'd already heard the car pull up outside and I wanted to leave, and I said, "Well we've finished," and you said, "No, we haven't, not yet." I felt really trapped, like you wouldn't let me go.’

‘You were feeling trapped in that earlier session,’ I say. ‘You wanted to go but you felt I wouldn't let you.’

‘That's right.’

‘I wonder if it was what we were talking about or …’

‘Yes!’ he says urgently, ‘it was what we were talking about! I didn't want to talk about it, we'd gone in quite deep, and I wanted to leave. But you wouldn't let me. I'm glad really that you wouldn't let me?’

‘You were both wanting to escape and wanting to be trapped by me. You were wanting me to force you to continue.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the reason you've brought this up now is that you're feeling the same, you're both wanting to escape and wanting me to stop you from escaping.’

‘And it's to do with sex,’ I say. ‘You've been trying to find a way of talking about it, but it hasn't quite happened, we haven't found a way.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were trying to find a way when you were talking about Mel. And you're worried that we're not to going to have the time to talk about some really important stuff before we finish tomorrow.’

At that moment I glance at the clock and am surprised to see that we've gone overtime. ‘Goodness is that the time?’ I say.

‘Does it matter?’ asks Joseph impatiently. ‘Can't we go on?’

‘We can't, I'm afraid. I've got some other commitments I have to keep. But this is where we must start this afternoon.’

Abruptly he's gone and I soon find myself caught up in other matters. But in the back of my mind I know that we're coming to a crucial moment in our work.

A couple of hours later I'm busy getting the room ready for our second session. I set out the glasses and the water jug, and clear away the toys strewn around the carpet by another client. All the while I'm thinking about Joseph.

There has been a shift. I can feel it now during our sessions.

He seems, for instance, to be more genuinely aware of his feelings. He's not just asking for a Six Step Programme or for a way of thinking about things, he's now wanting the work to stay at a deeper level. He's taking us into the area which holds the most fears for him. He's pleading with me to help him resist the impulse to flee. He's disappointed, almost dismayed, when the session ends.

This seems to be connected to a shift in the power dynamics in the room. For a long time it was important for Joseph to stay in control, to be calling the shots, to be keeping things at the surface. The question of how and what we would talk about was less important than the question of who was in charge here. When I took the lead, he would acquiesce but withdraw emotionally so that his commitment was purely intellectual. The letter but not the spirit.

The shifts in the power dynamics at the beginning of our session this morning reveals something different. He began by beating Allen into submission and telling me that the tree in my garden was ugly. He put me on the defensive and during the photo 'show and tell' he resisted any attempts by me to regain the initiative. But then, about half way through the session, something moved. It was like a development of the 'But anyway' conversation where he asked us both to look at something difficult and puzzling. He steered the conversation towards Mel and what happens in secret places when you don't think the adults are listening. It's as if he was saying, ‘Steve, you've been suggesting that there's something sexual and difficult that needs to be talked about, and you've made it clear that it's up to me to take us into that territory. I haven't wanted to do it, I find it awkward and exposing, but I can now see that you won't be put off, that you'll bring me back to this difficulty whenever you can. So no more "but anyways"! I trust that this is what needs to be done.’

In hindsight it's not difficult to see the seeds of this shift in earlier sessions; the putting of the imaginary ball into my hands, the requests that I shake the rope, the questions about how to proceed.

Seen through a Winnicottian lens, this is an omnipotence looking for a way of being contained. Actual omnipotence is frightening: there are no felt boundaries. To feel omnipotent is (paradoxically) to feel out of control; the would-be dictator always feels isolated, unheld, alone, unconnected, always feels caught up in a futile attempt to impose his will in a world that's too big and too chaotic and, ultimately, too hostile. There is a part of Joseph that yearns for a strong father figure, for someone who is involved but firm, who will say, ‘I'll take you to Steve's tomorrow, but my own priorities are important and I'll take you at 9 am.’ Without a containing father, Joseph feels too powerful, too much left alone with his omnipotent fantasies.

So, one aspect of the shift is Joseph's finding a way of being contained. It's like setting off into the unknown and finding a safe-enough companion. I find myself remembering his interest in Dante's guide into the Inferno. In some important way we have moved beyond an old paranoid-schizoid pattern. We seem to have established an alliance where we notice and resist distractions, where we can talk together about the 'but anyways'.

But there remains (as always) something else, something elusive and hidden ... something to do with sex and intimacy, a confused part of Joseph's life where anger and desire are muddied. There is a thwarted seeking for intimacy, an attempt to feel and find love which gets cut-off and then re-routed into a kind of suppressed but felt rage. I feel that we're at the edge of this territory and that Joseph now wants us to enter it.

As soon as Joseph arrives for our afternoon session, it's clear that he knows what he wants to talk about, that he's been thinking about it since this morning.

‘I want to tell you about what happened in the room with Mel,’ he says. ‘It's no big deal really, but for some reason I want to tell you about it ...’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I'm ready.’

‘We were sitting in the room with the door shut and in front of the computer searching the Internet. After a while we started to type in words like "sex" and "dick" and "fuck". It was hilarious and we were getting some pretty weird sites, I can tell you. We were laughing really loudly, it was really fun, and it was only afterwards that we noticed that the high window was open and thought that maybe we'd been overheard. No-one said anything.’

‘It was pretty exciting,’ I say.

‘It was, because it was forbidden territory, kind of risky.’

‘Because it was about sex and Mel was a girl.’

‘It was exciting but it wasn't really sexual. It was the forbidden territory thing that made it exciting. It was exciting but safe.’

‘It felt risky, you said, but also safe.’

‘Well it felt risky just because we'd never done anything like this before, but we knew it wasn't going anywhere, it had no consequences, we weren't going to do anything. We both knew that I was leaving soon to go to Australia and that we wouldn't see each other for a long time. But it felt kind of like being on the edge, trying something a bit dangerous or something.'

‘Like making a move but feeling that it wouldn't go too far,’ I say.

‘I've had very little sexual experience actually,’ says Joseph. ‘Sometimes I feel a bit strange about this, I mean I'm sixteen after all and I guess most kids my age have done some fooling around or something.’

‘But not you,’ I say.

‘No.’

'It just hasn't happened.'

‘I've never really felt the need,’ he says. ‘I don't feel frustrated, I don't feel that I miss it ... maybe I don't miss it because I've never had it, I don't know what it's like. It's funny actually, but there's some plan being made by my mother at the moment to set me up with a girl to do some dancing lessons. It should be quite fun.’

‘There's a bit of a mystery here,’ I say. ‘Here is Joseph telling me about his lack of sexual experience... and you say that you don't miss it, you're not frustrated ... and had I known nothing else I might have concluded that here was someone without much of a sex drive. And yet the reason he is sitting here is that he's been involved in a couple of sexual acts in public.’

‘There was a feeling of panic just then when you said that,’ Joseph says. ‘Like when you were talking I wanted you to stop, but there's also a feeling that I want to go further. It wasn't a big feeling, and maybe it's not important, but I just wanted to let you know that I'd had it.’

‘The way you notice and express these feelings has changed the whole dynamic of our conversations,’ I say. ‘We're working together now.’

‘Yes,’ says Joseph.

‘And so we have this puzzle,’ I say.

‘Well,’ says Joseph, closing his eyes and putting his hand on his forehead, as he often does when thinking deeply. ‘For a long time as I was growing up, I've felt very confused about my sexuality. I've felt at times that I was a girl, and at times that I was a boy. That's been very confusing for me. I didn't know what I was. Recently I've realised that I'm male, that I've got a male sexuality, and now that I've made that decision it's going to be important for me to use and express my sexuality more than I have in the past.’

‘You've made that decision,’ I say.

‘It's like for a long time I've been stranded in the sea between two islands, and now I've given up looking for an island where I can be both, and instead I've now decided to clamber up onto the man's island. In a way I've made that decision, and in a way I've been pushed by society.’

‘You've been pushed by society,’ I say. ‘Do you mean the bullies, the ones who have called you gay?’

‘No it's not the bullies. It's more what's expected generally. It's like there are only these two islands, one where I think of myself as a boy and the other where I think of myself as a girl, and everyone expects as a matter of course that I'll move towards the first. Going to the other island is like swimming against the tide.’

‘Against society's tide rather than your own,’ I say.

But Joseph ignores the implication behind my comment. ‘It's a great relief to have made the decision to swim for the boy island,’ he says. ‘That's been a great relief. It's like there's a list of conditions or a script that I can now follow, about what you have to do if you're on this island.’

‘The list tells you what to do. It's less confusing that listening to your confused feelings about your own sexuality.’

‘I guess that's right. I've made a decision to follow the script that says I'm a boy.’

‘So I wonder what's happened to the female part.’

‘It's like she's in hibernation, my voice is telling me, and she'll come out again when I've had children,’ Joseph says, then looks quickly up into my face. ‘I didn't expect to say that! I thought I'd eliminated her, that I'd made the decision to turn my back on her!’

‘She mustn't be Zero-ed,’ I say. ‘She's a part of you, and perhaps she's feeling pretty emotional now that she knows that you've made this decision to climb onto the male island.’

‘She's crying,’ says Joseph.

‘She's crying,’ I say.

‘She's upset. I can feel that she's upset.’

We sit quietly for a moment and it's only when I fear that something might important might evaporate that I break the silence.

‘Perhaps it was her that was masturbating in the library,’ I say. ‘Perhaps she's feeling angry and wants somehow to express her rage.’

‘My immediate reaction is no, says Joseph, ‘but that voice is saying "yes". My male voice, the conscious one, says no. But unconsciously there's another answer.’

‘The female voice says yes.

‘The unconscious one. It doesn't seem to have a gender or a role ... You know, for some reason I find myself thinking about those super-fast, pencil-shaped planes that get from London to New York in no time.’

‘The Concords,’ I say.

‘Yes, that's them. I have this aerodynamic impulse myself, to get quickly from one spot to another a long distance away.’

‘The impulse to escape, the "but anyway" impulse. To get away from uncomfortable feelings,’ I say.

‘Yes, exactly,’ he says.

‘And you run the risk of leaving a part of you behind, ignored, unhappy, revengeful.’

‘Crying,’ he says.

‘A frustrated female part which needs to exact its revenge.’

‘It's like making enemies of former friends,’ says Joseph.

‘Perhaps it's important to renew the friendship,’ I say.

Again we sit in silence for a while. Our time is almost up and there's a feeling in the room that what has had to be said has been said. I say something about the possibility that one day the issue of his sexuality may resurface, that he might find himself attracting, or attracted to, a male, and that perhaps he's felt some of this already. I also say that there are people who feel partly male and partly female who have found islands where their bisexuality has found a home. He acknowledges these remarks with a nod but makes no comment.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask just before he gets up to go.

‘Oh I'm all right.’

‘She's a bit of a mess though,’ I say.

I have five minutes on the phone with Giles soon afterwards and try to describe what has happened and the mixture of relief and concern that I'm feeling.

‘But Giles,’ I say, ‘I wonder a bit about taking this female part too literally, about speaking about "her" as if she were a person who actually existed. I know that Jung talks about the complexes being gods, each having their say in what goes on, and there are times when I can't think of a better way of dealing with the complexity of things other than by talking about different parts. But is this being too literal?’ (1)

‘It depends, I suppose,’ says Giles, ‘on whether the personification of the female part broadens the picture, gives you more room to move... gives you access to places that were previously shut off.’

‘Whether it's a healing fiction,’ I say, remembering the title of one of Hillman's books.

‘It seems to be a way of looking at things, a construction, which illuminates dark places,’ says Giles.

Like the candles in my dream, I think to myself. Perhaps the candles in my cathedral dream are ideas, perspectives, theories, ways of thinking?

‘I worry, of course,’ I say, ‘that I put this idea into Joseph's mind, that he's just feeding back to me what I've put into him.’

‘How so Steve?’

‘Well do you remember a week or so ago I told Joseph that he had locked up a part of himself in a dark room, the suffering part, the little-boy part that feels things.’

‘You're worried that this "revelation" today is simply a regurgitation of your own interpretation?’

‘Not really,’ I say. ‘The thought does cross my mind, but no ... it seems more likely that together we're finding a way of describing something Joseph actually experiences. It's probably not the only way of describing it ... other words, other perspectives ... other stories... could be used…’

‘This story makes sense,’ says Giles.

‘Yes, it makes sense!’ I say, seeing for the first time a new meaning in the expression. ‘This story makes something, it creates something ... a kind of order out of chaos... it brings things together in a meaningful way. Where there wasn't sense before, now it has been made.’

‘This is Taylor's thesis, isn't it Steve. That the postmodern quest is not to do with finding meaning, with stripping things back to their essences to reveal something that existed all along ... God, a natural order, whatever. The postmodern quest is the invention of meaning, the articulation of a story that makes sense. It's about giving a shape to experience that makes a difference to how we feel about our lives. (2) From what you've said, this is what Joseph and you are doing together. You're making something ... a story if you like. The articulation of this story makes a difference.’

‘And I guess what I'm hoping,’ I say, ‘is that this is an embodied story, that it's been put together out of the raw material of his actual experiences, his present bodily feelings and that it somehow embraces what it is that he's wanting to become.’

‘Unlike his more conscious story ...’

‘The supersonic Concord who left behind a disowned passenger,’ I say. ‘There are stories that connect us to life and stories that whoosh us away from it.’

‘The story that you're creating together here,’ says Giles, ‘has the potential to bring previously-unrelated parts of himself back into relationship.’

After the call is over, I sit for a moment remembering his first story. ‘The good side at one end of the sea, and the concealed and sour-smelling evil at the other.’ I’m struck yet again at how often what was expressed at a first session captured in a nutshell what needed to be amplified, circumambulated, lost, rediscovered and then articulated in a more embodied and relational form.

I've been writing and thinking about Joseph, about what it is that he's attempting to do as he tells me his stories. And about what is it that I'm doing when I tell a story.

Take last week, for example, when I lectured to a group of undergraduates. What was it that I was attempting to do when I told them the Grimm story, 'The Prince Afraid of Nothing'?

Once upon a time there lived a prince who had got tired of living at home in his father's house and as he was afraid of nothing he thought: I'll go out into the wide world, I won't be bored there, and I'll see plenty of strange sights. So he took leave of his parents and set out on his journey. (3)

Actually the story I told was not simply the Grimm fairytale. I kept interrupting the narrative each time the prince found himself in a new situation:

• leaving the castle,

• encountering a giant,

• fetching a magical apple,

• being blinded by the enraged giant,

• finding a cure for his blindness,

• enduring torments for a beloved and celebrating a wedding.

At each of these points in the story I reflected on the prince's perspective at that moment, and suggested to the students that in our lives we experience many of these perspectives at the same time, and that our feelings and actions are perhaps more the result of a partly successful attempt to reconcile different perspectives than a clear consequence of any single one. It was, at one level, an attempt to encourage a Nietzschian multi-perspectivism. (4) So perhaps the answer to my question is that in telling a story I'm attempting to teach something.

But if I was using this fairytale-plus-reflections as a didactic tool, it was something of a fizzer. It didn't work very well. ‘I felt confused during your presentation Steve,’ one of the students said at the end of the session. ‘I enjoyed the story, I found myself engaged with the narrative and held by the way you weaved extracts from various sources into your presentation, but I kept wondering what it was exactly that I was being asked to think about.’ The atmosphere in the room suggested to me that this student's experience was not unique.

So, had I just done it badly? Or were there other reasons why there was some confusion in the room? Was my aim really didactic, or was I trying to do other things as well? And is it possible that there were assumptions in the room about the nature of story-telling that confused the communication, assumptions not unrelated to those which confused and limited me in some of my sessions with Joseph?

This, of course, is the argument of this thesis, that there are in fact widespread misunderstandings in our culture about the act of telling a story and that this has quite profound consequences not only for teaching but also for therapy. I have been suggesting in these pages that a story is not primarily a cultural object, an encapsulated truth made intelligible so that it can be passed from client to therapist or from teacher to pupil (Joseph telling me about good and evil, Steve preaching the virtues of a Nietzschian multi-perspectivism); it is instead the currency of exchange between teller and listener, a way of sharing maps and inviting joint-exploration ventures, a means by which relationships are formed and fostered. We tell stories not in order to persuade but to connect, not to teach wisdom but to find and develop links, not to reveal a truth about anything but to expand (by creating possible meanings which are useful) the intersubjective space which is formed by the interlocking boundaries of our personal worlds. If it is true that vitality is generated within the intersubjective or relational field, then the act of telling a story is an attempt to animate the world by agitating and enlivening the intersubjective space. Or, to put it more simply, we tell stories in order to love and be loved. (5)

Not, of course, that we're usually aware of this. The need to tell a story is felt more as a bodily impulse. It's a form of nature naturing, as inevitable an aspect of being human as breathing (we don't breathe out as a result of the thought that it's time to expel the used air) or the centipede's walking (mind-bogglingly complex only when analysed!). I simply must speak. I need to find a way of articulating something elusive or complex, something as-yet-unformed.

In its conception this impulse seems to have very little to do with other people. It seems to be selfish, a response to an entirely internal need. I need to make sense of something for myself. There is an unknown something, a chaotic or confusing something, and in its present undifferentiated form I cannot use it, talk about it, feel the power of it, feel myself energised by the aesthetics of it. (6) I have an intuitive sense that it would be good to be able to do some of this, that if I could find the right words then some pressure or heaviness or muddiness or impotence or loneliness that I'm feeling might be alleviated. So I must speak, and unconsciously I begin to play with the chaotic elements, to muck around with them in exactly the same way a toddler does with a new combination of toys or blocks. (Play is not a preparation for living, but a continuing component of the creative life.) I've got to muck around, I've got to play, until I've formed some kind of relationship with the elements, or with the unknown world into which the elements have taken me. I've got to play until the chaos has been patterned in some way, until I've made the unknown more familiar. The alternative is to be frightened by the world and to be pushed back into myself, a particularly postmodern temptation in a world where God is dead and Gaia ailing. Thus I begin the early drafts of this thesis by playing with the elements; creating a Joseph and investing the invention with the characteristics of many of my most challenging or unsettling clients, writing scenes which seemed to convey something of the atmosphere of actual interactions, and then superimposing a partly fictitious account of a supervision with Giles. I muck around with scenes and dreams and thoughts and feelings until what initially felt dizzying, distanced and disempowering begins to take on some coherence and starts to lead to connections of many kinds: with my past, between my bodily agitations and certain thoughts, between apparently unconnected ideas, with philosophic and psychoanalytic traditions, and with current challenges. Even in these earliest stages a story is a verb, attempting to do something, not a noun attempting to be something. This playing with disparate elements is an attempt to temporarily reconcile uneasy internal coalitions and rivalries as well as being an attempt to make more room for imprisoned and previously unrecognized internal beings like Hannibal. It is therefore an attempt to be inclusive and pluralistic rather than single-minded and didactic.

So, in its inception, the impulse to tell a story seems to be about sorting out something for myself, clarifying an internal confusion. But even early on the audience is implied, is felt to exist. (8) We seek out a response and adjust the story according to what we find or fail to find. As I'm writing my first draft I have my supervisors and unknown examiners in mind, I think about how various colleagues might react to the material; even as I'm sorting out my jumbled thoughts for the session with the undergraduates I'm imagining their faces and wondering where they're coming from, how they will respond to this material. (9) The process involves continual adjustments; the business of storytelling is always dynamic, a tense and never-entirely-successful attempt to reconcile the need to make sense of internal realities with the need to be understood. (10)

So the story never stands still, never arrives at a final form. It remains dynamic. And each attempt to tell a story has a destabilising effect on previous stories. (11) A good-enough story sufficiently supported by a facilitating environment attempts a dismantling of some of the 'old story', allowing structural links to loosen or break so that more of the world can come in. This is Fordham's deintegration-integration (12) and Bion's Ps-D. It's always a balancing act and the threat of an abyss is always present. Our fear of meaninglessness is one of the spurs to the story telling that arises out of our need to see connections, to feel ourselves connected. If I stop telling stories, I cease to be sane. (13)

If the environment is insufficiently supportive or responsive, the storyteller is turned inwards. A story is fashioned to take the place of the holding environment, and this story necessarily must cut itself off from the unsympathetic external world. The story becomes tight, controlled, self-sufficient and solipsistic. It becomes disembodied. So much energy goes into such a holding operation that none is then available for an advance into the unknown but vitalising territory which, for others blessed with a more facilitating environment, is the real world of real interactions.

A young man (I'll call him John) came to see me some years ago living out exactly this kind of disembodied story. John had never had a girlfriend or a satisfying job, and he'd developed an alternative world which he inhabited, a crystal world full of beautiful lights and labyrinthian corridors, which he described to me one day as follows:

It's kind of like ...it's hard to describe ... it's like this ornate crystal globe or cube that has all these pathways running in it ... and it's quite twisted and has various turns and stuff like that, and they go in all directions and in three dimensions, and ... and it seems to be stuck in time, it doesn't actually move forward at all (14) ... and there are all these crystal pathways that I follow and they tend to change or shift or get confused in the lighting effects of the globe ... like there are so many distractions or different paths to take ... So it's like this huge maze which is enclosed in a globe, and in fact there is no way out of the globe

And what I need to do to get out of it, I think, is to just do it. And yet I feel blocked from doing it, I just feel trapped in this thing, it feels too hard to just do it and get out ... In fact the longer I stay in here, the longer ... the more complicated the paths actually are, because I find new paths to take and stuff like that, and by going along them I'm making them more concrete and more real, more intricate, more twisted around itself, and I'm not making any real progress ..

There's a part of me that thinks that … [the crystal globe] is an illusion, but it's actually better than being outside ... and surely it's not necessary to compromise the beauty of the thing to be free of it ... But it's so much like a cage. It's a very beautiful cage but it's still a cage. And I know it very well. (15)

In telling me this story, John was attempting to articulate a new one. This is how it has been, Steve, and in telling you about it I'm hoping that some new story will emerge. A story is an aspect of love-making. It is an attempt to articulate a desire and to elicit or provoke a response. Whenever John felt that my response was inadequate he would try another tack, a new story, sometimes insisting that he was stuck and the therapy was futile, wanting to punish me for my unresponsiveness and demanding that I change my ways and offer more. His stories were not just descriptions of psychological states, they were weapons (both offensive and defensive) wielded in a desperate campaign being fought over the issue of his involvement with the world.

John's crystal world was a disembodied story, cut off from lived experience and relationship with the world, self-nourishing, a self-sufficient system living in a bubble, recycling stale and increasingly poisonous (but familiar) air, unable to flush away its shit. It existed (until he told me about it) as a noun rather than a verb, a lifeless construction rather than a living plant. An embodied story is our lifeline to psychological health. When we successfully take part in a story-telling, we're joined up to the world. We breathe in other people's stories, we breathe out our own. The air in my lungs is never simply mine.

We tell stories because our hearts are heavy with desire. Thus when we tell a story, we're less interested in having the listener think something than feel and do something. While it may be true that feeling and thinking are not two separate things (two separate actions), it's also true that to respond to a story with a disengaged and disembodied thought (a thought without its roots in the soil of the body) is to miss the point. We tell stories in order to affect the listener. We want the listener to shudder or panic, laugh or smirk, be quickened or saddened, feel gapped or connected. We, the storytellers, want to excite something in the listener, which when successful always affects a relationship. We want to excite love (even when, in our disappointed fury, our immediate impulse is to hurt, to cause pain or to kill) (16). One aspect of introversion, that tendency to keep our best stories to ourselves, may well be a timidity that comes from too many failed attempts to excite a listener, too many attempted seductions that have gone wrong.

I'm suggesting, then, that when I told the story of 'The Prince Afraid of Nothing' (and added my reflections on its seven locations), there was an implied agenda that had less to do with teaching than with relating, less to do with imparting truth than with enlivening an interactive field, less to do flashing than mating. (17)

So, if it's true that when I'm telling a story I'm engaging with the world (real and imagined, flawed and ideal) and am attempting to affect or change my relationship to that world in some significant way, how then does this differ from what we assume a story to be? What are our assumptions?

Not far beneath the surface there are, I'd suggest, three main ones: that stories are

• carriers of truths, faithful descriptions of some reality (existential, unconscious or fantastic);

• entertainments, diversions designed to pass the time pleasantly and to take our minds off less-palatable realities;

• objects which can be observed without involving our participation.

It's possible to speculate that the student who didn't know what to think as I told my story was operating out of all three assumptions: that Steve was trying to teach her something, that Steve was trying to entertain her for some reason, and that Steve was putting before her some object of value for her to appreciate and reflect on. Any suggestion that I might have been trying to affect our relationship might have seemed faintly shocking or peculiar to her. Yet that was what I was attempting to do, albeit largely unconsciously, and I'm suggesting that one of the reasons why my attempt was confusing to her was the existence of these dis-engaging assumptions.

Our culture is shot-through and hamstrung by these three assumptions about the nature of a story.

Example 1.

'This bird has been trapped in the classroom all night,' says the kindergarten teacher as she and the early arrivals watch the bird cowering in a corner, cheerupping pathetically. One of the children starts to cry, the others look worried. ‘I think we should open the window wider and let it go.’

‘The bird is lonely,’ says Andy, the tearful one, always first to school in the mornings. ‘It wants a cuddle.’

‘We can't keep it here, Andy, it's just going to feel more frightened. It's crying because it wants to get out. Letting it go is the sensible thing, isn't it.’

Example 2.

‘The poem was unfinished, wasn't it,'‘says 16 year-old Alison, hoping that her extra reading about Coleridge and the circumstances of the writing of 'Kubla Khan' will impress the teacher she admires so much. ‘I was wondering if instead of writing an analysis I could write an ending to it. Or could I do a painting? I've got this painting in mind, based on the last lines which describe the man besotted with the Abyssinian maid:

Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.'

‘We're preparing you for university Alison,’ says the teacher soberly but not unkindly, ‘and it's important that you get practice here expressing your ideas clearly, presenting them so that one follows on from another in a logical order. That's where your essays have been weak this semester, and that's what we've got to address. We've got to get your marks up.’

Example 3.

'Great concert, eh! Doesn't it make you feel great! Doesn't it make you feel like running in the dark or something.'

'So you liked it?'

'I loved it!'

'So what did you like about it? What made it so good do you reckon.'

'I can't answer questions like that! I hate questions like that!

I knew you'd ask something like that, and it spoils things for me, it distracts me!'

'Have I said something wrong? Look, I was just trying to make some conversation. You're so bloody touchy these days?'

Example 4.

I had this dream last night - it was really weird, I'm not sure what to make of it - about my lover storming out after an argument and then being brought back dead, killed in an accident,' he says to his therapist, his pulse quickening as he relives both the murderous fury of the confrontation and then the desperate sense of loss when he saw the face in the coffin.

'What does it mean?'

'You've entered the depressive position at last! You're making progress! ... You're frowning.... Let me try to explain

In all these cases the gap between the worlds of the story teller and the listener remains unbridged as the listener regards the story from a Cartesian distance, unaware that the story has been told not in order to reveal something, not to place an object on the table for dissection and analysis, but in order to engage the other and further a relationship. The unconscious assumptions about the nature of a story prevent the story from achieving its objective.

Of course the psychoanalytic literature is full of warnings about this, and the trend in theory has been away from Freud's disengagement and towards an empathic involvement in the intersubjective space. (18) Nonetheless we remain, as a culture, dominated by a disengaged rationalism. When we hear stories (women's stories, indigenous stories, our children's stories, our psyche's stories) our gut reaction is not to ask What is this story trying to do and how am I affected? but From what emotionally disengaged distance can I place myself in order to evaluate the truth or significance of this story? (19)

Of course distance and rationalism have a place; civilised life would not be possible without them. They are, for example, our defence against the tyranny of the crowd; they are gateways to all kinds of insights and advances, scientific and otherwise. It is partly because we need in our work a more distanced clarity that we attempt to look again at our experiences through the eyes of our supervisors.

At the same time, the writing of this thesis has revealed to me the extent to which I have been unconsciously caught up in a kind of rationalism that has led me, at times, to miss the point of my clients' communications, to receive a story as if it were a noun rather than a verb. At one level the writing of the thesis (the telling of this story) is an attempt to mate with a less constricting and more vital world.

Endnotes

(1) Winnicott has written about the personification of a split-off part in an paper called 'The split off male and female elements to be found in men and women' [pp 169 ff in Winnicott (1989)]. Giles mentioned the paper during this conversation and I read it that night, finding it absorbing and alive given what had happened during my session with Joseph.

Winnicott begins with the concept 'familiar to psychoanalysis' that all humans have a predisposition towards bisexuality and in characteristically fruitful ways he plays with this idea, juxtaposing his thoughts with clinical material of a patient who had been in analysis for more than twenty years. Among the central questions which the paper addresses are: In what ways is it useful to think in terms of male and female internal characters? What kinds of factors might contribute to a strong and perhaps upsetting cross-sexual identification? Are there helpful theoretical ways of thinking about the male and female elements in a person's personality and development? And how might these thoughts be used in the therapy?

One of the most refreshing things about this paper is Winnicott's willingness to take risks, to play with ideas, to exploit intuitions. Listening to his patient one day he finds himself thinking that he is listening to a girl ... and he says so! Then it occurs to him that it is only his own madness (Winnicott's) that makes this true... and again says this to the patient. This in turn leads to an exploration of the relationship between the patient and his mother, and to the realisation that she treated him as a girl rather than as a boy. In all of this Winnicott refuses to be restrained by an over-literal regard for what might be called 'objective truth' and instead allows his artistic license considerable latitude. He talks to the patient as if the female element were a real person and as if he (Winnicott) knew how the girl felt.

The girl that I was talking to [says Winnicott to his patient] does not want the man released, and indeed she is not interested in him. What she wants is full acknowledgment of herself and of her own rights over your body. Her penis envy includes envy of you as a male... The feeling ill is a protest from the female self, this girl, because she has always hoped that the analysis would in fact find out that this man, yourself, is and always has been a girl. [p 172 Winnicott (1989) Winnicott's own emphases.]

What I found so exciting about this paper was not so much what Winnicott says as the way he is talking to his patient and to this split off part. He is speaking as if the girl exists and as if he knows what she wants and feels. This is precisely the way I had found myself speaking to Joseph in our session as together we empathised with this rejected internal female element and saw some of Joseph's behaviour in terms of this girl's fury.

Again I'm brought back to discussions with Giles about meaning. Do we invent a meaning; or do we find one? Does the invention of this girl (in Winnicott's patient, in Joseph) simply provide us with an ordering framework which enables us to proceed, to act, to move away from the debilitating sense that all is fundamentally chaotic, disordered and mad; or does it move us closer to a state of affairs that really exists? Are our stories about stories arbitrary (though clever and relational) inventions; or are they approximations which bring us closer to Bion's O? Do we trust the spurtings of our deeper intuitions and our dreams because they're simply aesthetically wondrous; or do we trust them because they contain within them intimations of what is perpetually hidden from our view, the things-in-themselves?

What Winnicott is implying in this paper is that it's less important to find certain answers to these haunting questions than to increasingly operate, as Winnicott clearly does, from an informed and playful intuition.

It's not simply Winnicott's therapeutic style, his way of playing with his own spontaneous thoughts, which is instructive: he has things to say about the nature of the female and male elements which give me pause for thought. He equates the female element with being and identity and the male element with doing and creativity. 'The male element does while the female element (in males and females) is.'

After being - doing and being done to. But first, being...

At the extreme I discovered myself looking at an essential conflict of human beings, one which must be operative at a very early date; that between being the object which also has the property of being, and by contrast a confrontation with the object which involves activity and object-relating that is backed up by instinct and drive.

This idea of an 'essential conflict of human beings' existing between being and doing, between identity and object-relating, a conflict which can be dramatised by thinking of it in terms of a dynamic relationship between the female and male elements, casts its light into several corners, not the least of them being the way Joseph hides and engages, is without boundaries in his intimacies and is unapproachable, is sentimental and emotionless. In his dreams and in his life the female element is attempting to find an elusive sense of being and identity through becoming the breast (dancing bare-breasted outside the doctor's surgery, snuggling up to his parents, exposing himself in the library), while the male element is busily making a way in the world, getting good grades and focussing on a career ahead. It wants to get on with things, and is both furious and anxious when events conspire to slow things down.

Later on in the paper, Winnicott offers another interesting idea:

Stealing belongs to the male element in boys and girls. The question arises: what corresponds to this in terms of the female element in boys and girls? The answer can be that in respect of this element the individual usurps the mother's position and her seat or garments, in this way deriving desirability and seductiveness stolen from the mother.

I'm reminded immediately of Joseph's dream of the red clothes being stolen from his mother's flat by the girls (the female element usurping the mother's garments) and then flaunted on a line in public view, an act which made the dreaming Joseph (the male element) murderously livid. The male element wants to eliminate the female, to zero her, to shoot her with a gun... or at least it used to.

And there's another fruitful idea in the article, that an overdeveloped female element might be the consequence of parents wanting the boy to be a girl. Winnicott's patient was, like Joseph, born after the death of an infant sister and Winnicott speculates that his patient was seen as a girl by the mother.

(2) p 18 Taylor (1989)

But the invocation of meaning also comes from our awareness of how much the search involves articulation. We find the sense of life through articulating it. And moderns have become acutely aware of how much sense being there for us depends on our own powers of expression. Discovering here depends on, is interwoven with, inventing. Finding a sense to life depends on framing meaningful expressions which are adequate.

(3) pp 343 ff Grimm (1982)

(4) As the author of the article on Nietzsche in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has put it:

Both in principle and in practice Nietzsche's thinking was avowedly interpretative, multiply perspectival, experimental, and tentative and made free use of language that is highly metaphorical and figurative. He preferred to offer suggestions, hazard guesses, and propose hypotheses rather than attempt to construct rigorous lines of reasoning. He further acknowledged that the upshot of what he (or anyone else) has to say on any substantive issue neither is nor can ever be beyond all dispute. Yet he repeatedly insisted upon the distinction between plausibility and soundness of various ideas on the one hand, and their 'value for life' on the other (between their 'truth-value' and their 'life-value', as it were.) p 622 Schacht in Honderich ed. (1995)

(5) There is, of course, a whole other dimension to 'story telling': we also tell stories in order to maintain power, suppress minorities, create bigger distances between people, protect privilege, set things in concrete, deny life or change. We tell stories not only to bring the world into closer relationship but also to keep it at a distance. But hate and fear and the maintenance of power are not unrelated to love and desire. The amoral libido (or so at least Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would suggest - Spinoza too ) ignores distinctions between good and bad, selfless and selfish.

(6) Charles Taylor writes:

...we come here to one of the most basic aspirations of human beings, the need to be connected to, or in contact with, what they see as good, or of crucial importance, or of fundamental value. And how could it be otherwise, once we see that this orientation in relation to the good is essential to being a functional human agent. ...

.. [The] goods which define our spiritual orientation are the ones by which we will measure the worth of our lives. (p 42)

...[B]ecause we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a 'quest'. (pp 51-52)

(7) Bion's talks about the inescapable need to turn chaotic elements infused with a sense of catastrophe (he calls them 'beta elements') into an alive thinking process (his term for this is 'alpha function'). I think we're talking about the same process, using different language. Drawing on the Kleinian lexicon, Bion (and other post-Kleinians like Eigen) describe a process where beta elements are produced but cannot be made sense of by the infant, and so the psyche 'has to evacuate these elements into the mother, relying on her to do whatever has to be done to convert them into a form suitable for employment as alpha-elements by the infant. [p 116 Bion (1967)]. In my less sophisticated language, this is the infant and the mother (or the client and the therapist) telling each other stories, enlivening the intersubjective space. As Eigen [p 218 Eigen(1993)] puts it:

Bion tracks a free floating sense of catastrophe which is a fundamental term of our existence. It functions as an invariant which can be filled in with a range of more specific contents (dread of birth, death, change, boundlessness, sameness, the predator, castration, disease, burning, drowning, suffocating, falling, etc). One strains to see its face clearly in what can be seen but it grips one blindly from behind the scenes...

... However, the self is not simply one with its sense of catastrophe....As the self goes under it broadcasts signals of dissolution in progress. It can do so only from some remaining

quality of difference which it cannot shake off. In the end a difference remains between oneself and zero and however miniscule, it is infinite.

This, in varying degrees, is a description of Joseph telling the story of good and evil, me dreaming about Hannibal, and the student in my class complaining that she doesn't know what to think about. Bion's Faith in O [see Eigen (1985) in Eigen (1993)] can be seen as his faith in the meaningfulness of the animating substrata of the intersubjective field.

(8) Winnicott [p 48 Winnicott (1971)] says that in all stages of play the mother's presence is felt and necessary, whether or not she is actually in the room.

(9) ... a face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight) is not on that account its cause, but - one might say - its target.' Wittgenstein, quoted p 9 in Phillips (1993).

(10) It initially puzzled and bothered me that every time I told a particular fairytale or myth to a different group or individual, I would change it in some way. Wasn't I tampering with something archetypal here, with some artefact of the collective unconscious? Then I realized that the variations in each case were influenced by the audience, and that by noting what I was changing I was being given some insight into what I was unconsciously perceiving about that group or that individual. We adjust our stories all the time according to what we find or fail to find.

This led to further thoughts. For many years I'd taught in a progressive school and had come to realize that the Rousseau/A.S. Neill assumption that, given the right physical environment, the child would flourish, had its dangers. Our school was set in beautiful surroundings and we teachers put a lot of work into making the classrooms stimulating places, with tools, art supplies, toys, puzzles, dress-ups, and so on always available. What happened when kids were let loose in this stimulating and beautiful environment? It seemed to depend (I came to realize) on the willingness of the teacher to engage. Those teachers who, as it were, stood back and observed the children 'set free' soon found that some of the children became quickly bored and aggressive. What was missing, for these children, was a response, an interaction: they were made anxious and felt adrift because there was no 'mother' face in which to find or fail to find a reflection. Those teachers who on the other hand got their hands dirty, mucked in there with the kids and revelled in the play themselves (without forgetting their adultness, without losing sight of the kids' need for them to be teachers as well) found themselves a part of an enlivened overlap between two areas of play. [See Shann (1987)]

(11) Thomas Ogden [p 1 Ogden (1989)] begins one of his books with the following paragraph:

This book, having been written, has become part of the given and must now be overcome in the minds of its readers and its author. Having been written, it is static and no longer becoming anything other than itself. The potential value of this book lies in the degree to which it creates a possibility for the given (of which it is now a part) to be overcome through interpretation by the reader in a new and more generative way.

[12] Fordham [quoted pp 51 - 52 Astor (1995)] described it as follows:

In essence, deintegration and reintegration describe a fluctuating state of learning in which the infant opens itself to new experiences and then withdraws in order to reintegrate and consolidate those experiences. During a deintegrative activity, the infant maintains continuity with the main body of the self (or its centre), while venturing into the external world to accumulate experience in motor action and sensory stimulation ... Such a concept of the self brings a new dimension to both depth psychology and developmental psychology, for it is now conceived to be a dynamic structure through whose activity the infant's emotional and ego growth takes place.

[13]Someone - was it Laing or Winnicott or Adam Phillips? - has defined madness as being that state where you cannot find anyone who understands your stories.

(14) John had described in an earlier session a lifelong attachment to 'a magic crystal' which froze time for its possessor.

(15) This session was tape-recorded (of course with the client's permission), and so the words quoted are verbatim.

(16) At an English teachers' conference in the late 80s, a man approached me and asked me if I was Steve Shann who had written School Portrait. When I said I was, he told me rather belligerently to sit down as he had a thing or two he wanted to say to me. 'I'm a deputy head in a government school,' he said rather belligerently, 'and I took your book with me on a camping holiday last Christmas. One wet day I lay in the tent and picked up your book, read about 20 pages and flung it over the other side of the tent, shouting to my wife, "This bloke wouldn't know if his arse was on fire, teaching at his progressive school with all the rich kids." But later in the day I picked up the book again and found myself reading it at one sitting, and at one stage my wife came in and found me crying. I was so moved by it, he said, his face suddenly softening (he was enjoying telling me this story, and enjoying the slightly alarmed look on my face). 'I'm a tired and sometimes cynical old teacher, but I felt refreshed by your book.'.

This remains my favourite reaction, I think because it indicated that my book had got into his body. It had successfully mated!

(17) These are all false distinctions, of course, in order to emphasize the relational aspect. For example there's clearly a showing, a display, involved in story-telling. I'm strutting my stuff, and hoping that 'the other' will be impressed and will respond.

(18) This was the theme of Jung's The Psychology of the Transference, and it's echoed by post-Freudian analysts like Stephen Mitchell [p 21 Mitchell (1993)] who writes:

What is inspiring about psychoanalysis today is not the renunciation of illusion in the hope of joining a common, progressively realistic knowledge and control, but rather the hope of fashioning a personal reality that feels authentic and enriching ... The bridge supporting connections with others is not built out of a rationality superseding fantasy and the imagination, but out of feeling experienced as real, authentic, generated from the inside, rather than imposed externally, in close relationship with fantasy and the imagination.

(19) Many schools and universities still tell their students in English and other humanist subjects never to use the first person pronoun in essays, still encourage the objectification implied by the passive voice, and still assume that the correct model for an argument is a scientific experiment with hypothesis (definitions made explicit), accumulation of objectively observed data (preferably in controlled and repeatable situations) and an unambiguous conclusion. Such a discourse actually excludes from consideration what is at the heart of the human experience.