Chapter 2 Feeling useless

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

The arrangement is that Joseph will get the bus here from school each Tuesday afternoon, but today he is late. I stand at the window of my study looking out onto the path he'll walk up, breathing deeply to still a fluttering of discouragement. Even fifteen minutes into the session time he is not here. I ring his father's home but there's no answer. Finally with half our time gone he arrives, a little breathless from running.

‘I'm sorry Steve, I just completely forgot!’ He flops down next to me on the sofa. ‘I got home and was watching the TV when suddenly I remembered that it was Tuesday and that I should be at Steve's!’

‘Well you're here now,’ I say soothingly (soothing him or me?), ‘and it's good to see you again.’

Should I say more? I suspect that there's a meaning embedded in this lateness, a gesture to his parents who have sent him here, a statement that he's making to himself or to me. But it's probably unconscious, and despite the breathlessness he's already got that detached air about him that he had at the beginning of our first session. Perhaps I say nothing because unconsciously I suspect it's my fault.

‘How are things?’ I ask.

‘Very good actually,’ he says.

‘Things are good at school?’ The doubting tone in my voice is out before I can stop it, making almost inevitable an adolescent tendency to deny that there's anything the matter. Why couldn't I have said simply, 'Things are very good' and left it to him to fill this out, respond to? Probably because I'm so worried about doing my job properly, about getting to the heart of matters as quickly as possible. Or maybe I'm worried that the doors to the Underworld have been prematurely shut, that I'm being refused admittance.

‘Yes fine,’ he says, looking me deliberately and almost defiantly in the eye. Yet his smile is so sweet! I feel trapped now in my role as cross-examiner.

‘How are things with Russell?’

‘Oh they're not bothering me at all at the moment. Everything's fine.’

"You were telling me last week that you'd decided to try to bridge the barrier by approaching them and joining in with whatever Russell and his friends were doing.'

‘Mmm,’ he says distractedly, looking over towards my desk and the computer. ‘I was wondering if I could have a go on your computer? I'd really like to do that.’

This is going from bad to worse and I'm needing to work hard to prevent it from slipping away altogether. We'd gone in deeply last week and it was clear that Joseph was enlivened by the encouragement I'd given him to tell his story and relate his dream, but now he's rushing away from our engagement. Did we go in too deep last time and is this a reaction? Is he testing the boundaries, seeing how resolute I am about the task? Or perhaps things really have improved at school, and my doubting and resistance is undermining the therapeutic effect of a good session?

‘When you told me your story about the Evil and the Good last week,’ I say not terribly confidently, ‘it was like introducing me to a world, your private world. It was like you were inviting me in, you were wanting to show me around a bit. Going to the computer feels like something of an escape from the work that we're being asked to do.’

‘I’d really like to play on the computer,’ he says.

‘I don't think so,’ I reply. ‘Let's sit and talk for a while.’

‘OK,’ says Joseph with a shrug. He turns to face me again, his eyes again full on me and somewhat challenging. ‘What will we talk about?'

‘What about dreams?' I ask but I can't manage to get the tone in my voice right. Again I'm asking questions, somehow inviting Joseph to be passive, reactive, in touch with thoughts rather than feelings.

‘I've had some dreams,’ he says, ‘but I can't remember any of them.’

‘Any fragments from your dreams?’

‘No, nothing. It's really frustrating when you know you've dreamed something but it's gone, completely gone.’ He smiles charmingly as if saying rather condescendingly, I'd help you if I could, Steve, you seem to be a nice sort of person and I'm sure you'd feel a whole lot better if you had a good dream to get your teeth into. But I just can't remember them. Sorry.

We talk for a while about a school production of Dante's Inferno he's in. He's a singer and a dancer in it. As soon as he mentions it, my mind thinks of the Underworld again. Here, surely, there is a way in? But for Joseph it seems to be just a production and he resists my attempts to explore the content, to see if there are connections between Dante's story and what we were talking about last week.

The shortened session is soon over, and as Joseph leaves I'm acutely aware that I feel as if I'm knocking at a huge door and am getting no response. I'm feeling powerless, constrained and tentative.

Before ringing Giles, I sit grumpily with my feelings of inadequacy. I've always viewed developmental psychology - Giles's psychology - with a certain antipathy. All that emphasis on damage done in childhood! All that tracing of neuroses and psychoses to childhood trauma or deprivation! It seems so limiting a view of what it is to be a person. And it sits so uneasily with my experience (as a teacher and a therapist) of the vitality and creativity of even the most battered or distraught children. I'm unconvinced by the Freudian emphases on incest and genitalia, the Kleinian obsessions with breasts and turds. Post-Freudians and some post-Jungians talk of 'false self structures', 'self-objects', 'de-integration' and 'projective identification', but these are concepts expressed in language that I can't stomach, can't bring myself to read. I'm much more drawn to Hillman's view:

Physicists, theologians, Zen teachers - all said the map is not the territory. Psychologists seem not to have learned that. All these explanations of human life are for me fictions, fantasies. I like to engage them on that level, but only as fictions, as archetypal fantasies. They may have therapeutic value, like any story can have. They may help the therapist get a second-level structure, an ordering grid, while he is in the middle of the confusion. But psychodynamics - and I don't care whether role-playing theories, infantile development theories, or the Gods themselves - keeps us in explanations. We cannot explain the psyche. We are the psyche. The soul wants imaginative responses that move it, delight it, deepen it ... explanatory responses just put us back into positivism and science - or worse, into delusion, a kind of maya or avidya, an ignorance that makes us believe we know. (1)

Or, as he puts it in another book:

Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing. This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak. It alone may keep us from delusions. (2)

There's some comfort in this emphasis on not knowing - I'm certainly full of it! - but I feel out-of-sorts nonetheless. And worried. I know that Giles's supervision is offering me another way of thinking about things, one that might perhaps address the feelings of inadequacy which continually beset me. But will there be a price to pay? Will being a more confident therapist mean that I'll have to jettison my attempts to sit soulfully with deeper mysteries, that I'll have to shut 'the dark eye that makes our brightness unsure'? (3)

And, of course, underlying this defensiveness is a terrible fear, and one that I've known all my professional life. Will Giles reveal a fundamental flaw in my Hillmanian-informed stance? Do the attacks he makes on the classical Jungians and some of Hillman's followers actually apply to me?

‘Today,’ I say to Giles as we begin our supervisory session, ‘I want to talk about Joseph's retreat, the way he forgot the session and then had nothing to talk about, as if he were closing a door that he'd opened the week before. I want you to help me to think about why this might have happened. And at the same time I'm wanting to try to understand better your thoughts about therapy, about what's actually going on in the room in a session. I've been reading some of your articles and thinking about them in relation to our conversation last week. It's as if you're saying to me, “Steve, the reason why Joseph didn't turn up and why he was so withdrawn was that you'd let him down in some way, that you'd missed something essential.”’

‘I don't think I'd say it quite like that!’ says Giles. ‘But go on.’

‘I guess I'm thinking about the dream I had,' I say, 'the one where Joseph is getting sacrificed and it's all out of my hands. I suppose I've been reflecting on what you said last week about the danger that a therapist might want to avoid messy intimacies, might want to keep his hands clean, might need in some way to stay distanced ... and that maybe one way of staying distanced or unengaged is for a therapist to say, "it's all out of my hands".’

‘You're talking about an impulse to keep him at arm's length, to keep your hands clean.'

‘Maybe ... but these are not conscious feelings, Giles. Consciously I'm wanting to get closer. At one level, at least on one level, it's Joseph who is doing the distancing, not me. But my dream seems to be implying a distancing. Maybe unconsciously I'm not wanting to get into something messy. I understand this as a possibility but I can't actually feel it.'

'What do you feel, Steve? What did you feel when Joseph didn't turn up, or when he told you he had no dreams.'

'Blocked out,' I say. 'Inadequate ... stuck.'

'Which made you want to work harder.'

'Possibly, but more I wanted to sink myself into something... I don't know how to put this... I wanted to ... Giles, can I read you something, it might help.'

'Of course.'

'It's a passage from The Great World by David Malouf where he's describing the main character's experience of the world.'

I find the book from my shelves and then read out loud:

Digger was dizzied by the world. He could never, he felt, see it steady enough or at a sufficient distance to comprehend what it was, let alone to act on it. This was a disadvantage; but he had long since come to the conclusion that his perplexity about life which did not prevent him from living it, was essential to him.

A nailhead. That was clear enough. Round, flanged, with ridges that allowed the hammerhead a grip. The weight of the hammer, too. Driving a nail in, feeling the point go through the soft grain to bite on the last two blows - that was the only action he knew that was simple. Everything else, the moment you really looked at it, developed complications.

Even the least event had lines, all tangled, going back into the past, and beyond that into the unknown past, and other lines leading out, also tangled, into the future. Every moment was dense with causes, possibilities, consequences; too many, even in the simplest case, to grasp. Every moment was dense too with lives, all crossing and interconnecting or exerting pressure on one another, and not just human lives either; the narrowest patch of earth at the Crossing, as he had known since he was two years old, was crowded with little centres of activity, visible or invisible, that made up a web so intricate that your mind, if you went into it, was immediately stuck - fierce cannibalistic occasions without number, each one of which could deafen you if you had ears to hear what was going on there. And beyond that were what you could not even call lives or existences: they were mere processes - the slow burning of gases for example in the veins of leaves - that were invisibly and forever changing the state of things; heat, sunlight, electric charges to which everything alive enough responded and held itself erect, hairs and fibres that were very nearly invisible but subtly vibrating, nerve ends touched and stroked.

This was how he saw things unless he deliberately held back and shut himself off. (4)

"That's how I feel Giles, dizzied by the complexity of things ... It's like I have two possibilities here with Joseph, a kind of sinking into the experience which means saying to myself that it's too complicated for my mind to grasp and all I can do is to trust it, to trust that something is working away in its own way in there, or to step back and be disengaged... No, that's not right ... that's not right! ... Being dizzied by it is also a kind of disengagement. Like in my dream, where I'm getting the boy into hot water and I'm thinking all the while that I'm taking part in a mystery.'

‘It keeps your hands clean, or your conscience clean. Outcomes are not your fault,' says Giles.

‘I’m missing something here, Giles. Consciously I'm trying to engage. I'm trying to go deeper into the experience, to pay close and deep attention to what Hillman once called the oozings and spurtings of the creative imagination.(5) But at the same time I feel unconnected, that I'm missing something, and I sense that Joseph is retreating."

‘The oozings and spurtings are all very well,' says Giles, ' but an unrelational fascination with oozings and spurtings can lead to a missing of the actual patient. It can lead to blind spots, which seems to be what you're describing here. You can't see something.’

‘You're saying that I've developed some blind spots which prevent me from seeing important things?'

‘I’m not talking about 'seeing through' his story or his dream to some truth,' says Giles. 'It's not a Freudian or Kleinian stance that I'm talking about, each of which can in their own way be terribly persecutory. It's more an awareness - a way of thinking about and perceiving what is going on in the room - that the therapist must develop.'

'I understand your sentences but I don't know what you mean,' I say. 'If you're right that there are blind spots, then of course I can't know what you're describing because I can't see them. How can I cure a blind spot?'

‘If we think about the blind spot when you're driving ...'

‘You don't have to cure it. You just turn your head.'

‘You look in a slightly different direction, you see and experience things differently.'

'So where am I looking at the moment?'

'What are you seeing at the moment?' asks Giles.

‘I'm seeing a boy who is telling me a story and who then wants to disappear. I'm seeing a rather confused therapist, moved by what the story evokes but unable to work with it .. Are you saying that the story is a distraction, that by focusing so much of my attention on this amazing story of his I have a blind spot to more pressing realities?'

"No, it's not the story that's the distraction, though it might be something to do with your attitude towards it ... the way you look at it, the way you think about it and talk about it. Joseph's story is fascinating, evocative of biblical passages, old stories, creation stuff. But we can get too focussed on the content, too preoccupied for instance with images of good and evil and battles and unmaskings which leads us to miss the patient's real need, his lonely love or frightening hate or fear of cunning madness. We have to develop the ability to connect these evocative images to the patient's current realities, which are often messy and painful.'

As Giles is speaking, I'm madly trying to match what he's saying with the Joseph I experience in our sessions. I don't see the loneliness so much as the inwardness, the hate so much as a rather aloof distancing, the fear so much as an adolescent suspicion of a prying stranger. Are these my blind spots? Or am I responding to a flesh-and-blood person where Giles is articulating a theory? The possibility is fleetingly reassuring.

'Some of Hillman's followers,' he continues, ‘are so caught up in the chambers of their own highly introverted vibrating psychic contents that they undervalue the relatedness of this work. Their missing of the patient's real need comes out of their unrelated narcissism and stems from a sense of fearful weakness. Not you, Steve, I'm not talking about you. Some of Hillman's followers.'

'Not me?' I say doubtfully, imagining that in fact it's me he's describing. The phrases he has used seem so penetrating. Vibrating chambers sound like Hannibal's cell. To talk of unrelated narcissism is to remind me of my continual worry that I'm treating my own wounds rather than tending those of my clients. And haven't I been talking about my 'sense of fearful weakness' all along?

Again I remember a dream, a nightmare of a few nights back. I'm at my fiftieth birthday party, announcing to the guests that soon people will be telling stories and that telling stories is telling a person's life and not telling stories is like death ... but no-one is listening. People are leaving the room in which I make my announcement, and I'm full of rage and frustration. I look down and notice that I am holding in my hands the blackened and dead something that was once my 'heart's soul'. It's like standing at the window waiting for Joseph to arrive, feeling that we've got all this life and death stuff to grapple with, all this good and evil business, but he has forgotten to come.

‘No, not you.'

I remain unconvinced, but don't want to get stuck here.

'The real needs of the patient?' I ask. "What do you mean here? What are Joseph's real needs?'

'I'm not going to answer that question,' says Giles. 'I can't. Not yet.'

'But even if you're saying it's not me, Giles, you are saying that there's a blind spot that I have.'

‘It's something to do with what gets excluded when you focus exclusively on the story,' he says. 'And what gets excluded is the interaction between you, the fact that the psychotherapeutic crucible is two people, not one. We mustn't lose sight of the inter-relatedness of this work, of the transference if you like. If we get too carried away by the images, then we forget about the transference, we forget to notice what's happening between the two of us. Our clients are trying to establish relationships with us, particular kinds of crucial relationships, ones that they attempted long ago with their parents but which didn't work well enough. They're likely to make all the old mistakes, to fall into old patterns, to provoke us into ways of acting that have the potential to repeat old wounds and create new harm. We've got to keep trying to make links - to connect current interpersonal stuff to the past, to relate current inner and outer experience to the here and now.'

‘When I think too much about the content of the story, then I develop a blind spot for what's happening between us when he tells it to me,' I say, aware as I'm saying it that while the words may be right, an embodied sense of what this means is missing.

'It's what's happening between the two people that's the crucial thing,' says Giles. 'When the therapist is able to find language for this, or when the two of you find the language, then what is created is a shared world, a body of mutual experience. Initially this is the patient's world which the two of you are talking about, finding language for, but it's a world into which the analyst is necessarily sucked. The analyst's task is to think like bloody mad and to know or find a way out of this sometimes sickening confusion into our separateness and difference, a process which helps the patient (and the analyst) to a new relationship with himself, a new psyche-soma coordination.'

'Something is created in the interaction,' I say. 'Something that didn't exist before.'

'Well it sort of existed before,' says Giles. 'The transference is a recreation of a world gone wrong. It's the expansion of a basic fault. We're going back and doing it in a different way.'

‘Winnicott once said, didn't he, that there was no such thing as a baby, just a mother-baby dyad. (7) I've been thinking about that and about what he might have meant. I'm wondering if this is what you're talking about here, that in a sense there's no such thing as a patient, just the patient-therapist dyad. The oozings and spurtings of Joseph's creative imagination make no sense, or at least cannot be therapeutically worked with, unless they're somehow engaged in the dyad.'

'That's exactly right. That's it,' says Giles. 'The oozings and spurtings remain disembodied if there's only one body to claim them, if there's no relationship.'

I feel more in tune with what Giles is saying than I was at the beginning of the session and it occurs to me that remembering my dream of a blackened heart's soul has something to do with this.

'But,' Giles continues, 'this isn't an either-or. Hillman and I aren't as polarised as this discussion is implying. I think we're both trying to find a way to include in our work both thoughtful imagination and intuitive knowledge on the one hand and subtlety and relatedness on the other. And for me this must include trying to find shareable words, trying to find a common language, to make meaning of the images and sensations we experience in the analytic relationship. These words, this language, helps makes sense of internal chaos and unknowing. The words shift something along."

'And isn't this connected, Giles, with what you've written about ‘relational energy'?'

‘What are you thinking about?' asks Giles.

‘Well, as I've been thinking about this business of ‘blind spots', I've been wondering if there's some way of thinking about the world, about reality, I guess... some way of thinking philosophically or metaphysically about things ... which might open a door... or take the blinkers off. I mean, I'm feeling stuck. I can understand what you say, but when Joseph walks in the door, it's as if I go into a way of thinking that makes what you say unavailable to me. This must be to do with philosophical assumptions, with what I'm assuming is going on in a room when two people meet. I suppose I'm trying to think philosophically ….. or think differently philosophically, as I assume we're all thinking philosophically all the time even when we don't think we are. We're always making assumptions about what a person is, what a person wants, what moves him or her at the deepest levels ... So I'm thinking about Freud and Klein and the whole of that tradition... I'm sorry to go on like this Giles, and I'll get to the relational energy bit in a minute ...

'Don't apologise. Do go on. This is important,' says Giles.

'Well Freud and Klein take a particular philosophical stance, don't they? They both say that what's going on in a therapy is to do with the management of instincts, and at times they seem to be saying that it's the struggle between the life and the death instincts, or between love and hate.'

‘They also talk about the struggle between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and therefore about repression and resistance,' says Giles.

'So theirs is an intrapsychic focus, informed by philosophical assumptions about what it is to be a human being,' I say. ‘You're now encouraging me to think about things differently, but I don't as yet have an alternative metaphysic to underpin or shape my experience. It's like I hear your words, and yet when a client enters the room I still tend to see before me an ego trying to cope with conflicting instincts, or (if I shift to a more Jungian perspective) a self trying to cope with the demands of many internal gods or complexes.'

‘This is how you see your clients because, perhaps, this is how you see yourself,' says Giles.

'Absolutely,' I say. 'It's not easy for me to think about my Hannibal dream other than in terms of trying to cope with an unwelcome visitor from within! That sounds strange, 'visitor from within", but you know what I mean. There are internal happenings, which I guess I connect with an instinctual life, which seem to be the source of my experiences. Sometimes I feel full of zing, full of a life force that seems to charge me up - Freud's life instinct, I guess, or Schopenhauer's will ...'

‘Or the Romantics' nature flowing through you,' says Giles, ‘Schelling's world spirit, Fichte's reason in action …’

... and sometimes I'm visited by these Hannibal moods, where I feel imprisoned, artificially and desperately controlling, full of rage or despair or hopelessness or ineffectiveness... and it feels like a death instinct, it feels like some kind of preparation for a leave-taking, like saying that my time is over, the energy is running out, the zing is elsewhere.'

‘You feel shaped and ruled by what you experience internally,' says Giles.

'So many images come to me when we talk like this!' I say breathlessly. 'Reading The Faraway Tree as a child, reading about the lands that rotated at the top of the tree, which the children would find themselves in, trapped in for good or for ill, and from which they couldn't escape until the rotating world of these lands turned a full circle ... this image has always struck a chord in me, as it's seemed to me that we're each constantly finding ourselves in these unexpected lands from which we cannot escape, lands which are somehow related to our moods. We get stuck in despair, or filled up with elation, or have a time deeply connected to a kind of creative productivity ...'

‘These lands are the different internal worlds,' says Giles.

'So when Schopenhauer talks about the will as being the 'thing-in-itself", the one blind irresistible energy which animates the whole world ...'

'He doesn't say it's irresistible,' says Giles. 'Schopenhauer says there's a way to escape its miserable grip on your life.'

'Yes, but it's still an intrapsychic escape route,' I say. 'If you can think about the world in the right way, you can escape the suffering ... but it's still intrapsychic ... So when he talks about the will, and Nietzsche talks about the 'will to power', or the Romantics talk about nature as source, then there's this overwhelming metaphysical underpinning to the way we see things, to the way I see things when Joseph is in the room. I see a person with some kind of essential and probably problematical relationship with forces or urges or instincts or energies that operate within or through him in some kind of a way.’

I've got quite stirred up and pause for a moment, but feel the engagement with Giles and with ideas. This is fun.

‘So you're looking for some alternative philosophy,’ says Giles.

‘For a while I thought I'd found it in Jung,’ I say. ‘And, I guess, in Hillman. Not that their perspectives were less intrapsychic, it's just that they seemed to have a more exciting ... or a less hemmed in … notion of what the intrapsychic consisted of. Like for Jung there was this inescapable connection to the collective unconscious, this sense too that we were connected to the gods through the archetypal patternings of our experience. And with both of them, Hillman and Jung, there was the teleology of it, the sense that we weren't simply coming from somewhere (usually a damaged past), but we were moving towards something which was a kind of fulfilment.'

'All much too rosy for a pessimist like me, I'm afraid,' says Giles.

‘Too rosy?’ I ask.

‘Your teleological focus puts too much emphasis on health for my liking,’ says Giles. ‘It skips over some of the less palatable features of human life, some of its darker features. Our philosophical tradition has forgotten its Hobbes.’

‘That life is nasty, brutish and short,’ I say.

‘Too great an emphasis on the good, on the possibility of fulfilment and contentment can blind us to the existence of limit, cruelty, suffering and immovable stuckness. You're working with a model of health when you're thinking that Joseph is moved on by teleological urges towards fulfilment, but our clients are also struggling with terrible losses, defeats, absences, lacks. Not everything is going forward.’

‘You're saying that blind spots can come out of too rosy a view of things …’

‘We can ignore painful realities ...’

‘And that, I suppose, is one aspect of my wanting a metaphysical viewpoint broadened, or changed... or something ... so I can see things differently.’

‘Your Hannibal dream seems to be partly about stuckness and limits ...’

‘Yes, though I feel buoyed up by its final image, of Hannibal wanting to play.'

‘But he can't. He wants to, but he can't.’

‘Yes Giles but isn't the important thing that he wants to. He's filled with this longing which surely is also an energy, something which moves him towards playing.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Giles. Again there's a pause into which many thoughts press.

‘Giles, can I go back a few steps? I was saying something about the tradition that seems to take an intrapsychic focus, and was saying that perhaps there's another way of thinking about this. So I wanted you to talk some more about your thoughts about a 'relational energy'.’

‘There's been a shift since the first generation of analysts, since Freud and Jung and Klein. Well, even these three were beginning the shift themselves in their thinking about transference. But it was people like Winnicott (among the post-Freudians) and Fordham (amongst the post-Jungians) who began to focus on dyads, on what was going on between mother and infant, for example.’

‘And so you write, Giles, about a 'relational energy' which you see as fundamental, in the same way that Schopenhauer would say the will was fundamental, or Nietzsche would say the will to power was fundamental.’

‘The way I've sometimes described this is as a vital force which leads us instinctively to make contact with others in the world. It's like an urge which energetically permeates the psyche-soma and naturally and necessarily reaches out to mate with the human environment, in other words with other embodied vital persons.’

‘It sounds not unlike what Freud would have called the sex drive,’ I say. ‘Or Schopenhauer the will.’

‘It is very like these concepts,’ says Giles. ‘It is like a primal vital spark which instinctively lives itself out between me and the world, making life between me and the world, seeming to find it. (9) My difference with Freud, though, is that I experience it in the therapy whereas Freud instinctively excluded it and attempted to remain disengaged and objective.’

‘He saw the sex drive operating between Dora and every man that crossed her path, but not between Dora and Freud.’

‘Freud knew about the erotic transference. His friend Jung succumbed to it and wrote to him asking advice! But he wasn't one to allow for messiness or confusion.’

‘So you're saying that this vital spark is present in the therapeutic relationship.’

‘It is essential. Without it, things are dead. Without it there is nothing actually happening.’

‘It's a reaching out?’ I ask.

‘It's not a simple instinct, but a mix of things. I sometimes think of the people who walk into my room as being a bundle of mixed-up emotions, and I think that this is what this relational energy thing is, a mix up of chaotic emotions, a mix up of love and hate. In the infant it's present, it's the still small and frightened but potentially strong and passionate instinctual self’ (10).

‘It's what makes the baby and the mother a dyad rather than two separate units.’

‘I think so,’ says Giles. ‘And it's running both ways of course.’

‘From the mother to the baby too.’

‘Yes, though some of the time there's a kind of digesting by the mother - and it's useful to think about it this way when we think of therapy as being a kind of redoing of the not-good-enough primal relationship - there's a digesting by the mother of the infant's chaotic instincts and feelings. She needs to take them in, to digest them and to think and feel them out, and then, having sorted them out, to return them to the child so he can see what life energies belong to him, and how they belong to him.’ (11)

‘You're saying, the developmentalists are saying, that the people who come to see us, people like Joseph, are people for whom this digesting and returning process has somehow gone wrong.’

‘When, for whatever reason, the environment is not good enough, feelings remain chaotic, overwhelming in some core way,’ says Giles. ‘The feelings are experienced as invasions of envy or resentment, hatred or primitive desire, as stealings of life and joy. (12)

‘What Winnicott called 'unbearable anxieties'?’

‘Yes indeed,’ says Giles. ‘Threats of disintegration and the terror of isolation. To ward these off, narcissistic or even autistic defences get set up to hold things together. (13) I think this is what you're seeing with Joseph.’

‘And you're saying, presumably, that this isn't the end of the story because the essential vitality and relational energy continue to reach out (however tentatively) to the world, and the resulting confusions eventually begin to unsettle the defences.’

‘That's right, and I think this is what Joseph is trying to find a way through. But it's not easy. He wants to connect with you but he can't do it, his defences (if you like) are too entrenched. He offers you what he can: his confusions, his images, his dreams, his stories of painful encounters in the playground, and he wants you to do something with these. He wants you to do more than just admire them!’

‘He wants a relationship,’ I say.

‘Not just a relationship, but a relationship that's doing something,’ says Giles, ‘More than approval or encouragement, though of course it can include these things. When are you seeing him again?’

‘Later today,’ I say. ‘If he turns up.’

‘Hi Joseph,’ I say as I open the door to him. He's on time, and as he stands at the doorstep he's disentangling a pair of earphones which have got caught up in his collar. He explains to me later that he sits alone on the bus on the way here, listening to his music.

‘Hi,’ he says brightly as he sits down. ‘Today I remembered! Sorry about last week.’

‘Before we begin today,’ I say, ‘I wonder if it would be all right with you if I used your story in a talk I'm giving next week.’

‘Yeah, that's cool!’ he says. ‘What's the talk?’

‘I’ve been asked by the local Jung Society ...’

‘Jung Society?’

‘Jung was a Swiss psychologist whose ideas have been quite influential. The Jung Society is an organisation made up of people interested in his ideas, and they have monthly talks. They've asked me to talk about adolescence and I thought I'd use your story in my talk.’

‘In what way? Are you going to be talking about me or just reading my story?’

‘Just the story. In part of my talk I want to say something about the kinds of thoughts and feelings that adolescents have about good and evil, ugliness and beauty, that kind of thing, and your story fits in really well there.’

‘Yes, that's fine then. That's cool.’ Joseph says brightly. He's smiling in that big open way that sometimes sits uneasily with the hint of steel in his eyes.

‘So what are we going to do today?’ he asks.

'Yes,' I say. 'Where will we start today?’

He looks at me enquiringly. ‘What do you think?’ he asks, the emphasis clear. ‘What would you like to do?’

This is a delicate moment. On the one hand, I want him to feel supported and secure and can hear his request that I take the initiative. On the other, I have to be careful not to set myself up as the parent, inviting either acquiescence or rebellion. To use Hillman's terms, I have to leave room for the phenomenon to speak.

‘Ifeel you putting the ball into my court,’ I say. ‘You're wanting me to decide what we should do.’

Joseph is silent. I hold up an imaginary ball, and say, ‘You want to put the ball in my court, for me to decide, and I want to put it back into your hands’.

I give him the ball and he sits quietly for a moment. ‘I wonder if it might help if I talked about some possible ways we might start, then you can decide.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that would be good.’

‘OK,’ I say, ‘well, there are a number of ways you might like to start. Maybe you'd like to use the figures to make another scene on the carpet and perhaps tell me another story. Or maybe you'd like to begin with a drawing. Perhaps there are things happening at school that you'd like to talk about, or things you've been thinking or feeling that you want to tell me.'

The use of 'you' rather than 'we' sits uneasily given what Giles has been saying about the shared space, the psychotherapeutic crucible being made up of two people. Perhaps it would have been better to talk about what 'we' might do.

But it seems that my formulation has been good-enough. ‘Well,’ Joseph says immediately, ‘there are some things that have been happening at school. There's this boy at school, not Russell but a boy called Henry, and when we play cricket he calls me useless.’

‘He calls you useless.’

‘He calls everyone useless, I suppose, but it doesn't seem to bother the others. I'm not all that good at cricket, and I know there are things I do wrong. I just don't know as much about it as the others, I'm not as skilled.’

‘So it hurts when he calls you useless.’

‘A bit I guess. I try not to let it bother me, and I just go off to the library or something.’

‘You get away from it.’

‘Yes, it's not so bad really. Russell is still up to his old tricks a bit too. The other day in the art class he was teasing me a bit but I just ignored it and got on with my stuff and didn't let it bother me.’

‘He was teasing you again.’

‘Just a bit but it didn't really bother me.’

‘I noticed that you said a couple of times that you didn't let the teasing bother you.’

‘Well, I guess it bothered me a bit,’ he says.

‘It bothered you a bit.’

‘Yes, well I get pretty upset inside about some of these things sometimes. But I just make myself forget about it. I don't let it affect me too much.’

‘You feel things pretty intensely at times but you make yourself forget about it.’

‘Yes, I guess I do.’

‘You feel pretty vulnerable to those kinds of things but you've worked out ways of dealing with them.’

‘Yes, you've just got to ignore them and get on with things. That's not the only problem I've got though ...’ Joseph says.

I want to slow him down, as I have this feeling there's something being revealed and then quickly put away back out of sight again. In particular I'm wanting to say something about the connection between the 'too-muchness' of his feelings leading to a disengagement which keeps him on the outside, but I haven't quite got the words for it yet. In the meantime he's on to something else.

‘I've got this other problem,’ he continues. ‘I'm finding it really difficult to get into my homework, I keep procrastinating.’

‘You keep procrastinating.’

‘Yes, I'd always rather read than do my schoolwork.’

Quite right too, I think to myself! Why do we set up things at school so that kids feel guilty about preferring the soulfully rich to the intellectually trite? Joseph has touched one of my hobby horses. I half-listen as Joseph tells me about some deadly project he's got to do for school. He's got to list the imports and exports of the Netherlands, for heaven's sake! And no doubt he'll be instructed to 'present his work neatly and without spelling errors'! What, I wonder, does he do with the dancing and singing Joseph (he's told me how much he loves these things, how alive he felt in the production of the Inferno) in the midst of this school drudgery? Does that side of him go underground, along with the young philosopher who wonders about the relationship between good and evil?

‘But my mum and dad could tell you more about this,’ he says, perhaps sensing that he's lost my full attention for the moment, ‘because they have to deal with the consequences.’

‘They have to deal with the consequences.’

‘Yes, they're the ones who have to keep nagging me about my work.’

‘They nag you about it.’

‘Well, I'm glad they do really, because I've got very high standards for myself and I get upset when I don't live up to them.’

‘You like to do well,’ I say, and am aware that he's withdrawing energy from the conversation, that his eyes are again moving around the room.

‘I’d really like to play a game on your computer, or maybe explore the Internet a bit,’ he says.

‘I don't think so,’ I say again. ‘That's not the business we're engaged in here.’

‘What exactly is your job?’ he asks.

‘I'm a psychotherapist,’ I say.

‘Yes, I thought so,’ he says. I'm feeling alarmed as once again the session slips away from my grasp, once again we drift into disconnection. He sits silently for a while and then turns to me, wide-eyed and expectant. I smile and remind him that he's still holding the ball.

‘What was that list again?’ he asks, and again I talk about the things he might like to do, adding this time the possibility of doing some more with the story about the two lands.

‘Yes, that's what I'll do I think,’ he says. ‘I'll do some more with my story.’

For the next twenty minutes he sits quietly in the middle of my room, carefully arranging figures he's gathered from my shelves. There's nothing desultory about this play, unlike some of our conversation. Occasionally he breaks the silence by asking if I've got something that would do for the sea (I bring him a blue towel) or a boat (I point one out that he hasn't seen in the shelves).

‘There,’ he says with satisfaction when his scene is done. I can see a coastal strip or island populated by animals and little humans and on which there are three prominent statues of sages. Out at sea there is an alien space ship. ‘This is the world of the good,’ he continues, ‘and I'm now going to give you a detailed description of the good side. There are two main rulers of the good side, which are represented in statue figures. One is Quon Yen ... here ... and the other is Buddha... here. The ruler at the moment is King Jung ... this one ... and he is the representative of the main rulers' spirit. The people and animals that live in this half of the world have all gathered towards the seashore here. You can see the whales near the shore, and all the other creatures are there on the sand. They've gathered because every year on this day their alien friends from Outer Space ... see that alien ship there? ... that's just come from outer space. They come to deliver one animal and one human that they have taken to their planet for a complete holiday. When they return, the person and the animal will swim to shore on the whale's back and will be greeted by the King and Scarecrow. Scarecrow will read from a special parchment the names of the person and the animal which are to spend the next year holidaying with their alien friends. After Scarecrow has read the parchment, he folds it up and the whale takes the animal and the person out to the alien's ship where the aliens will take them up and fly them away to their home. After they have left, the great decision will come again to the King on who will go next year. While he is making these decisions, all the animals and people go back to their daily lives of work, rest and play.’

‘So,’ I say, ‘there's this annual ritual on the good side.’ It feels like such a lame comment, unconnected to anything really, though I guess it's a kind of a summary of the story that's just been enacted in front of me.

‘Yes,’ says Joseph, withdrawing again, my sense of inadequacy perhaps communicating itself to him. It's time for him to leave, and as he goes I wonder in a passive kind of way what it is that is slowly being revealed here, when it will be that I'll hear the phenomenon's words clearly.

‘Did you get my notes on the session, Giles?’

‘I did indeed.’

‘I feel as far away as I ever was from being able to use what you're telling me!’ I say. ‘It makes sense when we're talking together but it's somehow unusuable when I'm actually in the room with Joseph.’

‘This is a considerable adjustment, this is a different way of thinking about things. It's bound to take some time before it's usable. And it's early days yet.’

‘The alarming thing, though, is that Joseph seems to be retreating rather than engaging. The trend is away from the kind of shared world that you seem to be talking about, not towards it.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Giles, ‘We'll see.’

‘You've been saying that there may be blind spots, and that these may be to do with an overly intrapsychic focus, a way of sitting with a client which casts the therapist in the role of observer of a drama rather than participant in a process.’

‘That's right,’ says Giles.

‘It seems to me that it's not just Hillman who is guilty of the sin of talking about therapy as if it were observation rather than participation,’ I say. ‘Isn't this what Freud was doing with his metapsychological models of the struggles between id, ego and superego, or Jung when he talked about complexes and the collective unconscious, the layers of the house (as he put it in that famous dream), or Klein with her conflicting instincts of love and hate?’

‘Quite possibly,’ says Giles.

I expected a fuller response and am momentarily thrown. It's as if he's waiting for more, as if the point of my opening is not clear yet.

‘I suppose I'm trying to understand better why I find myself so often cast into the role of observer. Is it the psychoanalytic tradition, or a character trait of my own, or is it something that Joseph is doing to me?’

‘Probably all of the above I would imagine,’ says Giles.

‘It happened again in that last session,’ I say. ‘I just didn't know how to respond to Joseph's story. It felt like a response was necessary, that without one there'd be another withdrawal, but I didn't know how to think about the story.’

‘Hmm.’ says Giles. ‘That's not something you would often feel, is it? I mean, you work with young people's stories such a lot. It's an area where you feel comfortable, generally speaking.’

‘Well it is and it isn't,’ I say. ‘Yes, I've worked a lot with stories, but somehow it's been in a different spirit. I enjoy them and I know that young people enjoy telling them to me. I think I listen in a particular way to these stories, and I like Hillman's description of them as 'tales of our souls'. I think this is so different to the way young people's stories are generally listened to, in schools especially though things are changing there. Generally in schools the stories are seen as immature literary attempts, and they get subjected to the kind of critical attention that makes the more sensitive story tellers clam up. So yes, I do feel comfortable in this area, I know that I'm able to set up the conditions where young people want to tell stories and I think my enjoyment of them matters profoundly in many cases.... But Giles you're making me aware of something else about stories, or maybe it's something else about Joseph, I'm not sure which yet. You were saying last week that he's wanting a relationship which is to do with more than encouragement and approval, and this is where I start to get into less familiar territory with stories. I know that Joseph is wanting more than just my warm response, important though that is. But it's as if I don't know how to think about his stories, I don't have a perspective on what a story is. This is why I find people like Freud and Jung and Klein so fascinating but also so intimidating. They each had a clear theoretical perspective which enabled them to respond to a dream or an anecdote. Freud would see a repression, Jung a compensation and Klein some manifestation of the struggle between loving and hating. The clear theoretical stance would lead to an unambiguous interpretation. But I can't believe in their theories. I can't believe in any simple theory. And so I get stuck. I don't know what a story or a dream or an anecdote is. These things seem too complex to me. I can't say any one thing about them. What's a story? Something deep and mysterious and intensely personal, something vital, life-engaging... I know these things. These are the things I was saying in that dream last week about my birthday party, and no-one wanted to listen! ... What do you think a story is Giles? What are you thinking when you're listening to a story or a dream? What kind of theoretical thoughts would you have had in mind had Joseph been your client and had told you this story about the detailed side of the good?'

'Not theoretical thoughts, I wouldn't have been thinking theoretical thoughts. They would have got in the way. I would have been thinking something like, "What's happening here?" ... "What bits of Joseph are being expressed in these images?" And maybe I'd be thinking, "What's happening between us here? What effect is his story having?" By the way, what were you feeling as he was telling you this new story?’

‘Earnest and anxious!’ I say exasperatedly. ‘I feel burdened by my earnestness, by an image of myself as the conscientious and sensitive therapist. It gets in the way!’

‘It stops you from playing,’ says Giles. ‘It stops the flow of communication.’

‘But it's not just a matter of playing, is it? It's not just a matter of relaxing and enjoying the experience and then the right response will come? I can't believe that Winnicott played with no theoretical background to his perceptions, or that you respond to a dream in an entirely untheoretical frame of mind?’

‘No, you're right. Despite Bion…. you know what Bion said about this?’

‘Remind me,’ I say.

‘Bion said that in order to receive the patient's communications which are often at a psychotic and unconscious level, we must approach each session without memory and without ambition.’ (15)

‘Meaning?’ I ask.

‘Meaning that we must receive each patient at the beginning of a session as if this were the first time we'd seen them (this was also an idea of Fordham's (16))," as if we knew nothing about them, and we must listen without theoretical restraints and without hopes of any particular outcomes. Impossible, of course, even for Bion. You're right, there are always theoretical thoughts there. But he has a point. Too much thinking of a particular kind can get in the way. That's what's so good about Winnicott, the sense of playfulness which he manages to bring to his work. It's rigorous, informed, highly disciplined no doubt, but it's also engaging, flirtatious and fun.’

‘Flirtatious?’

‘I'm thinking of Joseph. I'm thinking of your sense of him trying to make contact and then withdrawing. He's trying to mate with you, he's trying to find a way of creating something new. Of course I'm not talking literally, I'm not talking about something literally sexual here, though I am talking about bodies and putting things into others and withdrawals and encounters that lead to orgasms and coitus interruptus.’

‘And so you are talking about theory here,’ I say. ‘In one sense. You're saying that there's a way of thinking about what's going on in therapy, what's happening when Joseph tells me his story, which help you listen in a helpful and engaged way, which allow you to respond in helpful and engaged ways. This is what I'm searching for Giles! A way of thinking that's going to help!’

‘Way of thinking? Mmm, perhaps,’ he says. ‘But I see what you mean.’

‘I’m wanting to understand your way of thinking here, Giles. Your theoretical perspective. I want to know what, according to Giles, a story is!’

‘Well, to be terribly banal, a story is something that one person tells in order to get something out and into another person. Isn't it? Isn't that what a story is? So it's not a thing, it's a process, it's something happening.’

‘You can think of a story as a thing,’ I say. ‘Surely that's the way it's most often thought about. There's the story, that's the thing, and there's the telling, and that's the process.’

‘But I don't think that actually helps here,’ says Giles. ‘As soon as you think about the story like that, as an object, then you immediately leave yourself out. You immediately objectify things, you cast yourself in the role of the observer. Isn't that what's happening here, with Joseph?’

‘You mean if I think of the story as a thing, as an object, then it makes it more difficult to see it as a relational thing, as some manifestation of relational energy, of him trying to do something to me, or with me, or something like that?’

‘That's it, I think,’ says Giles. ‘I like to think about images and ideas not as something separate from bodies and processes. That was Descartes tragic move, to separate bodies and thoughts, to say that they're essentially different. That's taken us down a very bumpy problematical road.’

‘As I'm listening to you, Giles, I'm trying to think about this story Joseph told me as if it were a process. Not a thing that he's handing over to me, but like a gesture I suppose, an act, an attempt to do something.’

‘Go on.’

‘A minute ago you used the word "flirtatious". I'm trying to think about his story as an attempt by Joseph to flirt with me, to engage my interest if you like.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, the image that comes to me is of someone who's not very good at it. Or who's frightened.’

‘Go on, this is good, this is getting somewhere.’

‘I guess I'm responding here not just to his story but to the bigger process, to what happens when he tells me the story, to this sense I keep getting of him retreating. He wants to show me something secret, or personal ...’

‘He wants to expose himself a bit,’ says Giles.

‘But he's not really sure how to do it. It's that game we play at the beginning of our session, where he says 'you go first,' and I say, 'no, you go first'. He wants help, he's shy or timid. Then he talks about things at school and very tentatively allows me to see that there's real distress in there, but he rushes on before it gets too exposed. He wants me to know but he's scared what I'll do with it, with his vulnerability I guess. Then he tells me this story which begins with a leader called King Jung ... and I've just been telling him that I'm wanting to read his story to the Jung Society, so this is him telling me that he likes the way his earlier story has got into me, and he wants to mate with that bit again ... something like that ...’

‘I think so,’ says Giles. ‘He's wanting you to know that he's pleased that his story got into your Jung bit, and now he's putting your Jung bit into one of his stories ...’

‘... but even in the story there's a sense of the tentativeness of this whole mating process, of comings and goings, of engagement (with the world) and regular zippings away into outer space ...’

‘... into disengagement, to holidays, to safety ...’

‘He's wanting me to know what's going on. All unconsciously of course.’

‘Steve, this is right, I'm sure what you're saying is right.’

‘But it's not the whole story,’ I say.

‘Nothing ever is,’ says Giles. ‘But this is a useful part of the story. Images are connected to feelings which are connected to bodies. You asked earlier what a story was. Another way of answering your question might be to say that stories are body bits transformed into communicable and therefore relational form. Ideas and images are what you use for mating when you're not using your body.’

I'm pouring myself a cup of coffee at a Jungian conference in Melbourne when a friend comes up and asks for some help selling some journals. I immediately feel resentful, intruded upon, my person somehow violated, and I say something terse and distancing. I've come to the conference to soak up the presentations, to withdraw in the highly introverted way that I sometimes fall into. The suggestion that I sit at a table marketing a journal feels like an insensitive tearing of me away from where I need to be.

I sit down and become aware of what I haven't been aware of until this moment, that I am filled with a wordless dread which seems mad. My friend has asked me to help, and I've been plunged into some kind of despair which leaves me feeling utterly alone (yet in the company of some of my closest friends). I feel both violated and abandoned (yet no-one has done or said anything hostile). I desperately want them to see my despair and to do something about it, and yet I know that if any of them approaches I would spit. I feel everyone talking to each other and nobody wanting to know me, everyone confident and 'on the inside', me pathetic and outside the boundaries. I know it is mad, but I am stuck in it.

For the rest of the day, breaks of any kind in the proceedings are terrible, for it is then that (in my fantasy) everyone sees the blackness surrounding me and feels the venom seeping out from my insides. At tea breaks I sit alone. At lunch, my journal friend sits with me but I have to flee. I approach another friend hoping that making the awful effort will break the spell but she is preoccupied and I run away back to my walled rage and self-loathing.

Giles gives a paper later in the day called "The necessities of confusion", and I feel a kind of perverse relief when he gives words to a psychotic state I think I'm experiencing. He talks about ‘necessary regressions to confusions destructive of a false neurotic order’, of ‘our ever present under-realm of pre-order’, of the possibility that ‘we live in a place of disintegration'. There are psychotic states, says Giles, which are pre-verbal and which therefore can only be expressed (for example, in analysis) through affect-laden non-verbal attacks on others. He seems to be talking about my present targetless and seemingly causeless rage and paranoia.

This state is not new to me, by any means. My family, friends and colleagues have all seen it and many have been stung by it. It has gone by several names in my own analysis.

At last, at the end of the conference proceedings for the day, I approach my journal friend and suggest we go for a walk. I am then able to talk about how I've been feeling during the day, and as I talk I recall how as a boy at boarding school I'd experienced these feeling of exclusion regularly, sometimes daily for weeks or even months. Everyone else at school seemed to know how to conduct themselves, what opinions or feelings it was necessary to express or hide in order to be accepted in the in-crowds. I could never get it. The day my younger brother left me off his birthday list so that I was excluded from the special table with its cake and candles was just the most public example of a humiliation that I felt privately all the time. Bedtime - drawing the covers over me and shutting out a world that I did not belong to - was the best moment of the day.

My own psychological wounds help me empathise with young people like Joseph, but there's a danger too. I have an instinctive tendency to avoid the opening up of old wounds, a fear of the psychotic, and tendency to engage thoughtfully and thoroughly rather than emotionally. I can end up missing what it is that a Joseph is asking of me. Perhaps at one level he's wanting me as an ally in making a safe haven, but he's also wanting more. So much of the material in his dreams and stories is about making connections, about wanting to dismantle the barriers. Is there something operating powerfully in my psychology – Hannibal and his powerful underground organisation perhaps – that make it difficult for me to engage with this reality-focussed struggle?

Endnotes

(1) p 38 Hillman (1983)

(2) pp 193 - 4 Hillman (1979)

(3) p 194 Hillman (1979)

(4) p 296 Malouf (1990)

(5) p117 Hillman (1990) The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy, and then congealing this play into paranoid monuments of eternal truth.

(6) See p 365 Clark (1996)

(7) ‘I once risked the remark ‘There's no such thing as a baby’ - meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship.' p 88 Winnicott (1964)

(8) see pp350-351 Clark G. (1995)

(9) p 366 Clark G. (1996)

(10) p 111 Clark (1987)

(11) p 108 Clark (1987)

(12) p 364 Clark (1996)

(13) p 364 Clark (1996)

(14) This talk was subsequently published. See bibliography Shann (1998)

(15) To quote Bion himself:

It requires a training which enables a physician, surgeon, psychiatrist, to denude himself of his preconceptions and be vulnerable to the facts. Knowing a great deal of medicine may be quite useful - one assumes that it is - but what is much more important is that it should not be at the expense of one's senses. When we see or hear a patient we should at once be sensitive to what we see and hear, and from that point of 'observation' go on to the 'meaning'. p 31 Bion (1978)

As psychoanalyst I was committed to keeping an open mind, while feeling constant pressure, not least from myself, to take refuge in certainty. The patients showed themselves anxious to agree with an interpretation so as to build up a sense of security. Since I deprecate allowing rein to memory and desire, it is right to point out that exlusion of both exposes the psychoanalyst to the anxiety of being in a minority of one (possibly two when the patient throws in his lot with the analyst) by engaging on the psychoanalysis of such a patient. p 158 Bion (1967)

(16)

‘Jung urged analysts to find a new theory for each patient, Fordham for each interview. His ideal analyst forgot his previous knowledge of the patient each time he met him and began afresh each day. For while it is true that an analyst has a repertoire of conscious techniques which include his knowledge of his patient, the unconscious interactions also give rise to information about the patient and the analyst.’ p 132 Astor (1995)