Chapter 3 Trouble at school

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

It's just over a month since Joseph told me his ‘detailed description of the good side’, and we've had four further sessions. I'm now again standing by the window looking out into the street, again trying to calm and clear my mind. A lot has happened, and he's due to arrive for our eighth session at any moment.

The first three of these intervening sessions were rather drifty affairs, with an elusive underlying dynamic to do with who was going to take the initiative, who was going to take responsibility for the direction we took. Joseph himself seemed not to care very much. It was as though having failed to persuade me to let him use the computer he was shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘Well, if not that, then I don't care what we do. You tell me Steve.’

He'd drawn and painted (after asking me to make a choice about what he should do) and in the sixth session he’d taken out scores of toy animals and a group of cavemen from my shelves and made a long line with them which he called ‘Evolution’, the dinosaurs at one end and people at the other.

There were clever thoughts that occurred to me as I watched him setting out these figures. Was he, for example, wondering about where he fitted into the scheme of things, or making a statement about his own evolution? Was he unconsciously trying to connect some of his more primitive drives with superego controls? Was this another version of his adolescent wondering about the nature of things?

But none of these attempts on my part to find meaning in his offerings could allay the growing suspicion that I'd somehow lost touch with what was going on, that we'd begun to drift without purpose. He'd drawn, during the fourth session, a big black and white question mark, and then on the same page a plus sign. I understood the question mark as coming out of our mutual puzzlement and wondered if the plus sign signified a wish for something more. I said something along these lines but he'd just shrugged his shoulders. I tried another tack and asked him where these two enigmatic drawings might be placed within his story of the Evil and the Good, and we read his story out loud again.

‘In this part,’ he said, pointing over my shoulder to the paragraph about the meeting point between the two sides. ‘The conference area where they can talk. I think that's where the picture belongs.’ But he couldn't say more than that and again clammed up when I tried to explore it. I felt him leaving crucial things up to me.

Perhaps, I'd begun to think, the work was already done and we were ready to finish. I'd recently found myself talking with Giles about other clients rather than Joseph. Perhaps all that Joseph had needed from me was the opportunity to describe his predicament at school and to give voice to his stunning story about ‘The Evil and the Good’? Perhaps everything else was superfluous?

So I'd begun to talk to him, during the fifth and sixth session, about ending our sessions, not proposing it but wanting to know what he thought. At first he wasn't sure but then concluded that he'd like ‘one or two more sessions to wind things up, and then perhaps some time with the computer.’ After that we'd stop. I began to relax, to withdraw energy from the work, to let the puzzlement go and to refocus my energies onto other clients whose needs seemed more urgent.

Then, a couple of days after our sixth session, the phone rang late one night. It was Joseph's mother to tell me that she'd had a phone call from Joseph's teacher earlier in the day.

‘Something's going on, Steve, and it really worries me,’ she said. Apparently yesterday at school Joseph was making little trip wires out of string around the kindergarten playground. One of the little kids tripped over a wire and ended up with a bloody nose, not hurt seriously but he could have been. Somehow they discovered that Joseph was responsible. I tried to talk to Joseph about it when he got back from school today but all he would say was “I don't know, something came over me so I did it.’ Then he went outside and vanished for about an hour. When I finally went looking for him I found that he was in the back garden clearing a patch of weeds that we'd been meaning to get to for some weeks. But he hadn't just cleared the weeds. He'd pulled out the plants as well. He was very proud of what he'd done and the effort he must have expended in that hour was enormous, it was a big job. My initial reaction, though, was one of disappointment. He just didn't seem aware that he'd pulled out the plants as well. Not that I care about the plants really, it's just that I don't know what gets into him ... There have been other incidents at school too, fights with girls and little kids, and Joseph has been told that if there are more then he'll be given time-out from school for a few days to reflect on what he's done, or even asked to leave the school ... Steve, there have been things happening at home, too. A couple of weeks ago, his younger brother's new toy car kept disappearing and it turns out that Joseph first hid it and then put it in the bin. When I tackled him about this he just said, ‘Something came over me and so I did it.’ ... And the strange thing is that while all this is going on Joseph's school work is really excellent, he's working hard and doing well and passing up chances to do fun things with me and his two brothers in order to do his school work. His teacher says that he's very worried about what he calls 'the split' in Joseph.’

The effect of the phone call was to bring me back to my confusions, to reharness my energies. At the session last week, I suggested to Joseph that it seemed that our work wasn't over after all, that there was more going on beneath the surface than we'd been aware of. He insisted that everything was OK and that he was ready to finish. The more I tried to keep our attention fixed on what had been happening at school and at home, the more defensive and fixed he became. I wondered aloud about his first story, about the existence of the two worlds and the mystery, and suggested that something of the quality of that story was present in what had been going on during the previous weeks at home and at school. Joseph reacted strongly. Was I, he wanted to know, suggesting that what he'd been doing at school was evil?

‘There is something going on here, Joseph,’ I said, both concerned that he was feeling misunderstood but also relieved that there was a renewed sense of re-engagement in this conversation. I'm not saying that what you're doing is evil, but there is a mystery, something that I can't put my finger on and which is puzzling you too, it seems. You don't know why these things happen. Something comes over you.'

He shrugged and looked challengingly into my eyes.

‘I don't want us to finish if there's still work for us to do,’ I said.

He shrugged again. ‘What sort of work?’

‘I don't know,’ I said.

We sat silently for a while, and then he said, ‘Well what now?’

Talking about it directly wasn't helping. And I had unconsciously linked his actions with evil. It was all getting messy.

‘Have you been dreaming?’ I asked, feeling quite sure he would say, ‘No, not really, not that I can remember anyway.’

‘Well yes, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘The other night I had a very strange dream, all about me and my mum. We went to Sydney and we became somehow involved in producing counterfeit money. Somehow we lost touch with the money and then became involved in drugs, buying from the producer and then selling to users and it was all illegal. When we had finished with the drugs and made our profits, we then came back to Canberra, banked all the money and then we were arrested and found guilty of producing counterfeit money and smuggling drugs into the country. After we had finished our sentences and paid our hefty fines, we started producing soaps as a cottage industry and made large profits, but this time it was all legal.’

‘So,’ I said. ‘You're involved in some kind of counterfeit operation and then in some drug dealing.’

‘That's right,’ said Joseph.

‘But you're found out and arrested, and when you've served your sentence and paid your fines you turn your attention to producing soap.’

‘Yes, strange isn't it?’ he said.

‘There's something familiar here, in this dream,’ I said. ‘It's reminding me of something, connecting me to something that's been present, or half-hidden, as we've been working together.’

‘Oh?’ said Joseph. ‘What's that?’

‘I can't really identify it,’ I said. ‘Does it feel at all familiar to you?’

‘I don't think so,’ said Joseph. ‘I can't think of what else it might be connected to.’ I was noticing as he talked how he did seem to be genuinely engaged with this question, not dismissive as he sometimes was.'

‘It's time to finish now,’ I said, ‘and I don't really know what I want to say here, but there is something. Perhaps this is where we'll start next time.’

***

I sent Giles an account of these four sessions. ‘I’ve read your notes,’ he said at the beginning of our next session. ‘You’re sensing that there is something half-hidden but you don't know what it is.’

‘It's like it's just out of sight, or just out of my sight,’ I said. ‘I suppose I have this fantasy that it's clear to you, that you'll be able to tell me exactly what's going on!’

‘Ah, the fantasy of omniscience,’ said Giles. ‘The fantasy that if we separate ourselves from the phenomena, if we cut off our emotional involvement and look at the thing objectively, then we'll see it more clearly. But it’s just a fantasy I’m afraid. I need you to take me more into the experience, to talk about it a bit more. To tell me more about what you’re seeing or experiencing.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘You know that I'm feeling puzzled, that I'm feeling this onus on me to see something clearly, to get it, and it's almost as though the requirement to see it makes it more difficult for me to see anything.’

‘You've talked before about this sense of being intuitively blocked because you’re so seriously focussed. You're wanting to loosen the hold of your narrowing seriousness ...’

‘ ... without losing touch with psychological realities that perhaps I've not been taking seriously enough.’

‘What are you referring to here Steve?’

‘I don’t want to lose sight of the seriousness of his situation. I think I have lost sight of that recently. I've been talking with him about ending these sessions and it's almost as if there’s a link between me being less concerned about him and the recent incidents.’

‘He’s feeling that you're not getting it,’ said Giles.

‘That's right. He's feeling that no-one is getting it. Everyone's perplexed. His teacher, his mother, me. Himself. We’re all in the dark about what this is that keeps coming over him.’

‘I wonder,’ said Giles. ‘Are we so in the dark? You talked in your notes about feeling his dream ‘connected to something present’. It's not just half-hidden, it’s also present: present in his dreams and in his stories, present in his actions in the playground, present in his interactions with you.’

‘Tell me!’ I said. ‘Tell me what you're seeing.’

‘You have been telling me about a boy who is experiencing a split world, a polarised world. This is his parents' world. This is his most important world and it’s split with the two halves at war with each other. He’s been tumbled out of Eden. Something evil has happened.’

‘Do you mean literally evil? That he thinks that some bad force in the world has come into his life? Or are we talking about evil in a different sense?’

‘Steve you are trying to be clear about something that is not clear. We have to go into the confusion first, into the undifferentiated space, to find words for it, to find words to describe our mutual experience of this space. Then, perhaps, some clarity may come. But we can’t impose clarity from the outside, as it were. We must puzzle this out together.’

‘You're talking about Joseph and me rather than you and me, aren't you?’

‘Both I suppose. We must learn to operate from within the experience, not shying away from confusing mixes of love and hate ...’

‘Or from what you've called before cunning madnesses,’ I said. ‘There's something cunning, or coldly calculating ... or confusedly dissembling ... I feel the presence of an overcurrent of artifice in these sessions, a compulsive need to thwart my therapeutic intent, to throw me off the track, to unsettle me.’

‘At some level he's feeling shame, or the potential of shame. He's frightened you’ll uncover some dark, dirty secret about him. He’s sensing the presence of evil in his world. We don't as yet know what he means by this, what this experience of evil is for him, though from his story and his dream and his actions we can say some things. We can say that it comes from out of the blue, that it destroys the good, that it's like a force that takes possession of the world – his world – in painful ways. It splits. He’s desperately trying to find a way to overcome this split, which is why the image of the meeting place is so important to him. That’s where he locates the question mark and the plus sign. He's also trying to find a way of living with it, which sometimes translates to a project in denial.’

‘He's sitting there in our sessions saying that everything is OK, but unconsciously he’s full of uncontained raw feeling which is somehow inexpressible.’

‘I think that's right Steve. The split has torn him apart and angered him more than he can say. Literally more than he can say. He cannot speak about this, only act it out. And his actions are not understood, not by him or by anyone and he's saying “Nobody's got the message.” He's saying “I'm going to try every trick in the book until someone gets the message.”’

‘He can't get the message himself,’ I said. ‘He needs someone else to get it. This is what you were saying to me last time we talked about Joseph, isn't it, that there are things that the baby needs to push into the mother, for the mother to digest (so to speak) and then return to the baby in a form that's assimilable.’

‘Steve is the place where it must happen. Where you and he are working is the meeting place, Joseph’s place of mystery where the two sides can talk. That story he told you is the beginning of the story. He's battling with evil out there, in the unheld space. The clearing of his mother's garden is a heroic task, but frenzied, undifferentiated, full of unconscious and conflicting intent. He was possessed by a terrible energy, a warrior strength. Was he trying to do an heroic task to help his mother, to take his father's place as the man around the place? How did he feel about his mother's perplexed reaction? Would this have pleased him or devastated him? Does he have to do upsetting things to make an impression on her, to move his distracted mother to take notice? These are questions that you can’t ask him but which events make us ask ourselves. Perhaps he’s both furious with his parents and he loves them fanatically.’

‘I can't ask these questions,’ I said half-regretfully. 'So often I want to be direct, to ask the questions, to get to the bottom of things.’

‘You can't ask the questions because he cannot know the answers. These things won’t even have framed themselves inside him as questions, just as impulses which manifest as actions and images. Hacking away at the garden. The mask of evil being partially revealed. Intimate partnerships with his mother in a life of crime. Asking questions about chaotic internal realities are just going to confuse him, scare him. He's too young to think about the evil as residing inside, he's needing to live it out in the world, doing his heroic tasks. Only much later will you be able to talk about how his own world is being torn apart.’

‘So if I can't talk to him about this now,’ I say a little exasperatedly, ‘what can I talk with him about? I don't want to just be the listener, I want to engage, that’s what you keep urging. But engagement is going to be too threatening for him, isn’t it? Isn’t this what you're saying?’

‘Well, maybe there are questions you can raise. Questions you can engage him with, coming out of what he's given you ... questions for example about the nature of evil. Engage him philosophically, safely. Perhaps you can ask him about the nature of evil. Evil has been revealed. Say something about the nature of evil.’

‘Like what?’

‘Give words to something that he seems to be hinting at, something like Evil is that which destroys the good. See what he makes of that.’

‘Because he's trying to understand something about the nature of evil?’

‘No,’ says Giles, ‘because he's trying to come to terms with feelings or impulses that for him, for some reason, he's found the word ‘evil’ a good-enough label for. It seems that for Joseph evil is the incomprehensible quality that divides and destroys the good unities. He's clinging to the sides very, very hard. He's trying to mend the worlds, keep things together internally. Evil is a problem in his world.'

‘And you're saying that he doesn’t want to stop seeing me. At some level he’s wanting us to engage here with these difficult and elusive things.’

‘He’s wanting you to be authoritative, not wishy washy. He’s wanting something solid from you. Say to him that it’s not yet time to finish. Use the metaphors that spring from his story. There's more talking that needs to be done in the meeting place, there's more work to be done in getting the two sides together.’

Joseph’s coming up the path now. I’ve just been rereading the ‘counterfeit money’ dream and am struck by its pervading mood of being entangled in a covert and underground operation, of being unmasked, and then of coming over to the good side where the cottage industry produces soaps. Soaps smell good and get rid of the dirt. I remember from his first story his description of the good side as ‘sweet smelling’. I’m trying to keep in mind what I think Giles has been telling me, that these dreams and images are the product of raw, unprocessed feeling, internal conflicting impulses, hates and loves, fears and yearnings, all unformed, preverbal, only expressible in images which describe a split world – or which describe two polarised worlds wanting some kind of relationship with each other. Two worlds between which he darkly moves in his waking life, in ways which perplex mother, teacher, me ... and most of all, Joseph himself. I’m trying to keep in mind that Joseph is wanting me to play a role in this process, that he’s unconsciously drawing me into his confused and conflicted internal world and is hoping that together we can find a way through it, find words which will in some way alter things.

I open the door as he walks up the steps, and again he’s untangling earphones. He sits down, looks me in the eye and says, “Well?”

I pass the imaginary ball to him but he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Last week you said that you had more that you wanted to say.”

“Well, in a sense I'm reluctant to say too much,” I say. “I talked too much last week and felt you retreating as a result. I also was wrong to make that link between the evil that you wrote about in your story (which was all about the teasing and Russell) and your actions in the playground. But there is something important going on here, something which is hidden. I don't know what all this is about but I feel that it’s important, that our work together isn’t finished yet.’

Joseph is listening very closely. He's not looking at me as I speak, not staring boldly into my eyes as he sometimes does. I feel my concern being received.

‘In your stories, in your dreams, there is often a sense of evil being present,’ I say. ‘Evil seems to be a part of things.’

‘Without evil, there would be no balance,’ he says. ‘Evil is needed to redress the balance.’

‘To redress the balance,’ I say.

‘Yes ... If too much space gets taken up by the good, then evil has to come into things.’

There's a silence. Joseph appears to be deeply inside himself, much less aware than usual of holding up a mask.

‘Like the Garden of Eden,’ I say. We had been talking about paradise when he'd told me he was performing in Dante's Inferno.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You can't just have paradise. Evil needs to enter the picture.’

‘The snake needs to come into the garden,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Without the snake, there's too much good.’

‘And when the snake comes and tells Eve to eat the apple,’ I say, ‘then Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, then they have a knowledge of good and evil.’

‘Yes,’ says Joseph.

I’m feeling balanced on a knife-edge here. In Hillman’s writings there are continual urgings to stay with the image, not to try to literalise it; the literalisation, he says, limits it, takes away its spirit, scares it off and makes it vanish.This is what had happened when I linked Joseph’s story with what happened at school. Giles, on the other hand, is continually encouraging me to make links, to name what it is that is preoccupying my client, to bring it out into the open where it can be thought about: this is what had happened in the first session when I helped Joseph think about the actual barriers he was experiencing in his life.

‘I wonder,’ I say, ‘if you had a sense of being expelled from Paradise when your parents split up.’

‘No, not really,’ says Joseph looking up. ‘That never really bothered me. It bothered William much more than me, he was really upset about it.’

‘It bothered William a lot.’

‘Yes, he used to cry and get really upset. He still does.’

‘He still gets pretty upset about it,’ I say.

‘Yes, it really annoys me to tell you the truth.’

‘It annoys you that he gets so worked up about it.’

‘Yes, William goes on and on about it in this whingy way and it really gets to me, I get really annoyed.’

‘He felt it at the time and still feels it.’

‘He should just accept that what’s happened has happened,’ says Joseph. ‘I have. I’ve completely accepted what's happened.’

‘What did happen?’ I ask.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was wondering what actually happened between your parents.’

‘Well, it all happened more than a year ago, before Mum brought us over here to Australia. Apparently, though I'm not sure about this, there was some argument about property and Dad was really upset about this. There were mumblings at dinner one night and then they were really upset with each other and I think Mum wanted to take me and William and Davie away somewhere to get away from Dad. Dad hid the car keys so that she couldn't.’

‘This all happened out of the blue? Or had things been bad for a while?’ I

ask.

‘If they were happening before that, I didn't know about it. It just seemed to blow up out of nothing. It was very unexpected.’

‘It was a bit of a shock,’ I say.

‘You could say that,’ says Joseph. ‘But you get used to it, you have to just accept that these things happen.’

‘So you haven't seen much of your dad since.’

‘Mum didn't want us to have anything to do with Dad at first and we didn't see him for six months.’

‘You didn't see him for six months.’

‘Yes that's right, but then we started to go to visit him, and then to stay with him. But William didn't like all the coming and going and then there were more arguments and Mum told us one day that we were going to live in Australia.’

‘And you miss him.’

‘I guess, a bit. I don't think about it much really.’

‘So your life has changed a lot from how it was when you were little.’

‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘But you get used to it ...’

‘You, but not William.’

‘Yeah, it really bothers him still.’

‘I wonder whether it's possible that underneath it really bothers you too.' Maybe you cope with your feelings differently from William, but you both feel it intensely, painfully.’

‘I don't let it bother me,’ he says dismissively, and then immediately follows this up with, ‘And by the way, I've decided to change schools. I'm going to leave my little school at the end of the week, and next term I'm going to start at a big government high school.’

‘You're moving out of the safe place and into the big bad world,’ I say.

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he says with a shrug. We're both conscious that the hour is up and I can hear the winding up tone in his voice. ‘But I'm quite looking forward to it. We're off on holidays next week so I won't see you for a while, but I'll tell you all about it when I get back.’

He's gone, suddenly, abruptly. He's scooted off again, away from an engagement he wants (or so Giles keeps telling me) but which it seems he cannot actually tolerate. He's whooshed off and is soon out of sight and I don't know whether the gossamer threads that have been joined between us can survive the whoosh and the gap.

Things beneath the surface. A necessary and forceful redressing of elemental balance, potentially violent and destructive if too long delayed. A boy for whom parental eruptions break out unexpectedly from an apparently peaceful landscape, and where now eruptions of a different kind – trip wires in a children's playground, an heroic and manic weeding – come out of an apparently stoical acceptance of life. ‘I don't know what gets into him,’ says his mother. ‘Something came over me, so I did it,’ says Joseph.

I, also, am in the grip of underworld pressures, as my Hannibal dream and my experience at the Melbourne conference demonstrate, and while these pressures give me much pain at times, I'm also oddly attached to them. I want to be released from their constricting clutch, yet I don't want them to be exposed, stripped back, reduced to an infantile state and banished from my experience of things. They feel too connected to how life necessarily is.

Joseph's dreams of drugs and prison constellate my own thoughts and feelings about Hannibal. His confusions become mine, they get into me, I feel unable to think, overwhelmed by the apparent numinosity and import of what Joseph is telling or showing me. Freud would know what's going on here (I'd think to myself); Klein would know what to say; Jung would know the archetypal forces being played out and would have a wealth of mythical or alchemical symbolism to bring to bear, to clarify and move things on; Giles too. I just feel at a loss. I remember this same mental blankness and panic when as a child doing some homework from school my father would stand behind me quietly but intensely repeating the word ‘concentrate’; or when in the middle of a chess game with a teaching colleague a rather intimidating science teacher wandered over as I tried to think my way out of trouble. I could fill pages with similar examples. Freud, Klein and Jung and Giles become fused somehow with my father and the science teacher; their intelligent and intimidating presence are with me at crucial times when I am with Joseph. I feel myself alone, required to come up with the goods, unheld in the moment, peered into, weighed in the balance and found wanting, shamed and impotent. I flee to the intrapsychic, Joseph's and mine, and experience our internal worlds as cut off, self-sufficient and fated. All of this happens in an instant, and usually it leads to a new engagement. With Joseph's help I find a way out of the panicked blank moment: I think and write about these dreams and moments, and talk them over with Giles; Joseph reminds me that there is more that I was going to say and then describes the ways in which evil enters a world out of balance. Our own engagement and uneasy equilibrium is for the moment restored. And then it goes again.

‘Giles, you’ve read my notes from the last session?’

‘I’ve read your notes Steve.’

‘Today I want to talk about what I'm experiencing here. It seems to be more than can be encompassed by thinking about the emerging dynamics of our relationship, the way Joseph and I come in and out of contact.’

‘Go on.’

‘You were saying some time ago, when we were talking about stories, that ideas and images are what you use for mating with when you're not using your body. I really enjoyed that image, it resonated with so much of my own experience. I remember the thrill of recognition when I heard the children's author Mem Fox once say that we write in order to be loved. Mating seems so much at the core of what we're doing all the time...’

‘Not mating Steve, attempting to mate ...’

‘OK attempting to mate …... but why is the distinction important?’

‘Because attempts go wrong,’ says Giles. ‘There are failed attempts.’

‘Yes sure, but ...’

‘I’m not just splitting hairs here, or I hope I’m not. As I’m listening to you I’ve got the phone in one hand and your notes in the other: I’m listening to you and thinking about your last session with Joseph. So when you said ‘mating is at the core of what we're doing’, I instantly thought, ‘no, that’s not what Joseph is doing with Steve, or with the world. He’s attempting to mate and the attempts are going wrong. With the world, with you.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean. We were talking that time about how he’s not very good at it. And yet he comes across as being so confident, so at ease in the world of adults. His mother says this too.’

‘But he’s not, you see,’ says Giles. ‘It keeps going wrong.’

‘He's not close to anyone. That’s at least what his mother and his teachers say.’

‘He doesn't know how to do it,’ says Giles. ‘He wants to do it but he can’t ... But Steve, you began by saying that there seems to be something more going on than just the relationship between you. There was something else you wanted to talk about.’

‘Yes, but I want to stay with this idea of ‘failed attempts’ for a bit longer ... I’m wondering if there's something fatalistic in what you're saying to me. It’s almost as if you're implying that the thinness in our connection, Joseph’s and mine, is symptomatic of his difficulties in the wider world, that he unconsciously keeps severing the link between us (as he does in the outer world), that he’ll keep on doing this unless I can find a way of altering the dynamic, unless I can find a way to keep a connection in tact despite his attempts to destroy it ... No, I’m confusing myself here, because at one moment I’m talking about him trying but not being good enough at it, and the next I’m talking about an active destroying.’

‘It’s an impotent good and a potent bad,’ says Giles.

‘Yes, it's both. It’s as though the relational energy that we talked about some time ago is weak ... that’s the impotent good ... and the defences that he’s constructed to ward of the painful feelings of loss and failure are strong ... that’s the potent bad.'

‘I wonder whether it’s accurate to say that the energy is weak, as if there’s a deficiency of some vital force,’ says Giles. ‘That doesn't seem consistent with the picture he’s presenting. Joseph is full of strong energies, strong impulses, perhaps stronger now because blocked, like the build-up of water behind a dam, looking for some weak spot to blindly, angrily, break through.’

‘When you say it like that,’ I say, ‘it as though the good has turned to evil. It’s like when there’s no meeting place, the evil gets stronger.’

‘I think this is right,’ says Giles.

'But we never really got into it in the session,' I say. "It's easier to get into it when I'm talking with you. With Joseph I worry that he may feel his immature ideas are being exposed when we talk deeply about good and evil.'

‘But we’re not talking about ideas here,’ says Giles. ‘We're talking about impulses, chaotic states which exist in an ever present under-realm of pre-order. These are the states I was trying to describe in my paper at the conference, psychotic states which are pre-verbal and which therefore can only be expressed (for example, in analysis) through affect-laden non-verbal attacks on others. When you're talking with Joseph about the nature of good and evil, you're engaging him not in a philosophical discussion, you're not working at the level of ideas, but instead you’re making contact with impulses which, despite your talking about them, will remain in large measure in a pre-verbal realm. And, Steve, he did engage with you here. He talked about evil needing to come in when there was too much good. It would have been interesting to have gone further with this, though perhaps this was not possible. You might perhaps have said, given your intuitions about the impotent good and the potent bad, that evil had to come into the picture because the good was too weak to keep it at bay?’

‘But Giles, I was reading Winnicott the other day and he said something about therapy being a painstaking giving back to the patient what they have given to you. [1] You seem to disagree with this. You keep adding things, giving back more than has been given. Shouldn't I just be mirroring Joseph's comments here, to see what he will do with them?’

‘You've got to add something Steve. That's what people come to see us for, to get added value. They’re struggling, confused, failing, not coping. They need our active help, our accepting bodies and responsive minds. They need us to do things with what they give us, to be alive and active with their material.’

‘So it's OK to feed back to Joseph an intuition or an interpretation that is purely my own?’

‘As long as your interpretation comes out of his material and not out of your unrelating mind. As long as you’re inspired by his predicament and not your own. In this case I think it highly likely that this idea of the good being too weak was in some sense put into you by Joseph, the idea was implanted …’

‘ ... like a seed …’

‘... in some kind of raw, unprocessed form. In making an interpretation like this one, you are giving back to him what he's put into you, it's just that you've done something with it, you've worked it a bit. Watered it or whatever. There's a chemistry happening. Things are being added to the soil by you both. It's a generative process. Or that's what we're hoping is happening.’

‘He's put it into me, you're saying.’

‘Not necessarily in words or concepts,’ says Giles. ‘Have you read any of Zinkin? I'll send you an article. He talks about the nonverbal cues and stimuli patients give us (and we give patients), that babies give their parents. There's an unseen exchange going on all the time, often of more vital importance (literally vital) than what's being exchanged through the words that are being used.’

‘Giles,’ I say after a few moments of silence. ‘I want to step back a bit. I want to try to explain what I meant at the beginning when I said there was more happening than what was happening between us. This might be a bit discursive, and I'm not sure where it's going to end up ...’

‘Just plunge into it,’ says Giles. ‘I do so enjoy this kind of talk.’

‘You're saying to me, if I've got it right, that here is a boy, Joseph, who is trying to mate with the world but it keeps going wrong. He's not very good at it, presumably for environmental reasons rather than constitutional ones ...’

‘Something has gone wrong with his first world,’ says Giles. ‘There have been traumas and non-happenings, both, which have led to certain relational deficiencies or difficulties or failures …’

‘And he's developed defences to cope with the painful feelings which come out of the repeated failures,’ I say.

‘Something like that has happened, I would imagine,’ says Giles.

‘And you're encouraging me to see his stories and experiences as expressions of these painful realities ...’

‘And sometimes as attempts to relate successfully, new attempts to mate …’

‘ ... which fail.’

‘Yes, which keep failing.’

‘... which keep collapsing because the structure is faulty or because the defence's forces destroy it.

‘Yes, both those seem to be occurring.’

‘But there's more, isn't there? There's more happening here than just futile attempts to bridge a gap.’

‘You mean that you’re now in the picture as well?’

‘No, though I know what you're saying. I'm trying here to get at something bigger, or something more that’s going on than environmental adaptation. I suppose I’m talking about the teleological again, and you once said that the teleological was too involved with a picture of health for your liking.’

‘You must have caught me on a bad day,’ says Giles. ‘But it's true, I have a pessimist's aversion to models of health which exclude the unrelenting destruction of the good by the bad, the inability of the good to survive the attacks of the bad. As a therapist we come up against inevitable disharmonies, interpersonal ineffectiveness and unbridgeable gaps all the time. We have experiences of sadism, chaos, psychotic destructiveness and often these things are untransformable.’

I find these pessimistic outbursts by Giles difficult to digest and yet wholesome, like some stodgy porridge which doesn't appeal to my sensibilities but which I know I ought to eat anyway. And I'm beginning to be aware of an odd relief of tension in me as I allow gloomier, more limiting, less boundless views of human nature a place in my mental picturing of the world. Nevertheless, when Giles speaks like this my gut rumbles and I try to find words for my reluctance to swallow his porridge unsweetened.

‘I’m trying to get at something more, Giles,’ I say, ‘at what I feel is another force at work in Joseph's life, one that's not simply relational (or the-relational-gone-sour, which seems to be the way we're thinking here about the evil that Joseph is experiencing). I've been reading some more Hillman, this time The Soul's Code, and I agree with him about the existence within each of us of some kind of unique individuating coding which is moving us, or trying to move us, in the direction of an expression of our uniqueness. I mean, sure, Joseph's hacking away at the garden or dreams about illicit operations with his mother are connected to frustrated relational energy ... but I also think there are elements in it of a different kind of frustration or attempted expression.. something to do with Joseph trying to find out or be what he’s got it in himself to potentially be. This is nothing to do with the new-agey idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. In fact it’s the opposite. It’s more like there’s only one thing we can possibly be, and we spend our lives either trying to get closer or giving up the struggle.’

‘Yes,’ says Giles. ‘I don't disagree with any of that.’

‘I suppose what I’m trying to get at is an intrapsychic perspective which remains valid, one that can be thought of independently of relational or environmental factors.’

‘You're talking about a something which is living itself out unrelationally, within Joseph.’

‘I’m not saying that it’s necessarily unconnected to the relational, that would be absurd. A person’s destiny has all sorts of relational implications. I'm just saying that there is a sense in which it is also illuminating, as a therapist, to position myself as an observer and an encourager, someone on the look-out for intrapsychic intimations of a unique unfolding, someone who encourages that to develop, if only by recognizing its existence and not reducing everything to a kind of Lockean ‘clean-slate-ism’.’

‘As long as an eye on the intrapsychic doesn't preclude an openness to the dynamics of the relational,’ says Giles. ‘As long as a desire to encourage the development of some of life’s sunnier possibilities doesn’t blind us to painful limit and psychotic illness which can remain stuck. Yes, there is the teleological, but let’s keep thoughts about it grounded, anchored to actual events and lives.’

‘Keeping thoughts grounded ... This is emerging as a big thing for me,’ I say. ‘It’s so easy for me to go off on some flight into the ether which is thrilling at the time but never gets anywhere that makes any difference. I think that’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about one particular client of mine, so that my thoughts stay grounded in an actual experience, so I’m continually brought back to what is actually happening in the life of a real person.’

‘It’s easy for thoughts to take off,’ says Giles.

‘It’s easy for mine to take off,’ I say. ‘And this brings me to something else I’m becoming more and more aware of. Do you remember we were talking some time ago about Winnicott’s notion that there’s no such thing as a baby, just the mother-baby dyad?’

‘I remember it.’

‘And we were talking about Winnicott’s idea that when there is not a good-enough environment, then the child has to develop a mind that will take the place of the good-enough mother, the unheld child has to learn to hold himself and he does this by holding himself with his own thoughts.’

‘The mind has taken over the function of the mother as a result of environmental deficiency. Winnicott describes this as the development of a false self in the shape of an exploited intellect’ [2].

‘Yes, well for me this is related to the struggle I’m having to keep my own mind grounded. I’m guessing that I’ve exploited my intellect, that I’ve found ways of using it to compensate for certain environmental lacks, and while it’s kept me relatively sane it’s also contributed to some relational difficulties. I’m thinking about that Melbourne conference. There’s a tendency in me when I’m feeling stressed to disappear into myself, to tell myself stories which reassure me (because they tell me I'm superior in some kind of a way) but which isolate me too. These stories cut me off from life . These thoughts, these stories that I tell myself about the way things are, become a refuge, a disembodied and unrelational safe place to which I retreat.’

‘You're describing a living of life in the mind,’ says Giles.

‘Look, I know this is very common, that we all do it to a certain extent. But I’m trying to relate this to other ideas we’ve talked about. Deprived children develop minds that act as self-objects. Steve has developed such a mind. These minds are at home in the purely ideational, but struggle with the relational. Crises - problems - are tackled not by re-engaging with the painful business of getting on with life but by withdrawing from it and trying to think a way out of the dilemma. There's a tendency for such people, and for me, to lose touch with life and with bodies and to live life in the mind.’

‘Becoming clever therapists, for instance,’ says Giles.

‘Or writing clever theses,’ I say.

‘That’s why you’re wanting to continually bring the thoughts back to the experience,’ says Giles.

‘That’s why I need this supervision,’ I say. ‘It seems to bring me back to what is happening. You keep encouraging me to be messily involved, where my natural inclination is to tidily think myself out of a difficulty.’

‘You want to find the right way to think about things,’ says Giles.

'It's not that thinking is useless, of course I don't think it's useless. It's to do with the quality of groundedness or relatedness that is attached to the particular thought.'

'There are embodied thoughts and disembodied thoughts,' says Giles.

‘Yes, embodied stories and disembodied stories. Ones that connect us to life, and ones that insulate us from it.’

‘I wonder if this might be connected to something we were talking about earlier,’ says Giles. ‘We were talking about the difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts at mating with the world.’

‘Yes! Giles, this is bringing a whole lot of things together for me! If we think about a story as any expression of an impulse - so it could be a gesture, or speech, or an artistic representation like a piece of music or a painting, or a dream ...’

‘ … or a punch, or a come-on, or a sulk ...’

‘Yes, any of these things could be thought of as a story …’

‘Then they’re all attempts at relationship, they're all relational ...’

‘And some fail, and some succeed,’ I say. ‘Some are successfully connected with the world, and some have meaning only in the psychic chambers of the subject.’

‘The successful stories,’ says Giles, ‘are connected to bodies in some vital way. They are not split off, either from the body of the subject or the body of the world.’

‘And that's important,’ I say, ‘because these two bodies both nourish the subject, afford the subject relational possibility. I am not only me, I'm also a part of the world. When I cut myself off from the world, when I attempt to look after myself, I cut myself off from a vital source.’

‘Jung would say we cut ourselves off from soul,’ says Giles. ‘Do you know that wonderful quotation where Jung describes soul as that which lives of itself and causes life?’

‘No,’ I say, though it does ring a faint bell.

‘Just a minute Steve, I can find it quite quickly if you'd like to hear it.’

I hear Giles put the phone down, then the shuffling of papers or the turning of pages in a book. I wonder, as I'm waiting, about this room that I’ve never seen, what it’s like. Lined with books? Giles is so often telling me about books. A mess? I’ve seen Giles giving workshops where the papers are literally tumbling out of his lap and onto the floor as he speaks. With big windows to the outside world? He often tells me at the beginning of our conversations about the weather in Sydney, how oppressive the heat is or how blissfully sunny and still.

‘I've got it Steve. Are you there?’

‘I’m here Giles.'

‘I’m quoting from Jung now Steve. ‘Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life … With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there and stay caught, so that life should be lived ... Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness ... To have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence ... It is something that lives of itself and makes us live.’ [3]

‘I remember that quote!’ I say. ‘It's wonderful. You used it in one of your articles, the one about animating images that come to exist in the space made by the analytic relationship. I remember now! You described having a hippopotamus dream that you later discovered to be a central animating image in the psyche of one of your patients. It was as if the dream had been put into you by the patient, or that it had been created in the psychoid space created by the analytic relationship. Am I getting this right Giles?’

‘Yes, that’s what I was writing about in the article, about these archetypal anima-animal images which can only be realized in relationship, in mutually experienced, emotionally loaded images and sensations.’

‘But that's the bit I’m questioning Giles! That they can only be realized in relationship, that they can only be animating if they live there. I agree that they’ll be more animating, more realized, more potentially connecting to life if they find their way into relationship, but it seems important to me to hold onto the idea that they can exist intrapsychically and un-relationally as well, and that they don’t necessarily die in that restricted space. In the quote you read to me from Jung he says that soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence. Doesn’t this mean both within relationship and outside of it?’

‘Relate this to something for me Steve,’ says Giles. ‘What are you actually talking about?’

‘The nature of unrelational, disembodied images, I guess,’ I say. ‘Whether my Hannibal dream or Joseph’s story of the Evil and the Good are only animating if they find their way into a relationship. Of course they're more animating if they do. I know that, I know how my Hannibal dream continues to live and to enliven me because I'm talking about it to an analyst, because I'm bringing it into my work with Joseph and into this supervision with you. But the dream is still essentially vital, life-giving, animating, central, even of itself, by itself, insulated. It's not a wank. Winnicott once wrote that certain types of fantasy stand as a substitute for life, as if a person's life had more chance if the fantasy did not exist. [4] I want to see these disembodied fantasies more as attempts to make connections, rather than wrong moves. This changes the way we work with them when our patients bring them. Disembodied stories are attempts at mating with the world. Soul is present in even the most banal and enclosed story, trying to find its way into the world.’

‘If you say so, though I’m as yet unconvinced,’ says Giles. ‘I continue to have a bleaker view, an experience which tells me that some images are useless, some keep us stuck, indeed worse than that ... there are images that attack the good, that are (if you like) in fact evil. But we'll no doubt talk more about this.’

‘No doubt,’ I say

Endnotes

[1] Winnicott (1971) p 117

Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen. I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this well enough the patient will find his or her own self, and will be able to exist and to feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

[2] See for example Winnicott (1986b)

[3] Jung (1934) quoted in Clark (1987)

[4] Winnicott (1971) This is discussed more fully in Chapter 11.