Chapter 4 Mother's breasts

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

Last week, at the end of our tenth session, Joseph and I had somehow found our way back to this question of what was going on beneath the surface. ‘It's as though,’ I said as we talked about some of the events of the past couple of months, ‘there is something in there that is wanting to be unravelled.’

‘What do you mean 'unravelled'?’ he asked. ‘I'm not sure what you mean?’

‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘Unravelled or revealed. Something that's out of reach at the moment, that we can't see too clearly, that we just get hints of.’

We'd returned to this theme by a circuitous route. Joseph had come back from his holiday in a sunny (though still slightly guarded) mood, animatedly telling me at our ninth session about his new school. ‘It's just like on TV!’ he'd said, smiling broadly and shaking his head disbelievingly. ‘Just like Heartbreak High! It's just packed with kids, the classes are really big, and it's so noisy! Kids talk to each other and muck around while the lesson's going on, it's just so different! It's amazing! But I like it. I like the size and the bustle and the atmosphere, and so far I like the classes. Yes, I think it's going to be really good! Really good!’

We'd talked, too, about his grandfather's death which had happened some time before he first came to see me. ‘I got a real shock when we all went to visit him for the last time, just a few days before he actually died. I was really shocked and I remember I cried afterwards.’ He was lost in thought for a moment. At first I thought he may be thinking it strange that he had ever felt such deep sadness, but perhaps it was more that the sadness had gone that was unsettling. I asked him, perhaps too clumsily, about this but he just shrugged his shoulders.

We sat quietly for a while and then he asked if he could read to me.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What would you like to read?’ thinking that perhaps he'd brought something along which was connected to what we'd just been talking about.

‘I don't know,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

I tried to delve a bit into this impulse to read something, anything, but got nowhere. So I mentally shrugged my shoulders and suggested a couple of books of traditional stories. Almost at random he opened a book of Scandinavian stories and began reading one called ‘The Wild Swans’.

On a winter's day in the long long ago, [Joseph read] in a land between the forest and the sea, a yellow-haired Queen went driving over the new-fallen snow of Yule. Her sleigh was rosy as the setting sun, with yellow birchen runners, and her horses were black, with scarlet steamy nostrils. As they rushed headlong past the fir trees she felt like a great white swan, feather-bright, wing-borne, piercing the glassy air. ‘Oh, joy!’ she cried. ‘Oh, wonder of life! Was anyone so happy as I?’ Twice she uttered these words. The first time they rang full and warm as golden bells, the second time they tinkled thin and cold as breaking icicles.

Then a strange thing happened. Her nose began to bleed. Soft molten drops plopped heavily upon the white bearskin which enwrapped her, so that she must rein in those fiery horses and bring the sleigh to a stand. Throwing back the bearskin, she alighted, and at once the horses were as still as though they had been carved in jet and ebony. Two great blood-drops fell upon the snow, and suddenly it seemed to the Queen as though all her happiness was lost in longing, and what she longed for was this: a daughter whose hair's blackness should be as the blackness of those horses, and the whiteness of whose flesh should be as the whiteness of the snow, and in whose cheeks there should be two red spots as red as the blood-drops glowing before her. twelve fine sons!'

‘To have a daughter like that,’ she cried, ‘I would give my twelve fine sons.’ (1)

I felt, as Joseph read this beginning, that stilling of the air and sudden presence of invisibles, even though Joseph was reading too quickly and was stumbling over some of the words.

For much of this and the following session, Joseph read me the story. A troll granted the Queen a daughter, called Asa, but took away her sons and turned them into swans. The young Asa grew up with a growing awareness that something was wrong and when she heard the story of her missing brothers she set out to find and release them. She discovered that she could only succeed if she could go three years without uttering a sound. During this period of enforced silence she met a young king who persuaded her to marry him. At first all was happiness and a son was born but the king's jealous step-mother secretly snatched away the baby and then publicly accused the young queen of eating her own son. Asa's vow of silence meant she could not defend herself, nor could she cry out her grief and frustrated rage. Twice more a baby boy was born, twice more the baby disappeared and the finger pointed at the queen. But she survived, eventually releasing her enchanted brothers and recovering her babies from the snake pit into which the step mother had cast them. The step-mother was then tied to twelve wild horses and torn to bits as punishment for her wickedness, and ‘all was joy and gladness, then and forever’.

For Joseph, this reading-out-loud had been essentially a performance, and there were times when I felt he was barely conscious of the story itself. I, too, had sat at some little distance from the folktale, despite its drama, as I wondered whether we were just passing time in the least threatening way possible, whether the hardbacked book on Joseph's lap and the story in the airwaves between us were actually preventing rather than enhancing a connection between us, between us and ‘the mystery’.

But I'd also been affected by the story's mood which itself seemed to speak of the hidden, of the unseen. When, for example, the wicked stepmother accused the silent Asa of murdering her first baby, the king echoed words that were present in my sessions with Joseph. ‘Not so,’ he said, ‘There is a meaning here which will yet be made known to us.’ ‘Not so,’ he says again later in the story, ‘There is more in this than we have yet seen.’

Indeed thinking back on it now, on Joseph's reading of the story, I feel that almost imperceptible internal tremor that hints at some not–quite–grasped–at–the–time synchronicity. I'm remembering, now, Joseph's words about evil. ‘Without evil, there would be no balance,’ he had said in an earlier session. ‘Evil is needed to redress the balance. If too much space gets taken up by the good, then evil has to come into things.’ The story, with its two drops of blood on the snow heralding the imminent presence of something sinister, seems now as I look back a poetic exploration of Joseph's thought, as if something were wanting to keep us in the territory of our brief philosophic exchange.

Anyway we had put the book away, and talked for a bit about parts of the story. Then the conversation moved again to the nature of our sessions, about their aimless quality, whether or not we should plan our time, and finally we returned to this question of whether there was something that needed to be revealed or unravelled.

‘I can't think of anything,’ he said as our session was finishing. ‘School's fine, I've had a good holiday.’

‘Perhaps we're not talking about something that's present in your awareness of things at the moment,’ I said as he stood up to go. ‘Maybe it's something that's going to reveal itself in its own way, in its own time. That's the way it is with mysteries. It's a bit like the two great blood drops on the snow. We don't know what they're all about until later in the story.’

‘Well, I've been thinking about what you said,’ says Joseph as he sits down for our eleventh session. ‘About there being something that wants to be unravelled.’

‘Did I say that?’ I ask.

‘Yes... didn't you?’

‘Well, I think I said something less definite,’ I say. ‘I'm not that certain. It's more that I wonder about it and that I think it might be a good idea to wonder about it together, to see if there is something there that wants to unravel or reveal itself. Maybe there's nothing.’

I'm trying very hard not to be the omnipotent and omniscient expert here. I'm too aware of my potential power, of my ability to determine the agenda, twist all the available evidence to fit my developing hypothesis, and to subtly insist that because I'm older and wiser there's stuff about his unconscious that I know and that he cannot see. I'm aware, too, of the complexity and of the possibility that I'm wrong. On the other hand, I'm not wanting to let go of my strong feeling that there are significant undercurrents going on beneath the surface.

‘Well,’ says Joseph, ‘I really can't think of anything. I can't think of anything about my life that wants to be unravelled.’

‘There's nothing that you're aware of that is hidden and wants to be shown.’

‘Nothing that I can think of,' he says again, acknowledging now rather than denying the possibility of something outside his conscious awareness. I have this image, as I listen to him, of us as a lighthouse beacon illuminating first the rocks and then the sea and then the coastal bushland. No wildlife is revealed, but not because no wildlife is there. The creatures scuttle or dive away from the light. Perhaps Joseph's internal creatures are just as shy? I toy for a moment with the idea of sharing this image with Joseph but I'm never quick enough it seems. He's already moving on.

‘But I have had a couple of dreams,’ he says. ‘One of them is really embarrassing. God, I don't know if I can tell you the first one, it's really embarrassing. Like I'm really sure that I must have blushed every time I've told this dream to someone ...’

‘You've told quite a few people,’ I say, a bit surprised given the level of embarrassment he's professing.

‘Yes, I've even told it to my mum and she thought it was really funny which is weird, she just laughed and laughed, but I think it's just so embarrassing!’

I remain silent, though again I'm thrown off balance by the conflicting messages I'm receiving. It's embarrassing but he's told lots of people. He's talking about blushing but it's an embarrassment he's relishing.

‘In the first dream,’ he says, ‘I'm going to a doctor's surgery with my brothers and my mum, and then ... oh this is so embarrassing, it's so weird ... Mum is standing outside the surgery and she strips off to the waist and she starts dancing with her breasts exposed. In the dream, as you can imagine, me and my brothers are just dying of embarrassment. She's just there in full view and everyone's looking and it's terrible.’

‘She has exposed herself,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Can you imagine what it's like to be there when your mum does something like that!’

‘When she shows something that shouldn't be revealed in public.’

‘Exactly,’ says Joseph. ‘And she seems to be enjoying it so much.’

‘She's acting as though it's a release, as though she's really pleased to be doing this.’

‘Yes, she's having a great time.’

‘But you are embarrassed.’

‘Yeah, absolutely... Well? ... Is this one of those dreams that has a meaning?’

‘Well what is it that she's doing in the dream?’

‘She's showing her breasts and dancing.’

‘She's showing something that isn't normally revealed, and she's enjoying it.’

‘Something is being revealed. Right. I sort of get it. It's what we were talking about before, something being revealed. But why is it my mum who's doing the revealing in my dream? Why isn't it me, if in fact this is all about me?’

‘Perhaps because the dream needs to also express the embarrassment that you feel, the sense of something private being wrongly revealed.’

‘Like I feel both things. I feel that's it's enjoyable and I feel embarrassed.’

‘That's exactly the way you seemed to be when you were telling me the dream. You seemed to be enjoying telling me and you seemed embarrassed at the same time.’

‘So I still don't get it. What is this thing? What is it that I'm feeling these two feelings about? What is it that I could reveal except I feel embarrassed?’

‘Something about breasts? Something to do with your mother? Something to do with joy or dancing?’

‘We're not ringing any bells here,’ says Joseph. ‘It's pretty weird if you ask me.’

‘And you're feeling embarrassed, or part of you is, as we talk about it,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’ He shudders, as if trying to shake himself free.

‘You mentioned a second dream.’

‘In my second dream I'm fishing next to a stream which runs close to my old school and I'm catching these tiny fish. There are a whole lot of men watching. The fish are really small but the men are waiting for something and I can see that they are expecting that the little fish will grow into big fish as they wait.’

‘You are catching little fish, and then men are waiting for them to become big fish.’

‘Yes, they're just sitting there watching me, certain that they'll become bigger on the spot.’

‘And what about you in the dream? What do you think?’

‘I suppose I get the feeling that the fish will grow big too. It's a strange idea to begin with, but the certainty of the men somehow convinces me that they may well be right.’

‘As if they know something that you don't know.’

‘Yes, I guess so.’

‘I wonder if this might describe your feelings about what we're doing here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you and I have been talking about whether there's something to be revealed or unravelled. Perhaps you're feeling that you keep dipping into the stream but all you seem to catch are little fish, fish of little consequence. They're nothing really. But all the time you're aware that I'm also looking at what you're pulling out.’

‘And you're a man and you seem to be waiting for something, just like the men in my dream. You seem quite confident that there's something big, or potentially big, that will come out of this pond,’ he says. ‘Maybe ... but there's something else that this dream is reminding me of ...’

‘There's something else,’ I say.

‘Yes... it's this feeling of being watched ... I know! It's something that happened at school last week ... There's this one class where there are these three boys, and sometimes they sit behind me and make comments. Usually I just ignore it, but one day this week they started to call me gay and to say all this bad stuff about me, like offering to arrange for me to have sex with some of their mates. And one of them exposed his bare chest to me, and then they started hitting me on a sore spot on my arm and making me cry. It was quite annoying really.’

As I listen I consciously shrug off my psychotherapist side that wants to analyse, to connect, and instead allow other feelings to emerge. I'm feeling appalled and I say so. ‘That's just terrible. It must have been awful. Surely more than just quite annoying!’

‘Well, it wasn't very nice,’ he says.

‘What was the teacher doing during all of this?’ I ask. ‘What they were doing wasn't just cruel and hurtful, it's also a kind of abuse that schools are trying to confront.’

‘Well I went to talk to the teacher afterwards, and she is going to take it to the head of the department. She's asked me to write down what happened, and I wondered if I could do that now and show it to you when I've finished.’

‘Of course,’ I say, and I set him up at my desk.

Joseph writes carefully for about ten minutes and then reads out loud pretty much what he has already told me.

As he's been writing, I've been thinking. ‘Do you know,’ I say as we both stand and walk towards the door, ‘maybe all this talk about unravelling or revealing is just chasing away whatever it is that at the moment is too shy to come out. You've used our session today to tell me things you want to tell me about and for us to talk things over together. It seems we've managed to set up a safe place here where you can feel you can talk about whatever you want. Maybe that's what's important, a safe and accepting place.’

'Yes,' says Joseph. 'That sounds good. A safe place.’

‘A bit like the meeting place in your story,' I say.

‘The place where Good and Evil can talk to each other,’ says Joseph, then stands up and goes back out into the day.

‘Giles?’

‘Hullo Steve.’

‘Hullo Giles … Look, I'm a bit worried about today's supervision session. I've got so much stuff here, I'm worried that it's going to be unmanageable, that we're going to be swamped by too much material...’

‘You're feeling the weight of it all,’ says Giles.

‘I'm not feeling burdened, if that's what you're thinking. It's not that. If I describe what my room looks like at the moment, then maybe that will give you some idea of my state of mind ... I'm sitting at my desk and the floor all around me is covered with papers and books. Since I last talked to you about Joseph, before the holidays, I've been doing lots of reading. I've been reading Ellenberger's book about the history of the unconscious (3), so I've got pages of notes from that on one part of the floor describing all those pre-Freudian philosophers and theorists who wrote about dreams, the unconscious, the will, vitality, hysteria, energy, animal magnetism and other ‘vital forces', the nature of reality, 'the-thing-in-itself’, the nature of knowledge, the Enlightenment thinkers, the Idealists, the Romantics ... Then in another part of the room I've got notes from the workshop that you gave about the philosophical roots of Jung, so there's stuff there about Descartes and dualism and Spinoza and what you called his 'ethics of joy', Rousseau and Kant, Herder, Coleridge, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and lots of others, all of them seeming to have things to say which bear on the conversations we've been having Giles ... my mind starts to swim! .... Then there are reams of notes from my reading of Nietzsche, his ideas are so zingy! I just find it exciting stuff, I haven't read any of this kind of philosophy before, the stuff I did in one unit at university was so dry and pedantic, this is about life! It's about the experience of living ... Then from Nietzsche I've found my way to Schopenhauer, and I've been dipping into The World as Will and Idea (4) ... and then the other day there was this video I borrowed about Wittgenstein, a film by Derek Jarman, (5) and I found what he was saying so apposite that I slowed the film down and wrote down chunks of the dialogue... and that's led me to Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein (6) ... Then spread around another part of my floor there are my notes from the sessions with Joseph, and the story about the Wild Swans ... and then there are some notes I took from our last conversation about things I wanted to follow up with you ... Lots of stuff Giles …’

‘You're really buzzing at the moment Steve!’

‘Well I am, and I guess the first thing I want to talk about is the nature of this buzzing. Whether it's helpful or not. Whether it helps me grapple with real things or whether it's a kind of sickness of the mind.’

‘Did you say sickness of the mind? What do you mean?’

‘I'm remembering a phrase of Wittgenstein's. Didn't he once say that all philosophy is a sickness of the mind? And didn't Winnicott once say that thinking is only necessary because we feel trauma?’

‘That's surely something different,’ says Giles. ‘Winnicott surely wasn't implying that either trauma or thinking were unnatural, sick, aberrations.’

‘No, you're right. But let me try to explain how it is that I'm thinking these thoughts at the moment,’ I say. ‘I went for an early morning walk this morning, to try to settle down the buzzing, to try to get my mind into a state where I could be coherent talking to you. I was walking with our dog, Bella, through a little forest here in the middle of Canberra, and I was thinking about Nietzsche and Kant and about what is real and what is hidden, and how this might relate to Joseph ... then suddenly I realized that I'd disappeared into my head! I was in the forest but I could have been anywhere, I wasn't experiencing anything, I wasn't noticing what was all around me ... the morning summer light on the forest floor, the yellowed grass, the pine cones, the rabbit droppings. And all the while Bella was sniffing and fossicking and rooting and nuzzling, and then I became aware of the sharp scents around me, the pine-scented air, the damp earth smell ... and I started to feel differently in my body, like I was a part things of things, not apart from them. And I suddenly thought: This is the way I get with Joseph! I forget his actual presence, his physical being, our physical beings! This is what happens when I disappear into my too-analytical head! I lose touch ... Sometimes I can get back into touch when I write my notes or when I'm talking to you ... sometimes then I start to feel again the corporeal presences in the room. Like in that moment when Joseph was trying to tell me the dream and he was embarrassed and exultant all at the same time ... That's the forest floor that I sometimes miss when I get analytical or theoretical or when I worry that I'm not understanding, not getting it, or when I worry that I'm not being a good therapist ... When I get into this thinky frame–of–mind I keep asking myself questions about the nature of the stories clients tell, questions about the nature of stories as if they were objects, nouns ... so I find myself wondering, is Freud right that the dream is a defence, or is Jung right when he says it's a compensation, or is Hillman right when he says that it's an object from another world? But these are distracting questions, they distract me from what's actually happening right in front of me ... Joseph is telling me a dream — that's the forest floor, that's the pine smell! And his dream and his telling excite his senses in a particular way and his dream and its telling excite mine in a particular way, and that's it, that's the thing-in-itself, whether I see or understand it or not. That is what is there!’

‘You know what Nietzsche said about this kind of stuff?’ asks Giles. ‘You know his thing about the testimony of the senses?’

‘No, I don't think so, though I've been reading so much Nietzsche in the past week or so that maybe I've read it and forgotten it.’

‘It was his definition of the scientific project,’ says Giles. ‘Nietzsche said that we have to accept the testimony of our senses, make them the basis of our knowing. For him, then, the scientific project was about sharpening the senses, strengthening them with the will and making them central.’(8)

‘Yes, this is what I'm talking about, I think,’ I say.

‘When you were talking about your walk in the forest and your forgetting of life, I was thinking back to our last talk about stories, about embodied and disembodied stories. On your walk a story which was becoming disembodied came back into some kind of relationship with life through your bodily senses. And this reminded me of what Winnicott has said about play. Too much earnestness gets in the way of play, and play is the most important therapeutic activity.’

‘Consciously I think so highly of play,’ I say to Giles. '‘I’ve written a book about it, for goodness sake, about the nature of play in the classroom. But when I work as a therapist rather than as a teacher, it's as if I'm suspicious of it as well. It's as if there's some kind of shadowed partner to my trust in the unconscious life, which is my suspicion of it. This shadowed partner fears that fantasy is an escape from, rather than an entering into, the necessary territory.'

‘It's difficult for you to engage playfully with the idea that there is something hidden in this work with Joseph,’ says Giles.

‘All the time I'm wanting to know what it is, I'm seeing it as my job to strip back the layers to reveal what's there at the bottom.’

‘But there's no bottom. Things can be continually deconstructed,’ says Giles.

‘Behind every cave there is another cave, then another, then another, and so on. Didn't Nietzsche say something like this?’ I ask.

‘He did,’ says Giles, ‘though perhaps what's behind the cave is not a thing so much as a process. Verbs, not nouns. With Joseph at the moment, there's some dynamic process happening that is making him blush and boast. There's pleasure and pain.’

‘He's embarrassed but he wants to tell everyone.’

‘Exactly.

‘But isn't this something we all feel, Giles,’ I say, ‘something to do with the human condition, something you'd find in everyone, so in a sense not to do with the business of therapy? We all feel incomplete, don't we? Wasn't it Plato who said that we were separated from our other half in some mythic past and that we spend our lives looking to be re-united with this missing half? We all have this urge to reach out into the unknown, to take part in an adventure, to find a lost treasure, even though we know that the belief in 'finding-the-missing-bit-and-being-made-whole' is a fantasy, never to be realised except in fleeting ecstatic moments I suppose. Isn't this an aspect of our unconscious yearning for death?’

‘Quite possibly Steve, though as I was listening to you just then, to these thoughts about incompleteness, I suddenly realised that the mental picture of Joseph that I'd had just a little while ago had gone! Vanished! As if these thoughts had chased it away, or excluded it. It made me wonder if we're losing sight of the boy.’

‘A bit like being in the forest and not smelling the air,’ I say.

‘Yes, a bit like that. Joseph's feelings of incompleteness are somehow more immediate than the generalised human condition that you're describing here Steve. There is something particular missing here in Joseph's life.’

‘Some denied or split-off pain,’ I say.

‘Yes, and perhaps also some repressed reaching out towards joy. Some basic frustration which wants release. This seems present in his Mother's Breasts image.’

‘There are layers of feeling ... or denied feeling ... here.’

‘Painful present realities, a desire to bring two worlds together,’ says Giles. ‘I like the Nietzsche image of the cave behind the cave, but I'm more comfortable if it's particularised.’

‘Behind Joseph's evasive charm there is a defence which hides a shadow born of a yearning which compensates for a wound which ... and so on,’ I say.

‘Yes, something like that, though it's still general. It's still a step away from your dog in the forest, if you see what I mean.’

‘Giles, I keep floating away from the particular! Our conversations set me thinking and my thoughts have this tendency to take me away from the particular.’

‘We've got to be allowed to think Steve! It's not a sin you know!’

‘But there are thoughts which feel satisfying in the expression of them which become increasingly disembodied.’

‘You don't stay disembodied, though, do you Steve? You keep trying to bring yourself back into relation to what you have actually experienced.’

‘I keep trying,’ I say, ‘though I'm often tempted to give up the engagement, to float away. I keep hearing your voice saying that engagements and connections are made by bodies rather than disembodied ideas, by our senses rather than by concepts.’

‘I don't think I'd draw the distinctions as sharply as that,’ says Giles. ‘There's a relationship between these different things, between bodies and ideas, senses and concepts. But I know what you mean.’

‘It's how to stay with the senses,’ I say. ‘It's something to do with aspects and essences, isn't it? ... I'm trying to keep this related to what I'm experiencing with Joseph, Giles.. It's related to the question, ‘What can I know?’ ... What can I know in relation to Joseph? Not any bedrock certain self, not any 'thing-in-itself', not any fundamental self from which everything flows ...’

‘There is no such fundamental self,’ says Giles.

‘There is no thing-in-itself here, no single thing that is unrevealed. All I can know are aspects and essences, which reveal themselves in anecdotes, body language, voice inflexions, facial expressions, dreams, fantasies, pauses and play ... in his interactions with me ... in our successful and unsuccessful attempts to mate...’

‘The sorts of thing Zinkin was writing about,’ says Giles. ‘The vitality affects, for example. (9)

‘And these things are captured better in novels than in text books, case studies than in quantitative research, diaries than in diagnostic descriptions. That's why I'm writing my thesis in the form of a story.’

‘You're wanting to show aspects and essences,’ says Giles. ‘This is at the heart of your research, the telling of this story of aspects and essences.’

‘The story is the research,’ I say. ‘Telling the story is revealing ... to me as well... to me especially!’

‘When you tell the story, more of this engagement, this seeking-out-together is revealed. And not just in your research. In the therapy as well. You're trying to create a story there too.’

‘The more I can put in front of us, on the table as it were, this thing that we're both experiencing, Joseph and I, the more we can find words for it ... tell a story about it ...’

‘This making a story is an animating thing ... it excites the senses...’

‘It has the potential to move something along …’

‘And it's stuck at the moment,’ says Giles, ‘because you - I mean the two of you, you and Joseph - you haven't found a way to bring this hidden thing into relationship. It remains disembodied, hovering around somewhere out of sight yet potentially lethal, destructive of things ….’

‘It's connected, surely, to his anger,’ I say, remembering again the trip wires, the tormenting of his brother, his unconscious ripping out of his mother's plants, the steely challenge when our eyes meet, his missing of a session, his deliberate incomprehension.

‘He's furious,’ says Giles. ‘More furious than he knows, certainly more furious than he can tell.’

‘And because he can't feel it, the pressure builds up inside ...’

‘This seems to be a part of what is happening,’ says Giles. ‘But I want to get back to smells, the equivalent of the pine-and-rabbit-poo stuff. Joseph's first story talks about smells.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There's the sweet smelling on the side of the Good - the image of the sweet smelling soaps came up again in his dream - and the sour smelling on the side of the Evil.’

‘And the Evil side is shut up,’ says Giles, ‘enclosed somehow. There's no fresh air, so things go off, they get stale and sour.’

‘It's as if there's something hidden in an airless cellar.’

‘A body perhaps. Something that's been murdered,’ says Giles.

‘Is this fanciful Giles? Are these thoughts embodied, or are we just having fun talking about the first clever things that come into our minds?’

‘I think they're relevant, or at least that they're ideas that are worth playing with. These are the images brought up in us through our contemplation of Joseph's pine-and-poo stuff. He describes the smells; we have the images. We could be wrong, of course we could be wrong, but we also have to learn to take the stuff of the psyche seriously. There are processes at work here.’

‘I seem to find it more difficult than you to take these images seriously, to let them work away at me. You keep having these thoughts or reactions which I find helpful …. and wish I could have thought of myself!’

.Perhaps this is Steve finding it difficult to credit his own psychic activity.’

‘My Hannibal self unable to play!’

‘It's possible,’ says Giles.

‘So,’ I say, ‘getting back to Joseph and these smells from an airless room ... there may be this decomposing body down there ... or that's an image that might express something essential about what is being hidden ...’

‘And it's being hidden because it inspires fear... and shame.. and it's also exciting,’ says Giles.

‘And it will stay hidden because the world, which includes me, is unwilling or unable to help him talk about it. The world too prefers to stick with the sweet smelling soaps.’

‘Yet things keep happening, don't they, to remind us of the sour side? Two drops of blood plop onto the snow white cloak of the Queen!’

‘Things keep reminding us of some other reality, beneath what is presented at the surface.’

‘Secret pleasures and pains in his world,’ says Giles. ‘Pleasures and pains, goods and bads, at home with his family and at school with the bullies.’

‘This is really puzzling Giles, because when we talk like this I feel no reluctance in myself to go into these areas, yet it still feels right to say that there's something holding me back from these sour smelling places when I'm with Joseph... I don't know what it is ... something about the idea of pleasure and pain being involved with the bullying I think ... There's something here that is difficult for me to assimilate, that I want to run away from …’

As I'm speaking I'm aware that I'm having a kind of deja-vu feeling and I try to explain this to Giles.

‘Right at this moment, as I'm telling you this, I'm reliving the moment when Joseph told me about the bullying at school last week. I felt outraged, indignant... I wanted him to know that I was on his side, that he was supported here. I remember deliberately coming out from behind my psychotherapist’s mask ... And right now, as we're speaking Giles, I'm feeling this reluctance in me to think about the bullying as involving pleasures as well as pains.’

‘It's difficult for you to credit that there might be pleasure involved in being the victim,’ says Giles.

‘It's just doesn't feel right.’

‘So instead you rush to his defence. You become his ally instead of his therapist. He is stirring something unconscious in you, some tender area.’

‘I guess I felt something a bit like panic,’ I say. ‘A kind of primitive reaction that got covered over by my indignation.’

‘Perhaps this takes you into an unexamined part of your own internal happenings,’ says Giles. ‘I don't know of course, only you can be the judge of that. But I do know that Joseph doesn't need you to be his ally here.’

‘He wants someone more dispassionate,’ I say.

‘No, not dispassionate. It's not at all a bad thing that you're feeling ambivalence and confusion here. The important thing, though, is to recognize it and to do something with it.’

‘So I am in a better position to help him with confusing thoughts about pleasure and pain, good and evil,’ I say.

‘Exactly,’ says Giles. ‘He wants someone who sees more than he can see, who'll help him understand things he can't understand. If you're just his ally, seeing things the way he sees them on the surface, then you're abandoning your role. you're abandoning him to his fate. He wants you to see both of the boxes of mystery in his story, the good and the evil, not just the one. He wants you to see hidden pleasures as well as obvious pains.’

‘You seem to be suggesting, Giles, that he enjoys being bullied! That there's some sado-masochism involved here!’

‘No, I'm not saying that. What I am saying is we must train ourselves to allow that possibility a place in our minds ... And now I'm wondering why that possibility has entered my mind, whether it's just some errant thought of my own or whether it's somehow been put there by something you've said. Is there really pleasure and pain in the world of the bullies, pleasure and pain for Joseph?’

‘I guess what this makes me think about is the pain and pleasure he seemed to feel when telling me the dream about his mother's breasts being exposed.’

‘And there is something, isn't there Steve, which connects this to his account of the bullies! Didn't he say something about the bullies exposing their bare chests?’

‘He did say that!’ I say. ‘I hadn't thought about that connection! He said that one of them exposed his bare chest and then started hitting him until he was crying.’

‘And at that moment you abandoned your therapist self,’ says Giles.

‘Perhaps it is just too much for me to contemplate the possibility that Joseph, at one level, finds this exciting.’

‘And of course at one level it's not at all exciting. It's hellish. Nevertheless we must keep in mind the possibility that is being suggested here, otherwise we cannot engage with this evil side that is so perplexing and problematical.’

‘So there might be pleasure involved in the pain, I can see that I need to somehow open myself up to this possibility ... But Giles, isn't there another problem involved with thinking like this? Isn't the temptation always to say that behind whatever is being presented there is something else, something sinister, to the extent that patients are never believed unless they're talking about the darker sides of human motivation? Doesn't this lead to a kind of reductive investigating, a process of whittling things away until we find the true self with its real intentions, which are probably base, repressed, unacceptable to the ego? This is sounding so like Freud. There's an assumption in all of this that there there's a single motivation at the source – sex if you're a Freudian, economic if you're a Marxist, the will if you go along with Schopenhauer – and that in a way this is the true self, the authentic self, and all the others are diversions or overlays or rationalisations or repressions or whatever.’

‘There are selves,’ says Giles, ‘many selves. Selves in a state of flux. Our selves are like twinkling stars that keep appearing and disappearing?’

‘So it would make more sense not to think of Joseph as someone feeling pain at the surface but pleasure underneath, not as someone putting on masks or adopting disguises in order to hide a true self, but as an agglomeration of selves.’

‘Yes, you're right, and there is sometimes this tendency to simplify things by assuming a basic drive. Do you know the books of Adam Phillips?’ says Giles. ‘Provocative stuff, I think. You'd like them. He's got a nice way of putting this. He says that dreams – and I suppose the same might apply to all stories in the way we're using this word in these conversations – are an always contentious collaboration of different parts of the self, that they're an attempt to incorporate an excess in points of view, that they try to conciliate rival internal claims. (10) I think this is what we're getting at here.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He's not just the slightly distanced adolescent, or heroic

vandal ...’

‘... or the playground sadist or Dionysian dancer.’

‘... or the conscientious student or the adventure seeker or the troubled victim, the philosopher, the guilty possessor of some dark secret ...’

‘... or the lover of sweet smells and his mother's partner in crime ...’

‘... he's all of these things,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ says Giles, ‘he's all of these things, though you mustn't be too catholic in all of this, don't be too multicultural.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Don't be seduced into thinking that the multiplicity always works towards the good, or that each player in the drama is working for the good of the whole. Some are destructive, psychotic and fearfully limiting. Some are enemies.’

‘Some need to be exposed, you're saying.’

‘Grappled with. Kept in mind. Made allowance for. Not just ignored or idealised or etherealised.’

‘Some are wanting to promote the good, some are wanting to attack it. Goodness, it's no wonder I sometimes feel dizzied!’

‘It's no wonder,’ says Giles, ‘but we've got to think our way beyond the dizziness. We have to reduce the whirl, the temptation towards passivity, the throwing up of the hands in despair at the complexity.’

‘I’ve got to find ways of living more actively with the complexity, of engaging with it. I do find it difficult though. I was reading an article about Nietzsche the other day, about his view that knowledge is always perspectival, that there are no immaculate perceptions. There's no possibility of an all-inclusive perspective which will contain all others and make reality available as it is in itself.’

‘You can't see all of an object from every possible vantage point simultaneously,’ says Giles.

‘And when I attempt to, when I try to see the whole picture or the essential core or whatever, then I'm clinging to an idea that my investigations or thinking can reveal to me the truth about him, can reveal the truth behind the apparent ...’

‘... when in fact,’ says Giles, ‘what we're seeing ... no, what we're involved in ... is a revolving, changing, evolving, multi-faceted and mutually contradictory dynamic process. And it's un-pin-down-able.’

‘... but when we bring our minds to bear on this process,’ I say, ‘when we reflect on it in the kinds of ways we try to do in therapy and we're trying to do in these conversations... in embodied ways ... then we begin to see a certain kind of order. It's not just chaotic.’

‘You've said this to me before, Steve. You've said it in relation to your writing.’

‘The more I write about something, the more drafts I do, the more I see an underlying order. Layers, and connections within and between layers, become clearer. They come into sharper focus.’

‘Yes but you see I wonder about this,’ says Giles. ‘I wonder if we're seeing an underlying order, or whether we're creating it.’

This is an unsettling idea for me. Surely there is something which is not just random chaos there? Surely we're finding an order, not creating one? And yet I've been reading about Kant over recent weeks, about the capacity of our minds to make meaning through the exercise of categories of thought.

‘The question can be asked about relationship too,’ continues Giles. ‘We've been talking about embodied and disembodied stories, relational and unrelational impulses, grounded and ungrounded ideas. When we encounter the embodied, the relational and the grounded, are the connections we discover ones that we create (through the act) or that we find? Do they exist independently of the discovering. I doubt it.’

‘It's like you're saying that we have a self - or selves - only in so far as we create them through our interactions with the world,’ I say.

‘It's Winnicott and the dyad thing again,’ says Giles. ‘There's no such thing as a baby, just a dyad made up of relational processes.’

‘It's only when we're creating ourselves through relationship that we can be said to have a being,’ I say, not really sure whether these are grounded thoughts or flights of fancy, but being enlivened by the exchange nevertheless.

‘We're continually in the act of creating,’ says Giles, ‘It's the creating, the embodying, the relating, that makes something real.’

‘We need other people in our lives for us to feel real,’ I say. ‘We need to be engaged in this creative process of living, which means feeling connected to a world which is bigger than ourselves.’

Giles is silent and I have a hunch as to why. What I've just said is something of a revelation to me, the introvert who so often retreats into his own individual boundaried world. To think of myself as, in a sense, unboundaried, as connected to the world, as continually engaged in the business of creation through my interactions with it, is to shift something internally. Of course I've had these thoughts before, but this time the thought is felt more viscerally.

‘There's a sense, then,’ I continue, ‘in which people can't be thought about meaningfully if they're thought about simply as individuals. We're connected to webs, the soul that animates us is in some important sense an unboundaried one.’

‘Yet this is precisely what we think when we're unhinged,’ says Giles, ‘that the solution to all our problems is to be found within the boundaries of the individual psyche.’

‘It's a great word in this context, Giles... unhinged ... we've lost our connection to the bigger structure. We're no longer connected ... I want to rabbit on a bit here, Giles, is that OK? It's connected to something I've been trying to think about for a while now.’

‘Rabbit on,’ says Giles.

‘It's about this idea that soul... life … isn't contained within an individual's skin. I guess this is just another way of talking about things like projective identification ... What am I trying to say here? ... To try to locate meaning within an individual, to suggest that things will make sense by peering into the space defined by the boundaries of an individual's life, is to mark off far too small a territory isn't it? To the extent that anything can be said to have meaning at all, it can only be in terms of the whole, the unity, which in this case means in terms of all of creation. There's no hope of grasping ... conceptually incorporating ... all of what goes together to influence the shape of Joseph's life unless we think in terms like the unboundaried soul ...’

‘We were talking about this earlier today,’ says Giles, ‘when we were saying that to lose our connection to the body (our own body, the body of the world) is to cut ourselves off from a source.’

‘We've got to keep thinking in this wider context, of a field that includes the relational and therefore transcends the personal.’

‘You're pointing to the impossibility of understanding the cell unless you think about the organism in which it lives,’ says Giles.

‘Yes. The cell in the organism, the brick in the building, the limb in the body, the city in the nation, the planet in the solar system. It's only within the context of the interrelated web of complex relationships that there is meaning,’ I say.

‘Which means that there are many different possible factors at work in Joseph's life, factors which include much more than the individual.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘So his dream about his mother's breasts, for example, could be connected to an aspect of any one of his many sub-personalities, and it could be connected to his family history, his society's pre-occupations, the instinctual life he shares with all adolescents, the collective unconscious, the first stirrings of some future shock or a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil.’

I'm rather pleased with this formulation though I'm wondering if Giles has really been carried along by it. I'm expecting, I suppose, some reservations.

‘This is another take on your attachment to the teleological,’ says Giles. ‘I don't disagree with any of this by the way. There is more to this world than any notion of it can contain, much more happening than any developmental theory of an individual life can illuminate. We can know bits of it.’

‘Aspects and essences maybe.’

‘Twinkling stars perhaps.’

‘A part of what we can know is that the soul is unboundaried.’

‘Yet the individual is important too. We must keep in mind that you've got an individual boy - a Joseph - coming to see you right now.’

‘Not the collective unconscious or the world spirit!’

‘No indeed! You're seeing an individual boy with a particular set of knotty difficulties and who is telling you these stories, shaping them in particular ways, in order to make a particular kind of relationship with a particular you.'

I'm at the coast for a week on my own, to write and to get away from an intolerable build-up of internal pressures that keep spilling out in my daily life and damaging relationships. I'm aware of holding inside a rage that threatens to burst its banks, which sometimes does burst its banks, regularly in my dreams and through the cracks in my waking life.

I'm dreaming of children who provoke my rage by refusing to do as I tell them. They threaten my sense of control. I want to lash out at them, murder them. There's an internal raw energy that doesn't want to be imprisoned and I'm at war with myself, trying to tame what must be expressed.

I dreamt last night that I was lost and searching for Field Avenue. What's the field I'm searching for? I think I know. I need to find a big enough field for my current energies, that otherwise they'll seep out in all sorts of inappropriate ways, like Joseph with his trip wires. Where is the field big enough for the inexplicable rages and frustrations I feel eating me up inside?

More dreams. Of deposed leaders. Of the beautiful repainting of an old house. And then this one last night:

There is a ceremony that I watch where an indigenous group come out of the forest and dance some dance of deep significance, and any tourists who want to be there must learn the steps and have a red leather hood put over their heads so they don't see the ceremony. If anyone actually sees the ceremony, the natives turn their white reflectors (they look like big shields) onto the person and they're blinded. The ceremony has already begun when I arrive but I want to join in, so I start to do the dance without looking at anyone, just concentrating on getting the steps right. At the appropriate moment in the ceremony, I have the red hood put over my head, but, because I don't know the steps and now can't see the way the dancing line is moving, I have to sit down during this part of the ceremony.

This is how I feel as a therapist, that I'm wanting to take part in some primal ceremony but have to have the hood put over my head. I can be in it, in a limited and confused way, but I cannot peer directly at it or even take part in some of it. I don't know the steps.

In the shower I suddenly realize that I trust no-one and nothing, except my dreams. They, alone, seem real somehow. They continue to create fresh and alive images at a time when my thoughts seem stifling, decaying, tending towards some kind of death. My dreams connect me to outside realities or a deeper mysterious ground of my being ... something beyond the confines of my boundaried and racked self.

I have this sense of my unconscious psyche being preoccupied with an attempt to create something out of raw and formless but energetic matter. It's trying to link me with something beyond myself, something that can carry me forward. That's the attraction of Schopenhauer for me, the thought that I'm being carried along by something blind to my individual welfare but connected to life.

As I walk along the beach at twilight I feel heavy in my body, as though in mourning. I want a mother's breast to lie on, to drink from, but know that no such thing exists in the world out there. The sea understands. Death understands. My dreams understand. Perhaps to hope for more is part of the omnipotent baby's illusion.

___________________________________

Endnotes

(1) Pp 27-28 Jones, (1956) Scandinavian Legends and Folk Tales OUP

(2) p 51 Hillman (1983)

When I'm dreaming at night, I'm in the image, I'm imagining - or imagining is going on and I am sunk deep into the inherently intelligible, the sense-making, clear, amazingly purposeful life of the dream. And almost the moment I wake up, even if very slowly wake up, my understanding begins. I'm understanding, turning the dream into understanding it, even if I don't want to, and at that moment the dream fades. It gets obscure, too, and loses its intelligibility. Why is that, why? The dream is hiding from my understanding. It's almost like an inner poet who hides from the inner critic c, because he doesn’t want to be understood and find out what he means.

(3) Ellenberger (1970)

(4) Schopenhauer (1819)

(5) Jarman (1994)

(6) Monk (1991)

(7) Jarman's Wittgenstein says it like this:

Philosophy is a sickness of the mind ...

For many years at the centre of philosophy was a picture of the lonely human soul brooding over its private experiences. This soul is a prisoner of his own body, and he's locked out from contact with others by the walls of their bodies. I want to get rid of that picture. There is no private meaning. We are what we are only because we share a common language and common forms of life.

(8) p 481 in Kauffman (1982). See more on this in Chapter 12 below.

(9) For more extensive account of Zinkin's ideas, see Chapter 11 below

(10) p 75 Phillips (1995)

The dream becomes the product of an always contentious collaboration of different parts of the self. Condensation, displacement, considerations of representation - what Freud describes as the dream-work - are all ways of incorporating what might be called an excess of points of view (the dream-work, as Freud said in another footnote, is the meaning of the dream). The dream itself, in so far as it has not become a nightmare, has apparently, and temporarily, conciliated rival internal claims.

(11) P 898 Encyclopaedia Britannica 15" Edition, Volume 24, 'Nietzsche'

Perspectivism is a concept which holds that knowledge is always perspectival, that there are no immaculate perceptions, and that knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage point.

Perspectivism also denies the possibility of an all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself. The concept of such an all-inclusive perspective is as incoherent as the concept of seeing an object from every possible vantage point simultaneously.