Chapter 5 Keeping shadows out

Part A: Hannibal and the Dizzied World

It's now over a month since Joseph told me the dream of his mother dancing bare-breasted outside the doctor's surgery, and we've had five sessions since then. Joseph tells me that he's very pleased with how the bullying was handled by the school. ‘My work's going well,’ he told me over the phone on a day when he caught the wrong bus and missed our session. ‘I'm getting good marks and I'm getting my assignments in on time. I'm glad I made the move to this bigger school.’

But still there are hints of shadows. He's had a birthday recently, and during one of our sessions he chatted brightly about the presents he got but mentioned in passing that his mother hadn't been at his party.

‘She's got a new boyfriend, did I tell you?’

‘No, you haven't mentioned that,’ I said. ‘There's a new man in her life.’

‘Apparently,’ he said, bringing his hand to his mouth to cover a contrived yawn. ‘But that's fine with me. I'm not at all bothered by that.’

‘And she missed your birthday party,’ I said. ‘Because of the boyfriend?’

‘No,’ he said briskly. ‘She had to go to my uncle's birthday and so she couldn't make it. But she rang me.’

‘I wonder how it felt for you to have your party without your mum being there,’ I said.

'‘It was fine. No big deal really.’’

I've decided to let Joseph play on the computer.

I've been worrying away at this for some time, wrestling with my career-long nagging sense of guilt whenever I let children play. In the light of what Giles has been saying to me, this move seems like a dropping of my bundle. Yet I keep being drawn back to what I've actually experienced, which is to do with the efficacy of unstructured and uninterpreted play. So many times before in my teaching and therapeutic life this kind of play seems to have moved things along. (1)

Joseph was surprised to hear that I'd changed my mind as I'd seemed so firm in my resolve. He hasn't been entirely sure what to do with this new opportunity and he never wants to spend the whole of the hour at the computer. Despite this he's become deeply involved in the computer simulation called Civilisation.

He was hooked from the very beginning. The game begins with a fanfare of trumpets and a creation story:

In the beginning
the earth was without form, and void.

The sun shone upon this earth,
and deep inside its hard crust
sleeping forces stirred and were released

I looked quickly at Joseph's face as these words scrolled across the screen. His lips were moving as he read them silently to himself, his face a study in excited anticipation. I felt sleeping forces stirring within him too.

The seas parted, continents formed,
mountains pushed their way upwards,
earthquakes split the earth, releasing lava, landslides and gases.

These strange gases charged the atmosphere.
Within this maelstrom of Fire, Water, Air and Earth life stirred
Tiny organisms found footholds in protected places.

The seeds of life grew,
strengthened,
spread,
diversified
and prospered.
And soon all earth teemed with life.

And with instinct, came
the first glimmers of intelligence,
and then its fruits:
fire, tools, weapons, the hunt, farming, roads, family, the tribe.

Now it needed just one more ingredient:
a great Leader
to unite the warring tribes
to build a legacy that would stand the test of time:
a Civilisation.

The words faded and the screen went black except for a tiny flashing picture of a wagon on what appeared to be the fragment of a map.

‘What's that?’ asked Joseph, pointing to the flashing picture.

‘That's the wagon which represents you and your tribe,’ I explained. ‘There you are, surrounded by blackness, the unknown world, and you have no idea what you will find if you decide to move your undefended wagon into this unknown territory.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘It's up to you,’ I said, suddenly aware that I too was feeling the stirring of sleeping forces, feeling the release of being a teacher again and having a guiding role, allowing a kind of uninhibited involvement which was absent for too much of the time as I struggled to be a good therapist. ‘You're the leader of this tiny tribe of Monguls. You can set off to explore the surrounding blackness, to push back the frontiers, and you may find exploitable resources or hostile armies. Or you can decide to stay put for the time being, to build a city right here where you find yourself and you can then farm the land, build roads and market places - in other words, get an economy started. Do you want to explore or consolidate?’

The dilemma serves as a metaphor for an aspect of adolescence. Do you stay put in your safe nest, or break out? Do you remain your parents' boy or venture out into the adult world beyond the borders of your known territory?

‘Can I do both?’ Joseph asked.

‘Not yet. You've got a small tribe at the moment, not enough to divide into two groups. But if you build a city and get things developing nicely, then soon your population will grow and you'll find yourself with more options. The more you grow and develop, Prince Joseph, the bigger the population your tribe can support, and that in turn will lead to further development. Soon, if you build a prosperous city, you'll be able to form armies who can do the exploring from a safer base.’

‘So can I build a city right where I am?’

‘You can,’ I said. ‘And it looks like a good spot for a city. You can see that it's on a river, which is always good for trade, and there's some good farming land by the river. There's also a swamp, poor farming land, but later on you'll be able to order some of your people to drain it and turn it into pasture. There's no forest nearby as far as we can see and that may be a problem, but there are some hills just there, see? Later on you'll be able to mine those hills.’

‘Mine the hills? What do you mean? How?’

So we talked for a while about mining and about how the ore could be used, first of all (given that the date was 4000BC!) to make simple stone tools and weapons, and later, once smelting was discovered, to make iron, bronze and eventually steel.

We talked too, for a while, about technology in general and I turned to the chart at the end of the Civilisation manual which showed the various discoveries, from the wheel at one end of the spectrum to the ability to send rockets into space at the other. ‘Your scientists will work to make these discoveries,’ I told him, ‘and obviously the quicker they do it, the better off your civilisation will be. You'll be able to build more secure cities, stronger armies, better trade routes. The scientists will help you keep ahead of your rivals, and I'll show you later some ways in which you can encourage your scientists to work more quickly.’

And so he began to make decisions. He decided to build his first city, which he called Timeland, and was soon working on a rudimentary defence of the city, first by building a barracks when the resources were available and then by arming some small groups of settlers. He sent farmers out to till the fields, and then to harvest them and store the grain. The population began to grow and soon he was able to send out an exploratory party which followed the river until they discovered the sea, and there he prepared the land so that he could build a second city, this one a port. Now the boundaries of the known world were extended so that he knew that there were no rival cities in the immediate vicinity, though still the vast majority of the world remained unexplored and unpredictable. His scientists and elders brought significant advances to his growing community, and by the end of our half an hour at the computer, a thousand years had passed, the wheel was in use and an army of charioteers was being trained. The population had grown to 60 000 and Prince Joseph Khan had a palace which his contented subjects had built for him.

The following session we returned to Civilisation. This time a further 500 years passed, his population doubled, and his scientists continued to advance his civilisation. He was poor but now his engineers were more mathematically sophisticated and had developed the catapult, making his armies amongst the strongest in the world. His explorers were making more extensive use of better maps, making the prospect of venturing over the sea a real possibility, and Timeland was now the third biggest city in the world. We still hadn't sighted any other cities; they lay beyond the boundaries, hinted at by diplomats and traders but essentially unknown. Rumour had it that there were two particularly strong rival civilisations: the English and the Russians.

These rumours fuelled a sense of urgency as together we discussed options and strategies. Sooner or later a big power would make contact with our expanding civilisation. Would we be strong enough to stand our ground?

Joseph told me how much he was loving the game. ‘It's just like the whole of history,’ he said, ‘it's like you're involved in all the big events. One day I'd like to use all your figures to build my civilisation on the carpet, just like I did with my first story.’

I too was loving the game, and perhaps for this very reason I found it very difficult to talk with Giles about these sessions. He would surely think it a cop-out that we were playing a computer game. He'd surely judge me harshly for caving in. Despite these misgivings I launched during one of our supervisory sessions into a description of what Joseph and I had been doing, and then told Giles how I was feeling about it all.

‘I can think of a thousand reasons in favour of what I'm doing, Giles, and perhaps as we're talking I'll find myself telling you some of them. But I want to begin somewhere else. I'm aware of how secretive I feel about it, how reluctant I am to tell you about it, how it almost feels shameful that we're enjoying ourselves in this way when there are clearly things that are troubling the boy.’

‘Did you say "shameful" Steve?’ asked Giles.

‘I did. That's how it feels. Like we're taking part in some conspiracy behind closed doors, some private little thing ... Christ, I know what you're thinking, Giles! Like we're having a bit of fun together, like we're playing with each other and it would be awful if anyone found out!’

‘Didn't Joseph have a dream along these lines Steve? Wasn't there something about a conspiracy in one of the dreams you told me?’

‘There was,’ I said, relieved that Giles was involving himself in the psychological raw material rather than standing back and judging. ‘Joseph had a dream a month or so ago about being involved in some undercover operation with his mother to do with counterfeit money and drugs. And that's just how it feels to me, that we're involved in a secret and pleasurable undercover operation.’

‘And in that dream,’ said Giles, '‘didn't he get caught?’

‘He did,’ I said. ‘Then he and his mother turned their attention to the production of sweet-smelling soaps.’

‘The sweet and the sour, the good and the bad,’ said Giles. ‘He wants to identify himself with the good, but it's the bad that excites him.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Giles.

Neither of us spoke for a moment and I've come to take these silences as part invitation to go further into the experience.

‘I feel a kind of shame,’ I said, ‘and I try to either hide it or talk it out of existence. The shame I feel makes me want to think of a million reasons why this play is actually connected to the therapeutic project.’

‘Mmm,’ said Giles. ‘Look, I think this shame has two sides to it Steve. There's stuff going on here for you, and no doubt there are many reasons to do with your personal history why this particular development evokes a sense of shame here. This is a question of management, if we look at it entirely as 'your stuff". You've got to manage your feelings, not let them take over, not allow them to take the therapy in a direction determined solely by your own psychological story.’

‘You think that maybe that's what I'm doing here?’ I asked. ‘Letting him play to satisfy my own needs?’

‘It's possible Steve, and we mustn't discount that. But it's not what I'm interested in at the moment. There's stuff going on for you here, but there's also stuff going on for Joseph. It's what this move means to Joseph that I'm trying to get at. Why has he pressured you to cave in? Why does he find it so exciting to be in this secret world with you?’

‘This is so complicated for me Giles,’ I said. ‘It's so mixed up, there are so many possible factors why he's enjoying it. First of all he's encountering a more animated and alive me here, I'm enjoying it, I'm knowledgeable in this realm and can contribute in obvious ways to his pleasure of it ... that's one thing. Then there's this power play which I feel is present, where he's seeing if he can distract the serious Steve, the task-oriented therapist, and he's won that power play, he's broken me down ….. that's another thing. I also think this Civilisation is an excellent game, it works on many different visceral, intellectual and metaphorical levels. And we know that Joseph is attracted to the thought of himself as hero, and this gives him a chance to play the hero. There are lots of possible reasons ... But Giles, as I've been talking, what's coming to me is something else ... I think he's enjoying it because it's solid, it's a held experience.’

‘Did you say, Steve, it's a held experience?’

‘Yes, that's what it feels like. I've been thinking a lot about what you've been saying about the need to find words for our experiences, that it's the creation of a common language that creates the relational space which is animating and potentially mutative. I've been watching my infant son over the past week or so with these thoughts in mind. Surely what holds our psyches together, what prevents them from the unintegration of Winnicott's 'unthinkable anxiety' and Bion's experience of catastrophe, is more than just the language? Surely sometimes it's things other than the language? My wife and I don't calm our baby Solomon when he's upset by explaining something but by changing a nappy, providing a feed, rocking, holding, singing, soothing. And I've been thinking that this is how play works, the kind of uninterpreted play that Joseph's involved with in Civilisation. This sitting at the computer is setting up shapes and patterns and connections which he experiences as safe, as reminders of an existing (or a created) order, in exactly the same way as the games played with a baby, or the rockings and soothings and murmurings, work. This is Zinkin's vitality affects isn't it Giles, those non-verbal cues conveyed as much by the expressions on the face, the tone of the voice, the positionings and shiftings of the body?’ (2)

‘This is what he was writing about,’ says Giles.

‘There's more I want to say here Giles, but please interrupt ... cut in when you want to.’

‘No, keep going Steve.’

‘This non-verbal thing, this ability to hold non-verbally ... isn't this what Ogden is talking about when he adds a third position - what he calls 'the autistic-contiguous mode' - to the two traditional Kleinian positions? In his The Primitive Edge of Experience he's saying that our fear of fragmentation is contained not only by our thoughts (which are linked to the depressive mode) but also by what he calls 'the sensory continuity, rhymicity, and boundedness of the autistic-contiguous mode.’ (3) I came across what I thought was a really wonderful example of this the other day in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. It's quite long, Giles, but I'd really like to read it to you?’

‘Go on Steve,’ said Giles.

‘It's in one of the stories at the end of the book, where Knecht is the Rainmaker in an ancient tribe. One night there's this shocking sight: the villagers look up and see what appears to be a collapsing of the stars in the night sky. There's immediately a panic, a kind of group madness, as the villagers are confronted with this catastrophe beyond their minds' capacity to comprehend. And it starts to spread, to snowball. The Rainmaker realises that he's got to do something. So here's the passage I want to read:

Up to the moment he reached the group, Knecht had hoped to be able to check the panic by example, reason, speech, explanations, and encouragement. But his brief conversation with the tribal mother had shown him that it was too late for anything of the sort. He had hoped to let the others share in his own experience, to make them a gift of it. He had hoped to persuade them that the stars themselves were not falling, or not all of them, that no cosmic storm was sweeping them away. He had imagined that by such urging he would be able to move them from helpless dismay to active observation, so that they would be able to bear the shock. But he quickly saw that there were very few villagers who would hearken to him, and by the time he won them over all the others would have utterly given way to madness. No, as was often the case, reason and sensible speech could accomplish nothing here.

Fortunately there were other means. Although it was impossible to dispel their mortal terror by appeal to reason, this terror could still be guided, organized, given shape, so that the confusion of maddened people could be made into a solid unity, the wild single voices merged into a chorus. But there was no time to be lost. Knecht stepped before the people, loudly crying the well-known prayers that opened public ceremonies of penance and mourning: the lamenting for the death of a tribal mother, or the ceremony of sacrifice and atonement in the face of perils such as epidemics and floods. He shouted the words in rhythm and reinforced the rhythm by clapping his hands; and in the same rhythm, shouting and clapping his hands all the while, he stooped almost to the ground, straightened up, stooped again, and straightened up. Almost at once ten or twenty others joined in his movements. The white-haired mother of the village murmured in the same rhythm and with tiny bows sketched the ritual movements. Those who were still flocking to the assemblage from the huts at once joined in the beat and the spirit of the ceremony; the few who had gone off their heads collapsed exhausted, and lay motionless, or else were caught up in the murmur of the chorus and the religious genuflections. His method was effective. Instead of a demoralised horde of madmen, there now stood a reverent populace prepared for sacrifice and penance, each one benefiting, each one encouraged by now having to lock his horror and fear of death within himself, or bellow it crazily for himself alone. Each now fitted into his place in the orderly chorus of the multitude, keeping to the rhythm of the exorcist ceremony. Many mysterious powers are present in such a rite. Its greatest comfort is its uniformity, confirming the sense of community; its infallible medicine metre and order, rhythm and music. (4)

‘And so your point is ...?’ asked Giles.

‘That it's not always the words that matter. That uninterpreted play can work. Sometimes it's all that does work. I'm arguing for my decision to let Joseph play on the computer, and I'm assuming that this puts me at odds with what you're saying about the necessity to find a language.’

‘Mmm,’ murmured Giles. ‘I wonder if it might help open things up a bit here if we tried to see this not as an 'either-or', but as a situation where both positions are appropriate at different times. You said, Steve, that Joseph feels "held' by this play and I think from your account this is clearly the case. Do you know Winnicott's writings about holding, handling and object-presenting?’

‘I've read it in that same article where he talks about it being pointless to describe babies except in terms of their mother's functioning,’ I said.

‘Well you'll remember that he talks about there being these three things: holding, handling and object-presenting. He's talking about ego integration and he's saying for it to take place, for the infant to be authentically and creatively joined with the world, then all three must take place. Surely, Steve, this is true for Joseph as well. The holding you're talking about is vital and it's happening, but there's handling and object presenting as well. Your infant son, the villagers... yes, they need the ritual which holds them back from the brink, that sensory continuity, rhymicity, and boundedness that Ogden talks about, but at some stage ... indeed at the same time ... they need the languaging as well, the linkages and connections and the verbalisations that will provide them with a more conscious sense of how the world might be experienced. It's difficult to imagine that the Rainmaker's ritual would be enough, he would surely be required at some stage to sit down with the calmed villagers and talk to them about the experience. Indeed, if my memory serves me correctly, isn't the Rainmaker actually run out of the village some time after these events, doesn't he lose the confidence of the villagers? It's the same with Joseph, surely? He needs to be held, yes, absolutely, unquestionably... and he also needs to be handled, to be interacted with, to be a part of a responsive relationship ... and he also needs to be handed some of your objects, some of your thoughts, your interpretations... at the right time, of course, and in a language that he can take in, that in essential ways comes from him. At some point you're going to have think about this play so that you can talk about it, so you can relate it to the experiences he's having in other areas of his life.’

‘But how Giles? Perhaps it's my sense of shame, of doing something illicit behind closed doors, but it doesn't feel related in that direct way. It feels more like a refuge, time-out, a sanctuary. If it's related to the outside world, then it's only as a safe place where energies can be restored for some future engagement.’

‘Is it? I'm not so sure,’ Giles said. ‘Steve I don't want you to think too much about this next question of mine. I'm not wanting a considered response but a gut reaction. What turns him on about the game? What scares him?’

‘Being the hero, that's what turns him on,’ I said. ‘And he's panicky about what might happen.’

‘He's frightened about what might happen?’ asked Giles. ‘What gives you that impression?’

‘It's nothing he's said Giles, and I might be completely wrong about this, but he conveys a sense of expecting some kind of disaster which will be too much for him. I've played this game with lots of young people and most of them are much more gung-ho than Joseph is. Most of them want to get out there and conquer the world whereas with Joseph I get this feeling that he's sure some huge army will come thundering out of the unknown darkness and destroy his cities.’

‘That evil will come into the picture to redress the balance. If there's too much good, as he once said to you Steve, then evil will come into the picture. It's the story of his psychological life. Bad things burst onto the scene and the good isn't strong enough to withstand them. Or that's what he fears.’

‘We keep being brought back to the same spot, don't we Giles,’ I said, both relieved and in a sense incredulous that Giles's confidence in the reality of the psyche had been affirmed. ‘Whatever we do in a session, whether it's talk about the past or what's happening in the room, whether it's play or making up stories and talking about dreams, we keep being brought back to the same thing. This is an aspect of Nietzsche's eternal return (6) , isn't it, that everything in our psyche conspires to represent, to recreate, a single recurring scene?’

‘Everything perhaps has that tendency,’ said Giles. ‘But again we can't let ourselves stop there. We've got to enter this moment with him, look around, find words for what we experience and discover. If all we do with the 'eternal moment' is revisit it over and over again with Joseph, if nothing's done with it, if it's not played with or expanded through our involvement in it, then it's just going to continue to be suffocating for him, limiting. I mean poor Nietzsche just had himself to play with, he was one of those 'lonely brooding souls' who in the end was broken down completely by the pressure. No Steve, these moments have to be got at, grappled with, worked on. The dough doesn't rise if it's not kneaded.’

For an instant I thought he'd said ‘the dough doesn't rise if it's not needed’ and I was tempted to play with this double-meaning. It seemed to be speaking all at once to the relational, the teleological and perhaps even the theological, and recently I've found myself wondering where God is in all business about the relative strength of good and evil. But I wanted to stay with Giles's perspective for longer, to allow it once again to enter me, hoping that one day it would have a grounding effect on my tendency to escape into airier regions.

‘You're saying, aren't you Giles, that the play is OK as long as it's played with, related back to things, and that play by itself doesn't change anything.’

‘I’m saying that if something goes wrong with the first play in the parental home, then no amount of subsequent play can change things, even if the therapist with whom the child is playing has different parameters. The play needs to be explained because otherwise from within the child there is still the undifferentiated chaos where there is only distortion, confusion and fear. This is an earthquaked and gap-filled surreal landscape. You can't play your way out of bad and dangerous landscapes full of unheld fear and desire.’

Sometimes I experience what Giles says as so full of condensed meaning that I can only scribble it down as he talks and then think about it later. One of the advantages, I’ve found, of doing this supervision on the phone.

‘There is a need for something extra,’ he continued. ‘Words have to be used that show that you understand what the other person cannot possibly understand.’

‘For the play to be useful, I've got to make interpretations,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to make connections between the play and what's going on in Joseph's wider life.’

‘This is why the Kleinians for example can be so good and so safe,’ said Giles. ‘They interpret, they set up shapes and patterns and connections which take hold and transform the play. Kleinians provide an alternative story upon which the child can build a supporting and connecting structure, rather than one that is insulating.’

‘But they can also be so relentless and persecutory,’ I said, thinking particularly of an account I'd just read by a Kleinian in which her interpretations seemed to me to provoke a justifiable fury in her client as old wounds were reopened. (7)

‘They can be persecutory, Steve, but the best of the Kleinians know a real and possible truth about the situation, something the client gripped by these primitive unheld fears cannot know.’

‘Talking to Joseph about his depressive fear of retaliation might help him understand something which at the moment he cannot know.’

‘You don't have to use that theoretical language Steve, you can ... you must ... use the words and ideas that Joseph gives you. Talk about evil and sour smells, about the good collapsing.’

‘But so often when I try I feel Joseph retreating.’

‘Then talk about the retreat! Tell him you feel him distancing himself and wonder aloud about what fears might be behind this. You're beginning to do these things Steve. You're getting better at playing with what you're imagining is going on.’

‘You say what I'm imagining is going on rather than what is going on.’

‘All we can do is build a structure which has meaning and coherence, so that our patients can see a shape with links. A shape, not the shape.’

‘A truth, not the truth.’

‘That's it. That's all. It's a big all, but that's all.’

I was geared up, before Joseph arrived for the next session, to explore some of this with Joseph were we to return to the game, but when he arrived he wanted to begin with a dream he'd had a few nights before.

‘In my dream,’ he told me, ‘I was in a pine plantation and it was time for all the pine trees to be cut down. There was this huge, bright-yellow mechanical arm that would chop down these trees and then let them fall to the ground, then pick them up and load them into a truck. Then I was at a cottage with a huge verandah and a huge garden which belonged to a couple I'd never met before and we were having coffee and cakes. They showed me round their huge cottage garden, with big flowers at the front with lots of paths and a vegetable garden round the back. After we had visited the garden, I was suddenly with some friends at Kings Cross in Sydney at night, and there were all these people walking around with powdery drugs, and the police would just look at them and their bags, then let them be on their way and not caring about the drugs.’

‘That's quite a dream,’ I said.

‘Yes I know,’ he said with an enthusiasm that reminded me of his energy at the end of our first session when we'd talked about the mystery. ‘Things were so huge in the dream, the mechanical arm and the verandah and the garden, and especially the flowers in the garden. They were enormous.’

‘I wonder how you felt in relation to it all.’

‘It was like I was walking around in this giant land,’ he said.

I was reminded of some of my favourite Grimm stories, in particular 'The Prince Afraid of Nothing', and wondered if I might tell it to him sometime.

There was also something about his heroic hacking in his mother's garden that had something of the same quality, Joseph tearing out the weeds like the yellow mechanical arm tearing out the pine trees.

‘And then that bit at King's Cross!’ he continued. ‘I just couldn't believe it. The police just didn't seem to care, yet I knew that they'd seen the drugs. They just weren't interested.’

‘Like the teachers at your new school,’ I said

‘Exactly!’ said Joseph.

‘Steve,’ Joseph said as he sat down for our session last week. ‘It's been an incredible week really. You know how I sometimes say to you that I don't dream much, or that I don't remember my dreams when I have them. Well I decided that I'd write them down each morning as you suggested, and I've got a whole lot here.’ He took out a little notebook which was full of scribbled dates and notes. ‘I'm so glad I've written these down. I can't believe how many I've had, and they're so interesting I think. Can I read them out to you?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

There were eight dreams in all. In one Joseph was attacked by a shark: he described to me how he overcame his fear, bit a piece out of the shark and then felt 'safe, content and at rest'. There was a dream where he was driving his mother's sports car in a race, and another where he was sitting at his father's work desk and then becoming a senior director in a company. There was a dream of men dressed as women playing on a huge net filled with blue and pink flowers, and one where Joseph was being given a swimming award 'in this amazing huge open space which is also enclosed with this dome'.

‘In another of my dreams,’ said Joseph, ‘I’m in another part of Sydney, not King's Cross this time, but otherwise it's very like my dream from last week, the one about the drugs that I told you. This time it's not drugs that people are carrying around but guns. They're all walking around with these guns in their belts. It's like everyone has mobile phones, except they aren't phones, they're guns ... And then there's this dream where a man is getting into a castle and then is only able to leave by scrabbling down this tree. He keeps going into the castle and escaping down a tree and then getting recaptured, but each time he gets down a tree he strips the branches and that tree is then not available for his next exit. He does this many times, and in an aerial view later on I realised with a feeling of alarm that maybe he would use up all the trees and get trapped in there, unable to escape ... And then there's this third dream which I had last night. In it my watch is an hour late when I get home from school and I totally miss the bus to Steve's. Then all other attempts to get to Steve's fail. I'd get to the bus stop on time but the bus would be going. This happened about ten times and I had this great feeling of frustration.’

‘You felt frustrated that you couldn't get here,’ I said.

‘Yes, I did.’ But, as Joseph closed the dream book, it was clear that the sense of frustration was not what he was feeling at the moment. He looked up at me with a beaming smile.

‘You're beaming,’ I said.

‘I'm so glad I did this,’ he said.

‘You're looking very pleased, as if you've given birth to a stunning family of babies. You're looking like a proud mum.’ It's an unusually feminine image for me to be using with an adolescent boy, but Joseph wasn't displeased with it.

‘Well, they're pretty interesting, don't you think?’

‘Yes, they're wonderful dreams,’ I said. ‘It seems that there's a consistent feeling of urgency running through some of them, especially these last three.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Joseph.

‘You've got to get to Steve's. You can see that the man may become trapped in the castle. There are people wandering round Sydney with drugs and guns, and no-one is taking any notice. In each of these dreams the dreaming you is anxious or frustrated, and most of the anxiety is to do with something not being seen as urgent or vital.’

‘Mmm,’ Joseph murmured, and I found myself looking quickly into his eyes. Have I taken him too quickly out of his comfort zone, at a moment when he all he needed was to feel proud of his offspring? Have I gone too quickly? To ignore the obvious sense of urgency would be a mistake, I knew that. But was my timing out? Was I being too earnest, betraying my underlying anxiety that the psyche is shy, presenting itself only for a split second and then disappearing out of reach again if not responded to in just the right way?

Joseph glanced at his watch. It was time to go and he picked up his book of dreams.

‘It's a fine collection,’ I said as he left. ‘You've given me a lot to think about.’

‘I'm trying Giles, to put into practice the things you tell me, but I don't find it easy,’ I said at the beginning of our next session. ‘It's very frustrating! You say the same things to me over and over again, I experience them as helpful and relevant insights as we're talking, but then I go back and make the same kind of hamfisted and overly conscientious moves when Joseph and I are actually together.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Except when we're playing at the computer, it feels as though I'm continually being engaged at a thinking level. I find myself trying to engage Joseph with thoughts. Like at the moment I'm trying to get him to think about this underlying theme of urgency from his dreams. Giles, do you know Nietzsche's image of being the carriage?’

‘I most surely do, Steve, but please read it all the same for our mutual pleasure.’

I looked up at the wall next to my desk where I'd stuck the quotation.

‘Here it is Giles,’ I said, and then read:

I want to awaken the greatest mistrust of myself: I speak only of things I have experienced and do not offer only events in the head

One must want to experience the great problems with one's body and one's soul.

I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. (8)

‘You're feeling frustrated because you feel yourself in the room not the carriage,’ said Giles.

‘It's this thing about my relationship to the world being through ideas rather than experience,’ I said. ‘Look, I understand what you've said before about ideas and impulses being two sides of the one coin, about the Cartesian wrong move which splits body and mind. Yet I feel blocked Giles, as if my only way of getting in touch with the world is through my head, through ideas ... or through its opposite, through the other end of the spectrum, through 'no thought', through non-interpretive play..... Here, in this session, I was trying to engage with Joseph's dreams ... but I'm trying to engage him with my thoughts about his dreams, and I'm trying to make contact with him through his thoughts about things and it all-too-cerebral, as if the ideas are separated from the actual experience of the panic or urgency that they express. It's like we're both in the room and just hear the carriage rumbling past outside, beyond our sphere of influence.’

‘He cannot talk about his feelings Steve. They are precisely like the carriage, only hearable through thick walls. He - and you - just hear the snorting horses, the shouts of the driver, the crunching of the wheels. And there seems to be something else, doesn't there, some potential danger ... maybe you're also hearing shouts which suggest that someone's been run over, or there's going to be a hold-up ... or the passengers on board aren't who they say they are .... I don't know ... but the muffled sounds are there in your room and your interest has been aroused! Now you've got to find the words to maintain and deepen that interest, to encourage Joseph to peek out the window, even to contemplate a move towards the carriage.’

‘I can get at these feelings when you and I are talking Giles, but I cannot do it so easily when I'm with Joseph.’

‘The chemistry is different,’ says Giles. ‘You must stop blaming yourself for this and start seeing it as something essentially puzzling and important about Joseph and his relationship to his feeling life. His fear of collapse, for example. His fear of evil, which is also his love of it.’

‘You mentioned something like this last week Giles. You said that Joseph wanted to identify with the good but that it was the bad that really excited him.’

‘This is Milton's dilemma is it not, Steve, that Hell is a vital place - it excites the senses — whereas Heaven is just a tad boring.’

‘When you talk like this Giles, I sometimes wonder if you're not stepping outside of Joseph's world and telling me about yours. This is the way you experience things.’

‘And don't we all?’ said Giles. ‘Don't you? Aren't you more stirred up when there's a whiff of sulphur in the air?’

‘I'm not sure,’ I said. ‘Consciously I've always wanted to align myself to the good. I'm an eldest child, remember! We see ourselves at the parents' right hand, on the side of the good, responsible, upright and true!’

‘Dreaming your compensatory Hannibal dreams!’ said Giles.

‘True Giles. And recently I've been dreaming of murdering children!’

‘It's the power of evil that turns us on,’ said Giles. ‘It excites us and it frightens us. We're are animated by it. It's the knowledge that evil is potent and invasive that gets our juices going. We're not in the business of promoting the good so much as defending ourselves against an invader, an evil which comes too close.’

‘You've said before to me Giles that life isn't an heroic task.’

‘We're not in the missionary business, we're not trying to spread the light or pump life into what's dead. All that's so altruistic, so outward-going, and it simply doesn't get very far.’

‘Pump life into what's dead? What do you mean?’

‘This project you're describing of trying to connect idea to body, trying to get Joseph moving by giving him good ideas. We cannot energise lethargy, we cannot animate this monstrous force of inertia. Some of us therapists go out with the idea of waking up sleeping monsters, and it simply doesn't work. It's the Trotskyite fantasy. Trotsky was the crusader, the communist missionary and he simply didn't get very far...’

‘Trotsky was my kind of communist!’ I said. ‘Out of all those Bolshevik leaders, it was Trotsky who caught my imagination when I was studying that stuff at university.’

‘But he failed,’ said Giles, ‘as all idealogues ultimately fail. And in the end communism itself fails because its ideological, it's out of touch with its baser drives, it hasn't enough appetite, enough greed, enough hunger. Iran works because of its Zoroastrian basis, the belief that it's a tiny island of goodness surrounded by a sea of evil. It's brought alive by that gut feeling. It's animated by its sense of a potentially invasive evil.’

‘You're talking about energy as existing when evil is present. What about the energetic good?’ I said.

‘The good is only energetic when evil is around,’ said Giles. ‘Otherwise it's lethargic. Peace and security are not enough. They always lead to lethargy. Joseph is right. Evil always comes to redress the balance.’

‘The plough of evil,’ I said. ‘You're talking about Nietzsche's plough of evil.’

‘Remind me,’ said Giles.

There was a short break while I put the phone down and tried to find the quotation amongst my notes. I'm a collector of quotations. Sometimes I fear it's my substitute for having thoughts of my own.

‘Here it is Giles,’ I said, and then read:

What preserves the species. The strongest and most evil spirits have so far advanced humanity the most: they have always rekindled the drowsing passions - all ordered society puts the passions to sleep; they have always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of joy in the new, the daring, and the untried; they force men to meet opinion with opinion, model with model. For the most part by arms, by the overthrow of boundary stones, and by offence to the pieties, but also by new religions and moralities. The same 'malice' is to be found in every teacher and preacher of the new ... The new is always the evil, as that which wants to conquer, to overthrow the old boundary stones and the old pieties; and only the old is the good. The good men of every age are those who dig the old ideas deep down and bear fruit with them, the husbandmen of the spirit. But all land is finally exhausted, and the plough of evil must always return. (9)

‘The potency of evil is animating,’ said Giles.

Our conversation was reviving memories of Joseph's excited face, of moments when he'd seemed especially animated. ‘It's when Joseph is remembering his cruelty to his younger brother,’ I said to Giles, ‘or is watching the class erupt out of control in his new school, that he seems most excited.’

And here is now, for our seventeenth session. I've been thinking about his dreams again, about the sense of urgency, and feel that it's important to come back to it if I can. I'm also keeping in mind Joseph's rhythms, the way revelation and indifference tend to succeed each other, one week an opening up and the next a shutting out. Will he want to play Civilisation for the whole of today's session? How will I handle it if he does?

‘Hi Steve,’ he says brightly as he packs his Walkman into his school bag and settles into his seat. We exchange some pleasantries, and then he says,

‘Well I've had no more dreams this week.’

‘You haven't been dreaming,’ I say.

‘Well actually I have been dreaming. I've had at least two, but I can't remember what they were.’

‘Maybe you're not going to dream much until we've paid some more attention to the dreams you told me about last week,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

‘I’ve been thinking about your dreams,’ I say. ‘The drugs and the guns. The man who doesn't realise that he's cutting off his escape route. I think there's something in there that's wanting to be taken more seriously, that's feeling ignored.’

‘Something wants to be taken more seriously,’ Joseph echoes, inviting me to say more.

‘It's as though your dreaming self, the Joseph in the gun dream for example, realises something that no-one else does. The dreaming Joseph sees the guns and the drugs and he is alarmed. Something is wrong but nobody is noticing it. And in your castle dream, the dreaming Joseph can see from his aerial view something that no-one else can see, that the man is soon going to be trapped.’

‘Yes?’ says Joseph, still feeling that my point is elusive.

‘All along there's been this question about whether there's something hidden, something that's just out of our sight, some mystery that wants to be revealed. You and I haven't been able to put our finger on what it is, yet the sense remains. It's here in your dreams. It's as though your dreaming self is shouting, There is something serious here that I want you all to notice, but you keep turning your heads away. For goodness sake, this is serious!’

‘You know that reminds me of something that happened last year,’ says Joseph. ‘I'd forgotten this until now, but thinking about the gun dream has reminded me that I watched an armed hold-up last year. Mum and I had gone to the shops, and Mum had just got out of the car when we saw these men with guns running from a shop.’

Joseph is smiling as he recounts the incident. ‘Goodness,’ I say, perhaps reacting to his sunny smile. ‘You must have been frightened, especially with your mum out of the car.’

‘I don't know,’ he says. ‘Maybe. I can't really remember.’ And then, after a pause, ‘Maybe it's like with the death of my pop. It didn't really hit me at the time, maybe it's going to hit me later.’

‘There are things that happen to you that affect you deeply, but something stops you from feeling them at the time.’

‘Maybe,’ he says.

‘Like the split up of your parents,’ I say.

‘I really think I've worked that one through,’ he says. ‘I've thought a lot about that and I really don't think it bothers me any more.’

‘Well, if I'm right about there being something that wants to be taken more seriously, and if it's not your parent's separation, I wonder what it might be?’ I say.

‘I don't know,' says Joseph. 'I don't feel upset or anything.’

‘You weren't aware of feeling upset at the armed hold-up,’ I say, ‘but it's difficult to imagine that there wasn't some strong feeling.’

‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘I'll think about it. But can we play Civilisation today? It's been a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to having another go.’

‘Let's play Civilisation,’ I say. ‘But let's also keep our eye out for signs that there's something in distress somewhere just out of sight, something in you that's feeling some pain and is wanting to be noticed.’

‘OK,’ says Joseph.

And so we move over to the computer and, as Joseph finds the game I sit next to him wondering if we'll find some way of keeping the images from his dreams alive and present: the wounded shark, the men dressed as women bouncing amongst the flowers in the net, the unheeded guns and drugs, the missed buses to Steve's house, the man in the castle destroying his own escape routes. In the chambers of my mind two sides of a vigorous debate compete and clamour for my attention, distracting me from my resolve to stay in the moment. If dreams reveal aspects of the self, says one, then the aspects will remain alive and present long after the dream images have disappeared. If the psyche is hinting that the predicament of the man in the castle can only be seen by taking an aerial view, counters the other, then some effort of will, some deliberate changing of perspective, may be needed to prevent the entrapment.

Again everything seems to go smoothly for Prince Joseph. His explorers have now uncovered a great deal of territory and there is no immediate danger of contact with one of the bigger civilisations. They are either on another continent or on the far reaches of this enormous island. Much of this uncovered territory is very promising land indeed, lush farming country, extensive coal and oil deposits and adjacent to coastal waters teeming with fish. If we can establish towns near some of these resources, our economy will certainly flourish. We've found an American city, but it's small and the American civilisation appears weak. They're certainly no threat to us as we've now got developed armies. There seems to be very little ground for any concern.

But right at the end of the session, when we look at the comparative statistics, there's an unsettling trend evident. We're still poor and the health of our citizens in declining. More alarming still is another trend: where 500 years ago we were the third biggest producer of goods in the world, we've now dropped to fourth, despite having the biggest land mass.

‘Do these things matter?’ asks Joseph as we look at the figures. ‘The people seem happy enough with my performance. They keep wanting to build extensions to my palace, and our approval rating is pretty good. And we're still the most advanced.’

‘It's hard to tell,’ I say. ‘It depends partly on the intentions of those civilisations who are doing better than we are economically. If they turn out to have aggressive intentions, then they're going to be able to build bigger and better armies.’

‘So this might mean trouble,’ he says. ‘This could be serious.’

‘It could be,’ I say.

‘What will we do?’

‘Well, again we can cross our fingers, hope that our rivals turn out to be peaceful and press on very much as we've been doing. Or we can take the possible threat seriously and alter our priorities.’

‘And how would we do that?’ Joseph asks.

I show him how we might slow down the scientific and technological push and instead get more of our people mining the hills, farming the land and the forests.

‘So what do you want to do?’ I say. ‘The session time is finished now, so you've got a week to think about it.’

‘I'll think about it,’ he says.

‘And that other business too,’ I say. ‘About your dreams and whether there's something in your life that needs to be taken more seriously than it's being taken at the moment.’

‘OK,’ says Joseph and disappears into the night.

‘Giles,’ I say, ‘I can't get this business of the impotence of the good and the exciting potency of the bad out of my mind. I want to fight this idea. I want to marshal some arguments against it. I want to try to speak up for the potency of the good.’

‘Speak up, good sir,’ says Giles in a way that I experience as both gentle and ironic.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘As usual I don't know where I'm going with this and it may be something of a ramble ... I want to begin with something I heard you once say in a lecture. You were talking about the idea, derived I suppose from the Romantics, that God dwells in the unconscious, that the unconscious is purposive, tireless and wise, that it has as one of its functions the healing power of Nature.’

‘You're quoting Carus,’ says Giles. ‘He says that it is through the unconscious that we remain in connection with the rest of the world.’ (10) These ideas influenced not only the Romantics but also Freud and Jung.’

‘So here's God dwelling in this ever-present and influential unconscious,’ I say. ‘Indefatigable, as Carus would say. And yet you're saying that the good spends much of its time asleep (until provoked by the bad). So there are two views here, one which suggests that God dwells tirelessly in the unconscious and the other which says that we need evil on the scene to wake God up. My own experience is of the former, of the unconscious mind relentlessly tending towards some kind of healing... or, if not healing, avoidance of breakdown. I think about myself at boarding school, cut off from the other boys, and telling myself heroic stories that kept me ... I don't know ... relatively sane. Terry Waite, the captive in Middle East, wrote about the way he told himself stories and how this kept him from going mad ... There are writers who believe a mad person's hallucinations serve this same function, of separating them from intolerable stresses, and that in the hallucinations themselves are related symbols which hint at ways back into sanity. And I'm feeling the same principle operating here with Joseph, where all his fantasy is taking us into the territory of a kind of splitness which has the potential to be energetic and healing in some kind of a way. God, if you like, is present.’

‘Well,’ says Giles, ‘it could be put like that I suppose, but personally that way of seeing things simply isn't alive-making. Not for me, anyway. The God-hypothesis, put the way you've just put it, encourages the very things you've been complaining of, the sense of impotence, of not having a role to play, of being cast as the passive observer of an intrapsychic dwelling place where God works His mysterious ways. I mean, if you want to think of the intrapsychic as some kind of place... and personally I don't want to make that move ... but if you do, then surely it's not simply God who is present there. Joseph's fantasy is about a battle between Good and Evil, between God and Satan if you like. It's the conflict that's animating, the juxtapositioning of opposites, the tension. And it's a battle that requires our involvement. If we allow ourselves to imagine that God dwells in the unconscious, that God is indefatigable and is working towards the good, and furthermore if we allow ourselves to think that God is omnipotent and omniscient, then what's the point of us involving ourselves in these things? And where does that get us? We simply go to sleep, like some Victorian high Anglican nodding off over his cigars and port in the knowledge that the known world was in very good hands, thank you very much. No Steve, that can't be my picture of the world. I need to add some Freud to my Jung, some Bion and Klein to my Winnicott, some Kernberg to my Kohut. I want some more energetic colours in my picture of things: more reds and blacks and oranges. The notion that God's involved is all too pastelly for me.’

Over and over again, as I talk with Giles, I have this sense that I'm being invited to join in with life, to be a part of things. It's never a stirring call, there's nothing salvational or optimistic about it. Indeed Giles continually manages to convey to me a sense that there's really no option but to be involved, that it's a part of the human condition to be a part of things, and that in all likelihood this is going to involve us in frustrations and failures and foolishnesses. He's told me about his admiration of the modern day anti-hero, the fumbler who stuffs things up, whose personal life is a mess. And he identifies his own outlook with the philosophical pessimists - Hobbes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and, in his own way, Nietzsche. As he said to me one day, ‘I'm drawn to the pessimists who have this dancing joy rather than to the optimists whose work is so often a dead weight. Nietzsche, for example, who wrote about saying 'yes' to the world when he was racked with pain, at times barely able to function physically, hardly able to see, freezing in his unheated room. And Hobbes who wrote that all life is nasty, brutish and short but who himself lived into his nineties and beamed his way through life! This is what I like about Spinoza, who did a hatchet job on all the joys of life and then ended up by saying in effect, ‘There's nothing left! What fun!’ I'm a cheerful pessimist Steve, and I have this sense that you're an optimist wondering what to do with your depressed side.’ I feel envious of Giles's cheerfulness. I want more of it for myself.

‘Giles,’ I say after thinking some of these thoughts, ‘if you're right about what exists in the unconscious, in dreams, in fantasy ... in our experience of life.. if you're right that it makes more sense to think about this in terms of goods and bads in continual conflict and opposition rather than in terms of some inevitable tendency towards the good, towards the healthy. and this does make better sense, I know that when I allow the thought into me ... it makes better sense of what's happening for Joseph ... So I want to let this thought in ... I want to somehow get it lodged inside me, get it embedded … But it's not easy to let it in, or at least it comes in when we talk but it gets excluded so easily at other times ... like I've got this other assumption so deeply embedded in me, this more optimistic one that things are working their way in favour of the good ... this is difficult … I'm finding it difficult to find the words for this.’

‘Go on Steve, I'm following what you're saying.’

‘It's so deeply embedded, this assumption ... it's so difficult to dislodge it, to feel the reality or solidity of any alternative assumption that could take its place ... Whenever I relax my mind, whenever I stop trying, the bleaker view ceases to exist for me ... You see, I'm trying to allow myself to be infected by what you're saying, I'm trying to keep hold of what you're saying, because I notice how these ideas about good and evil, the existence of both, the reality of both, actually feels better than the one-sided optimistically teleological ... this other perspective, the one you're expressing, feels more empowering to me somehow, more solid ... like the energy attached to it is weightier somehow.’

‘Weightier?’ asks Giles.

‘My sunnier thoughts keep taking me upwards, away from the place where action is possible. These thoughts reassure me, at times they excite me ... but they take me away somewhere else ... they don't sustain me. They don't feed me. They don't become ballast. Or only for a limited time. They're exciting, these heroic and life-affirming thoughts, and I feel deeply attached to them, I feel a kind of fear about the possibility of letting them go. But the excitement doesn't last, it doesn't lodge solidly in my body in an enduring, long-term life-connecting kind of way. Sometimes it's as if they're like candy floss, that stuff I used to buy as a kid which looked magic but disappeared when you put it in your mouth ... I find this when I write ... or when I make an interpretation in a session... or have what feels like an insight about a situation or a client... that the thoughts evaporate afterwards, they don't stick around, they've got no ballast, no weight. They don't keep me anchored in the relationship or the situation ...’

‘You're looking for a fuller picture of things, one that's less exclusive of the horrible, the mad, the destructive, the messy. You're also looking for something solid and that, in this postmodern era, is not going to be easy to find.’

‘I know what you're saying Giles, yet I still can't help trying. We've got to, don't we? Even if we know that we're never going to find certainty, we've got to keep trying to anchor things, identify things, think about things ...and notice what's being left out of the picture when we think or talk about things in a particular way, what's still uncertain or unclear, or what's changed since the last time we thought about it. I think this is why I'm so stirred up by this idea about embodied and disembodied stories. It's an idea around which so many of my questions cluster. How has my own story become disembodied, unconnected in some vital way? Can good ideas affect disembodied stories? In what way can a relationship, which I guess is always an attempt at embodiment, help something disconnected become a part of things again? Are there internal dynamics in a disembodied story which have the potential to move it towards connection, or must there always be some relational input? How can we move stories from one state - disembodied and now limiting - to embodied and connected ... from insulating to relational? For me it's the question of how Hannibal might be helped to play the piano (or how I might feel in my bones that I have the capacity to be a good-enough therapist). For Joseph it's the question of how to escape the 'eternal return' of the thrilling and destructive seepages of evil into his life.’

Gloomy thoughts and heavy feelings the next day. I slept for most of the afternoon and had the following dream:

I discover that the driving test man has arrived and is waiting at the bottom of the garden. My licence has run out and I have to take a new test. I tell the man I'll just be a minute, that I have to change my clothes, but when I go inside I can't find the right clothes nothing fits. I'm possessed with an almost intolerable frustration which feels so great that my body is scarcely strong enough to contain it. It wants to burst out of me.

Finally, still without my shirt on, I run down to the garden but the man has already gone.

And now I'm down at the coast, this time to work on my thesis. I've been here for five days.

When I arrived I picked up a joke book from the bookshelf and read through it looking for something that would make me laugh. I read it for about twenty minutes and found nothing even faintly amusing. It seemed such a banal collection.

Then, after writing the following morning, I took a walk along the beach. At first I was conscious only of my gloomy thoughts and lethargic body. But after a while I began to notice the colour of the water and to hear the waves hissing on the sand. The next day I found myself looking forward to the walk and I went to a new beach and picked up some shells to take home to my son Oliver. I cooked fish that night, with crisp green beans from the farmer up the road. After dinner I went down to the beach again and sat in the dark on the sand, smelling the sea and realizing how much better I was feeling.

I realized, too, that for some time now I've been living in a kind of psychic chamber with echoing metallic walls ... clients for most of each weekday, a weekly session with my analyst revisiting Hannibal's cell, supervisions with Giles, family tensions, and often reading Bion and Eigen and Rhode about madness before I put the lights out at night.

Sitting there on the beach, watching the moon light play on the water, I decided to try to clamber out of this chamber. It's becoming oppressive. It's feeding off itself, increasingly insulated from the outside.

Half an hour ago while packing up to go home, I picked up the joke book again. Some of the jokes in it are really quite good after all.

Endnotes

(1) See for example Shann (1987) and 1995 Masters Thesis (unpublished).

(2) See below Chapter 11.

(3) p 45 Ogden (1989)

(4) pp 446-7 Hesse (1943)

(5) see Chapter 4 in Winnicott (1962)

(6) Nietzsche wrote about this moment as follows. [pp 101-102 in Kauffman (1976)]

The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you - all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly." If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumberable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(7) I'd just been reading Sidoli. (1989) See especially chapter 5.

(8) Quoted p 12 by Hollingdale (1961)

(9) p 93 Nietzsche in Kauffman [ed] (1971)

(10) pp 207-208 Ellenberger (1970)