Chapter 7 A demon came over me

Part B: Attempts at mating

A fortnight ago I got a phone call from Joseph's mother, some six months after that final session. She sounded tense.

‘Steve, I'm sorry to bother you and I don't know if you can help us here, but Joseph has got himself into some big trouble. The parent of a nine-year-old boy has approached the woman in charge of the library where Joseph spends some time after school, and she says that Joseph has been showing pornographic material to her son and a number of other young boys. At least once – probably more than once – he masturbated in front of them. Yesterday the librarian rang me. She'd already talked to Joseph and was upset by his lack of remorse. She was obviously angry, so angry that she and the parent have threatened to get in touch with the police. They've agreed to hold off only if I can arrange immediate counselling for Joseph. So I've rung you ... I've just been talking to Joseph and he's upset now and he's admitted that things happened pretty much as the librarian has described, but he can't explain it. All he could say was that it was as though a demon came over him. ... I can't help feeling that this is all my fault. I feel I'm letting him down, that I haven't got a lot to offer him at the moment. I can't talk to him, I feel tense and preoccupied myself a lot of the time and I'm sure that all this insecurity has an impact on all of the kids. Our youngest, Davie, is wetting the bed again. I just don't know what to do here.’

‘What has he said about the actual incident?’ I asked.

‘I've tried talking to him about it Steve, but he just clams up and looks miserable. But something has to be done. Will you see him? Do you think you might help?’

‘What does Joseph think?’

‘I don't really know. When I mentioned your name he shrugged his shoulders and said ‘but Steve doesn't know that side of me.’ Still, I think he'll come. He knows that the police are going to get involved if he doesn't see someone. I'll talk to him and see if he will agree, then I'll ring you in the next day or so and we'll make a time.’

I found myself thinking about this new development often during the next couple of days. My feelings were mixed.

On the one hand what Joseph had done didn't sound all that terrible. It certainly didn't sound like a police matter and I felt utterly out of sympathy with the high-minded and appalled librarian. As I thought about the scene in the library, my mind went back to my own early adolescence in an all-male high-Anglican boarding school and the teacher who told me that masturbation was wicked and unhealthy and how sleeping on my hands would help me avoid the sin. I remembered, too, the night around the same time when we boys crowded around a bed in an unsupervised dormitory and one of the more extrovert boys announced that he 'could do it', that the rubbing produced an emission and a sensation, a moment of high drama which I followed up after lights out by attempting the same thing, driven partly to see what it was like but mainly to enable me to take part in what was clearly an initiation into the world of ‘real boys’.

Perhaps, I thought as I waited for Joseph's mother to get back to me, Joseph's impulse was similarly motivated.

On the other hand though, I remembered from his dream those images of the police in King's Cross taking no notice of the drugs and the guns, and that underlying sense as I worked with him that something serious was being missed. When I told myself that this incident wasn't such a big deal, was I taking the role of the blind policemen? Was Joseph in fact saying, I need some urgent attention, and I'll keep crossing the boundaries in increasingly risky ways until I get it?

There was a part of me that was relieved when I heard nothing more from Joseph or his mother. It seemed they had decided to go elsewhere for help.

I mentioned some of this to Giles during one of our supervisory sessions and he strongly urged me to be less passive. ‘If Joseph ends up talking to someone else,’ he said, ‘the split between these different parts of himself is going to be exacerbated, the good and heroic shown to one therapist, the dark and dangerous to another. Ring his mother up. Show your willingness to take this on.’

And so I did. Joseph's mother sounded unburdened by my initiative and an appointment for Joseph was arranged for today.

He'll be here soon.

But all morning I've been in something of a lather about it. It feels like such an important session, one where the foundations of our future work will be laid down, and I must be very clear about what our business is and how this might be best approached. Just letting things evolve, as I did when Joseph came earlier in the year, could invite the same kind of fruitless search for what has been hiding, the same meandering attempt to name what would rather remain unknown.

I talked with Giles about this yesterday in our supervisory session.

‘Keep in mind that when Joseph present his sunny exterior to you,’ said Giles, ‘that he's got feelings within him that he experiences as dark, exciting, cruel and sexy.’

‘These are feelings that are often inaccessible to him,’ I said. ‘He can't talk about them with his mother, he can't imagine himself talking about them with me.’

‘They've been compartmentalised off,’ said Giles. ‘They operate like demons who act up and act out, take control at times in exciting and perhaps confusing or frightening ways.’

‘But Giles he's likely to just sit there shrugging his shoulders, he's likely to say something like, “I just don't know what came over me.” Joseph feels that it's too hard to talk about these things with me, the person who only knows the ‘good side’ of him.

‘You must try to find a way Steve. You must. From the very beginning he's been talking to you about the existence of two worlds, of the gap between them, of his wanting to bridge the gap.’

‘That's what his first story was all about,’ I said.

‘And you've been saying to me that these stories are not just about the way the world has been experienced, but are attempts to break through to something else. There is a gap and the two worlds must be bridged. If you stay with the sunny, unknowing, good exterior, then his world will remain split.’

‘I know you're right Giles, but I keep imagining Joseph in front of me, intelligent, silent, challenging, and me with this impulse to talk too much. I'm worried that we're going to fall back into a pattern which we'll both experience as familiar but stuck.’

‘Talk to him about the "mad and bad" bits Steve. Tell him that he's worried about the mad and the bad parts.’

‘Isn't that too confronting? Too Kleinian? Won't he just shut up shop and act as if I've gone off my rocker?’

‘He might,’ said Giles. ‘So what?’

There was a silence during which I became aware of a familiar and uncomfortable feeling.

‘I'm feeling a bit panicky at the moment,’ I said to Giles, ‘This is how I feel whenever I sense that a client is teetering on the edge of chaos, whenever meanings break down, whenever there seems to be nothing holding at the centre.’

‘This is perhaps your own struggle to take the Hannibal parts of you seriously, to allow yourself to see your own mad and bad bits as real,’ said Giles.

‘I know that's true Giles. I'd rather be the elder brother. That's the familiar role, that's the part I know how to play safely.’

‘Joseph is also an elder brother,’ said Giles.

‘I feel ... and perhaps Joseph feels this too ... that the way I've consciously ordered the world in my mind is precarious, that it leaves too much out. In these moments with clients when we teeter on the edge of something, I have this bodily sensation that I'll tip over the edge, that I'll lose my grip on whatever it is that I've found keeps me from falling.’

‘It feels precarious,’ said Giles.

‘It feels as though these ordering thoughs exist only in a mental realm, that they'll be swept away if I let too much in ... if I let chaotic forces of disorder in ... I guess this is what Joseph might be feeling too ... That if he thought too much about the impulses that led him to do what he did that he'd be admitting to a feeling life that he's so busily disowned and assigned to the unconscious, outside the boundaries of his constructions about the world. He's doing so well at school now, so his mother said. He sees himself as having a future, he's motivated and has a purpose... What has happened has the potential to shatter the sense of stability.’

‘It's like a nightmare for him,’ said Giles.

‘He's terrified that allowing the messy world in will undo that hard-won sense of coherence... he's busy out there keeping things together, he's carrying around with him a way of thinking about things …’

‘... what you called in an earlier session his 'creation story'...’

‘... yes, he's carrying around a story which is being threatened by events external to it...’

‘... and threatened also by impulses within his body,’ said Giles.

‘It's a disembodied story,’ I said.

‘Joseph will be feeling that mad and bad bits of him are present and very unsettling. You can begin there, surely. This is what he is experiencing at the moment.’

But the talk with Giles yesterday hasn't prevented my pre-session lather this morning, exacerbated perhaps by a dream I had last night. In it the headmaster from my schooldays (a teacher who played in my life the kind of role Giles does now) had returned to the school after a short absence. He was furious with what he found, with how sloppy everything had become in his absence. He told me and the other senior boys to get ready for a church service and it was clear that he would not tolerate any lateness. I went off to get ready but couldn't find the right clothes. I could feel the anxiety building. Eventually I found them but then I kept putting my head through an arm hole and found that the shoes didn't fit and the laces wouldn't tie. Anxiety turned into a kind of panic, yet I just managed to get to the church door as the other senior boys began to file into the crowded cathedral or church. Everything was dark inside. Then each prefect was given a lighted candle and we began to move slowly up the central aisle. Suddenly I was filled with a sense of the beauty of the occasion, I began to choke and sob and the tears began to course down my cheeks.

I feel now, as I wait for Joseph, very much as I felt in the early part of the dream, trying to get everything ready but encountering frustrations because my ideas aren't coming together and I'm finding it difficult to prepare or compose myself. It's an agitation with which I'm familiar, a kind of performance anxiety, an adrenalin-charged restlessness that I used to feel before going in to bat in my cricket days or before running in a big race.

My mind flits between different scenarios of how it might be in our session this morning.

Joseph sitting in front of me, smiling but impassive and me talking too much.

Me being filled with a familiar panic when we get into territory where comforting meanings dissolve.

Me being so intelligent about an underlying story that all possibility of chaotic and dangerous feeling is by-passed.

'Everything is dark except for the candles.' Can I pick up a candle and illuminate just enough so that we enter a cathedral? What I like about the image is the sense of entering a holy and alive place. It's true, surely, that Joseph's exhibitionism is the result of a frustrated love, that what happens in the dark places of his sexual fantasies and impulses is a frustrated expression of what has been denied him in the cathedral, that there's a link between that dark library corner and Joseph's love of heroic vitality. Unconsciously he's trying to find something, to make contact with something vital.' (1) When we light up the darkness, it's love we find revealed. That's what generates the intense emotion in the dream.

But is this a kind of sloppy New Agey optimism, a gilding of the lily that has already led once to Joseph saying that 'Steve doesn't know that side of me'? Perhaps it's more useful to assume that talking about the mad and bad bits is going to take us to a different place, to a Hell which is thrilling, steamy and dangerous. Too often my ungrounded impulse is to light up the darkness, to dispel it, to banish it. Perhaps we must enter into the darkness first.

Joseph has arrived with his mother and we exchange pleasantries about how much the garden had grown, how Joseph has changed. He's actually looking paler, thinner, with less sparkle.

His mother leaves and we go inside.

He sits down in one of the two armchairs and comments on the changes in the room: the different pictures on the walls, the new rug, the two chairs instead of the sofa. Things have changed. Things aren't as they used to be. We're both aware of the significance of this. For a long moment we sit in an expectant silence.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘it seems as though we've got some work to do.’ Joseph nods, looking awkward, looking as though he wants to say something but is blocked.

‘I wonder how we might get into this,’ I say.

‘I don't know.’

‘It feels very difficult,’ I say, playing for time again, hoping that one of these responses will be taken up by him.

‘Yes,’ he says.

There's a short silence.

‘I wonder if it would help if I talked about some different ways we might approach this.’ Is the old pattern being re-established? Am I being cast in the role of initiator, him in the role of monosyllabic and non-committal respondent?

‘Yes,’ said Joseph. ‘That would be good.’

‘It seems to me that we might go one of three ways. Either we could approach it directly, going straight in and talking about what happened in the library. Or we could approach it indirectly, through dreams and stories, and then work to link these dreams and stories to what happened. Or, thirdly, we could do a mixture of the two.’

‘I think the last one, or the first,’ says Joseph. He's inviting me, perhaps even pleading for me, to take a strong lead.

‘Well, perhaps we could begin,’ I say, ‘by talking about what actually happened. Can you tell me about the event itself, and what led up to it?’

‘It's hard,’ says Joseph after a silence. ‘It feels a long way away. I find I put a lot of distance between me and it.’

‘It feels a long way away.’

‘Well, I can't really forget it. I still feel very anxious about it. Like every time a car drives down the street at night, or every time the phone rings, I find myself thinking it's the police.’

‘That you're in trouble.’

‘Yes. I feel very stressed about that. It's hard because there's so much on at school at the moment, so many assignments that are due in, so much to do, and I have to distance myself so that I can focus on what has to be done.’

‘Making a distance feels necessary at the moment.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you keep being reminded of it by the cars coming down the street and the phone ringing.’

‘Yes, it really stresses me out.’

‘So there's a part of you that is putting a distance between you and what happened, and yet you keep being reminded of it.’

‘That's right.’

‘I wonder if it would be possible, right now, to try to travel across that distance and to talk about what actually happened?’

A silence.

‘That's hard. It's so far away.’ Joseph is quiet for a while, and then says, ‘What do you know about it already?’

‘It's very difficult for you to own that you did this thing,’ I say.

‘It was a really stupid thing to do. I'll never do anything like that again. It was so thoughtless, I didn't think of how the boy would feel at all.’

I hear echoes here of a real or internalised parent, perhaps even the librarian. Though his distress is palpable, his moralistic criticisms of himself are delivered in a flat, disassociated voice.

‘I wonder if it's possible for you to remember how you felt at the time?’

‘Not really.’

‘Sexy?’

‘No, not particularly. It was different, something different I suppose.’

‘Different and therefore perhaps exciting?’

‘No, not really.’

We then lapse into a lengthy silence. Joseph looks around the room, again looking at the new pictures on the wall as if thinking that one of them might provide us with something else to talk about. Then he brings his eyes up to meet mine. I hold his gaze, we sit like this for a second or two, and then, when I keep my silence, he looks away.

‘I wonder what that kind of a silence is like for you,’ I say.

‘It's all quite difficult,’ he says and then instinctively glances at this watch.

‘I guess you're wishing that the session was over, that time would go a bit faster.’

‘Not really. It's just that I've got a lot on at school at the moment.’ I find it easy to empathise with this need to 'get on with life'. I feel a natural sympathy with his sense that these events (and the emotions that infused them) are somehow inaccessible.

‘It's hard to remember how you felt at the time,’ I say.

‘I suppose I know that I have to go back into it but I don't want to. I just want to forget about it, get on with things.’

‘I guess there's a part of you that worries that whatever made you do it is still down there somewhere and might return.’

‘I'll never do anything like that again,’ he says with feeling. ‘I know I won't. If I ever did something like that again, then the consequences would be too awful. It would involve going to the police, and I just wouldn't be able to bear that. If I were faced with that situation, then I wouldn't be able to go through with it.’

‘Do you mean that you would contemplate killing yourself?’

There is a pause, then, ‘No, not really. No?’

‘It's been like a nightmare,’ I say.

‘Yes it has. And I don't know that I want to go back into it.’

‘Yet there is still something down there that feels bad.’

‘Yes, I don't want to go back to this because I'm scared that I won't like what I find.’

With many of my clients I know that a reply from me like, 'You're scared that you won't like what you find' will allow the next step. It will be taken up as an invitation to go further. With Joseph it's quite different. I sense these moments not as steps taken and support looked for, but as reluctant admissions that will evaporate unless I say something to anchor them, to weigh them down, to connect them to something that is less likely to vanish into thin air.

‘This is reminding me of something you once told me, Joseph. Do you remember the discussion we had about Dante's Inferno?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Do you remember the moment when Dante is standing in front of the gates of Hell. Like you, he was scared that he wouldn't like what he would find.’

‘He knew it was going to be horrible.’

‘He wanted to turn back. He wanted to put a big distance between him and the horrible place.’

‘But he had a guide, didn't he?’ asks Joseph.

‘Virgil,’ I said.

‘Yes, that's him. And didn't he find his mother or his sister or something when he came out the other side?’

‘He found Beatrice,’ I say.

I understand Joseph's interest in the guide, but I'm curious about why finding Beatrice had seemed of immediate significance to him. I make a note of it, thinking that perhaps it will become clearer as we proceed over the coming sessions.

‘I suppose I have to go down,’ he says. ‘I suppose I don't have any choice really, but it's not something I particularly want to do. It's like I'm at the edge of this descent and I don't want to go down, I don't want to find out what's down there. I'm going to need you to lead the way I think.’

‘You're going to need my help,’ I say.

‘The thing I don't get,’ he says, ‘is how we'll know when we've got there, how we'll know when we've finished.’

‘Well, I guess we'll both feel we've been through something together, that we've travelled through something.’ This premature interest in the business of finishing is familiar. ‘When you were here last time there was the same question about whether we had finished or not, and I think it's clear now that we ended our sessions too early, that something was unfinished.’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Joseph.

‘Well there was that question that we kept talking about last time, about whether there was something hidden, something that was not being taken seriously enough. We now know that there was something hidden, and that we finished before we discovered what it was.’

‘But maybe whatever it was grew in the time between,’ he says. ‘Maybe whatever it was didn't exist when I was seeing you before, and it only grew after we had finished.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Whether it's new or has been there for a long time, our job is to try to make contact with whatever this thing is.’

‘And then to get rid of it,’ he says, again with feeling. ‘To go down their with our Zero weedkiller and get rid of it.’

I am brought up short by the image, jarred by it, challenged in some kind of a core way. What Joseph is saying implies an attitude towards the underworld that goes against the grain. He wants to eradicate it, cut it out, poison it, zap it, and his gut aversion echoes so much in our society. Stamp out behavioural problems with discipline and Ritalin. Get rid of young offenders by getting them off the streets (and, if necessary, into the jails). Move the homeless out of view. Pretend that aging and death can be defeated. Undermine the confidence of those with intuitive and sense-based intelligence by calling them under-achievers and putting them in remedial classes. Cure depression with drugs, respond to loneliness and alienation with advertising - you too, the frail and the uncared for in your unheated unit, can be successful and popular. Was it Hillman or Jung who said that a god hides in every illness? Taking the Zero to a god could get us into serious trouble.

‘Well first we'd better get down there and find out where it is and what it looks like,’ I say. ‘Then we can decide what we might do about it.’

There's a silence again which I decide to break.

‘I wonder if you'd had a dream last night?’

‘Oh yes I did,’ says Joseph, his face suddenly brightening in a way that is familiar to me. ‘I had this dream where I was in my mum's house ... Mum lives in a very ordinary house, which I'm not happy about because I'd like to be living in something classier, one of the things about being a diplomat's son is that you get used to living in classy houses! ... Anyway, in this dream some of the girls I know from school had got inside our house and taken all our clothes and notepads, they'd taken the Christmas tree... I love Christmas trees by the way! Mine's up already and it looks wonderful! ... In the dream these girls had washed the clothes and hung them out on the ovals. We could see all the red clothing from mum's place...’

‘Red clothing,’ I say. ‘What sort of things? Underwear, socks...’

‘No, not underwear. Shirts and tops, that kind of thing. Anyway, there were a whole lot of other kids there, it was really public and everyone was looking at the clothes. So I found a sawn-off shotgun. I tried to load it, but the bullets were really thin and small. It had a pump and I found that this pump would suck the bullets through and put them in the right place in the chamber. A choir came to the front door and I aimed the gun at them and said, ‘You must know something!’ They said ‘yes, it's the girls from school’. I don't know if I was going to go off and shoot them or not. And that's where the dream ended. Weird, eh!’ Again Joseph smiled widely.

‘So, the girls from school had been hanging your dirty washing out in public,’ I said

‘No, it wasn't dirty. They'd washed it.’

‘They'd taken things that were personal and precious, your clothes and the Christmas tree, and you were so angry you wanted to kill them.’

‘I guess so,’ he says, looking at the small clock on the table between us. We've gone overtime and Joseph's mother is waiting outside. ‘Well, has it got anything to do with anything?'

‘I'd be very surprised if it doesn't,’ I say. ‘I guess we'll see as we get further into this.’

‘So,’ says Giles at our supervisory session the next day. ‘On the one hand he likes living in classy houses with pretty Christmas trees and on the other he's murderously angry when people break in and put private things on view'.’

‘There's this big part of him that needs to keep me locked out.’

‘There's a struggle, isn't there, between locking you out and admitting you. He wants both. He wants you to be the clever one who finds a way into this stuff.’

‘He does and he doesn't. His words say that he does and yet I feel him unconsciously attacking my attempts to make connections, to think clearly, to say things that are apposite.’

‘Bion's attacks on linking’, says Giles. He's referred me to the paper before. (4)

‘A part of the uselessness I've felt in the past has been my sense that things are confused, that I am confused. That it's all too complex for my brain. I suppose what I'm now beginning to feel that the dizzying is something that is done to me, that it's a clue to what's going on in the transference.’

‘To use Kleinian language, Joseph is putting the panicky confusion into you,’ says Giles.

‘But it's Ps→D, isn't it?’ I say following up on a conversation we'd had one day on the ideas of Bion. ‘He's operating out of the paranoid-schizoid position when he attacks my attempts to link things, and he's operating out of the depressive when he's asking me to help him go into this difficult stuff. The Freudian fallacy was that the first was a neurotic resistance to the 'truth' of the second, that as therapists we needed to cut through the resistance to get to the bedrock of repressed material. It works better, doesn't it, to see both positions as being valid and attempting the difficult task of paying attention to both?’ (5)

‘You're saying that Joseph is both wanting you to make links (he asks you if this dream has anything to do with anything) and at the same time he's unconsciously trying to destroy your capacity to think.’

‘That's the sense I'm getting from being with him Giles. He wants me to enter his house and he wants me to know that he'll be murderously angry if I succeed.’

‘I wonder what would happen if you told him this?’ says Giles.

‘I think I did.’

‘Yes, true, but indirectly. You said something about him wanting to murder the girls who stole the clothes. But he's saying something here about you, Steve. He doesn't know this consciously, but unconsciously he's working to destroy any capacity you may have to break into his house and he'll be mightily disappointed if he succeeds.’

It's the end of a hellish week of personal and family anguish and I'm having coffee with an old friend. I'm still feeling knocked about by all that's been going on over the past few days – there's been an internal cyclone of too-muchness which has left me feeling psychologically flattened – but these coffees with her have been a part of my week for so long that a part of me immediately relaxes into the familiar patterns and timbre of our talk.

As sometimes happens we quickly fall into a conversation which skirts unknown or uncomfortable territory for one of us – today we talk about recurring bouts that each of us has of 'knowing nothing' – and usually we traverse this kind of terrain with care.

But today, for some reason, I'm filled with an impulse to plunge more directly into what I'm all of a sudden perceiving as the shadowed territory of an unlived part of her life. Suddenly it seems urgent that I find the words to describe to her exactly what it is that I'm dimly perceiving, and I start to describe a distinction between her pragmatic and rational and ordered daily life on the one hand and the passion and exuberance of her artistic life on the other. We started slowly, tentatively, but now I'm hurtling down a mountain with the car in neutral. I notice that she's looking shocked, uncomprehending, and in my reckless mood I shut my eyes and reach down very deep for the words that will convincingly and clearly convey what it is that this apparently intuitive side of me is seeing. It seems urgently important.

‘You don't like feeling unsure,’ I say. ‘You want to be more confident about your knowing but it's as if you're looking in the wrong direction. You're trying to overcome this by drawing on your pragmatic and patient side when really the only way forward is through your passion and exuberance. By being wild. By letting your anger lead you. You're trying to find a rational knowing, a logical, careful, thorough, properly-evidenced knowing, but there's not enough oomph in this to break through whatever it is that's blocking things. You'll only find your way to a more confident knowing by letting your passionate and irrational side off the leash, by letting yourself be unreasonable and angry and exuberant and seeing where that leads you.’

She doesn't react – indeed she's more than usually silent – and after what becomes an awkward and unusually unnatural conversation (the car is no longer careering down the mountain but pushing its way through an unexpected stretch of sand) our time together comes to an end. As we say goodbye I look into her face for some clue as to how she's feeling but I can't read the signs. In the car on the way home, and later that day when I think back on it, I feel increasingly uneasy.

‘I'm not sure if I'm talking about you or me,’ I had said to her in passing during one particularly intense formulation of my perception, and it's this that I now keep thinking about. Why did I feel so compelled to lecture her on the nature of her knowing, when it's me that's trying to complete a PhD, it's me, at the moment, who is full of doubts about the validity of my knowing, and it's me who feels this desperate need to break through?

And then I remember that all morning before having the coffee with my friend I'd been bumping into professionals who seemed to know: the local GP telling me about my skin spots, a psychiatrist explaining the pharmacology of an anti-depressant he had prescribed for a patient of ours, a psychologist giving practical and authoritative advice on how a client must think about a particular problem. After each encounter I'd found myself comparing their confidence, their apparent mastery of their subjects, with my own dizziness and lack of conviction. I have been lecturing my friend about her 'not-knowing' when it is my own that is clearly preoccupying me.

Later I ring her to apologise. ‘No need,’ she says. ‘I knew then that you were talking about yourself.’ We go on to talk about other things, the air apparently cleared.

Later, sitting alone in my study with the family asleep, I think about the fragile structures that cluster together to make up my knowing. They're so often blown away, leaving me exposed, unable to act, collapsed in on myself and only able to feel a dreadful pain which weighs me down further and out of which I can only speak ragefully, vindictively, accusingly, destructively, damaging in their unconscious lashings out of other structures such as those formed by my closest relationships. What can I do about this? The internal psychotic metaphysics (despite Rhode's confidence (6)) lead only to an intensification of the tormenting echoes off the walls of my psychic chamber. Nothing moves on if its fed only by what happens in ‘the unconnected within’.

Yet things do move on. I am always more than I am, my skin insufficiently impervious to keep the world out, my body sensorily attuned in ways I know nothing about. I'm instinctively reaching for Biblical language and I can hear a voice: ‘Be still then and know that I am God.’ It's a line I remember from Anglican school days. Spinoza's Ethics is lying opened on my floor and I can hear his voice, too, telling me that there is only one Substance which can be called God or Nature, that God is the only reality, that all that there is in this world is nature naturing, that I am a part of this naturing and that to have sufficient knowledge of this fact is to live actively and joyfully. Even to write these words, to hear them being spoken to me by Spinoza, shifts something in me.

There's another book open on my study floor tonight. It's David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. This too is a book that says to me, ‘Be still then and know that I am God,’ though again the Biblical quotation doesn't appear anywhere in the text. We are, says Abram, a part of nature, not something separate. The body, 'the mind's own sensuous aspect'(7), ‘this poised and animate power that initiates all our projects and suffers our passions' (8) is an active and open system ‘continually improvising its relation to things and to the world’ (9), engaged incessantly in an ‘improvised duet...[with] the fluid. breathing landscape that it inhabits (10).

This is my experience of the pine-and-poo air in the forest, or of the waves at the beach a few weeks ago. This carnal participation (11) through the senses and through language (defined as primarily expressive, gestural and poetic rather than denotative and which therefore is an attribute shared with the barking dog, the chattering monkey, the whispering breeze and even the granite cliffs that speak to our sensibilities (12) is what gives the world we experience its shape and dynamic stability. Our lives are sustained through our ecological sensibility.

... [As] we know from our everyday experience, the phenomenal world is remarkably stable and solid; we are able to count on it in so many ways, and we take for granted much of its structure and character. This experienced solidarity is precisely sustained by the continual encounter with others, with other embodied subjects, other centers of experience. The encounter with other perceivers continually assures me that there is more to any thing, or to the world, than I myself can perceive at any moment. Besides that which I directly see of a particular oak tree or building, I know or intuit that there are also those facets of the oak or building that are visible to the others perceivers that I see. I sense that the tree is much more than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others whom I see perceive of it; I sense that as a perceivable presence it already existed before I came to other persons, but ... for other sentient organisms, for the birds that nest in its branches and for the insects that move along its bark, and even, finally, for the sensitive cells and tissues of the oak itself, quietly drinking sunlight through its leaves. It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world. (13)

Again this is so like Spinoza though the philosopher is not mentioned anywhere in Abram's book. It is also so like the spirit of Giles's thinking that our lives are expressions of our natural relational urge to mate with the world. This is why I feel better not by privately thinking penetrating thoughts about the nature of my specific psychological pain, but by talking to Giles, digging in the garden or riding my bike with Jo, cooking, walking through the forest or along the beach, attending to the poetics of Joseph's stories and dreams, talking about life with my daughters, playing roly-poly games with my sons or allowing myself to be moved along by the music of Mozart or the rhythms of Goethe's prose. These connections, these ‘conversations’ (in Abram's sense of the word) have a sustaining and stabilising effect.

I am a part of the one world, there is only one Substance, I am stilled (and at the same time taken up again by the rhythms of life around me), knowing that the I AM that I experience from within is God. Or, to quote Abram,

We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us. (14)

Endnotes

(1) Writing about the criminal, Melanie Klein had the following to say (p 260 Klein (1934):

One of the great problems about criminals, which has always made them incomprehensible to the rest of the world, is their lack of natural human good feelings; but this lack is only apparent. When in analysis one reaches the deepest conflicts from which hate and anxiety spring, one also finds there the love as well. Love is not absent in the criminal, but it is hidden and buried in such a way that nothing but analysis can bring it to light.

(2) I work with a progressive spellchecker, and it has accepted Ritalin! As an experiment I've tried Eros and Aphrodite. It recognizes neither.

(3) It was both. p 57 Hillman (1995) ‘If there is a God in the disease, as Jung says, ... is it not wiser to pay obeisance to the God than be obsessed by the disease.’

(4) See Bion (1959) reprinted in Bion (1967)

(5) see for example p 213 Eigen [1993]

(6) See p 2 Rhode (1994)

... thought exists in its own right and is true to itself and carries within itself a dynamic for transformation … The discovery of the depressive position, and of the mysterious threshold to it, which is the area of Bion's catastrophic change, transformed the nature of the transference. It was no longer a way of elucidating some unresolved burden concerning the past (the facsimile theory, or the theory of transference as a form of mental digestion); it had become a means of elucidating structures that are specific to the human mind - structures that disclose how mind originates in a rationality of ideas.

... the discovery of the threshold endorsed the irrefutable power of transference to be associated to a boundless optimism. Implicitly, Melanie Klein showed the transference to be a function of reason as love. It is one of the postulates of its progress that the inscrutable patterning of liminal phenomena (images whose structures find their origin in such emblems as the mask or the labyrinth) will resolve itself into a meaningful communication.

(7) p 15 Abram (1996)

(8) p 46 Abram (1996)

(9) p 49 Abram (1996)

(10) p 53 Abram (1996)

(11) Abram, [p 57 Abram (1996)] following Merleau-Ponty, suggests that perception is ‘inherently participatory’, so that

perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.

(12) p 80 Abram (1996)

... to affirm that linguistic meaning is primarily expressive, gestural, and poetic, and that conventional and denotative meanings are inherently secondary and derivative, is to renounce the claim that "language" is an exclusively human property.

(13) p 68 Abram (1996)