Chapter 8 An evil slug

Part B: Attempts at mating

Joseph didn't turn up for our next session, and my immediate thought was that the old pattern of revelation followed by retreat was re-establishing itself. But, about ten minutes after the session was due to start, he rang.

‘Steve, I'm sorry I'm not there, but Mum seems to have forgotten. She was meant to pick me up from home, but she's not here. I don't know what to do. If I got on a bus now, I'd wouldn't be there until near the end of our session.’

‘Let's talk on the phone,’ I suggested

‘Fine,’ said Joseph. ‘She must have just forgotten.’

There was a short silence, as if each was wanting the other to begin. Only after the session did I realize that he had begun, that we was unconsciously needing me to pick up on the disappointment he was feeling, the buried sense of having been let down again.

‘Well, where do we start?’ he asked

‘What about filling me in on how things have been since we talked last Wednesday,’ I suggested, pushing to one side the vague sense that I'd missed something.

‘I've been working really hard on school things, getting everything finished. I burn myself out, have late nights, do all my assignments and then collapse. I've got them all done now and went to bed the other night thinking I've got a stress-free life for a while now, til college starts. I went to bed savouring the moment.’

‘It felt good to have all your work done.’

‘It did. But I haven't really been able to relax. I got sick as soon as the last piece of work was finished and that night I was delirious and had nightmares.’

‘Delirious? You had fevers? Hallucinations?’

‘Kind of. I had sweaty nights and nightmares. One of the nightmares was that my quilt grew really big and it smothered me. In these nightmares, which I have about every month or so, my quilt, the lights, something grows big and tries to kill me. It's weird! When this happens, my body just stops, chucks a spack! ...’

‘Chucks a spack?’

‘Yeah, freezes, shuts down ... sort of is paralysed ... It's funny talking about it now, but it's not funny when you're in it. It would be funny if they weren't trying to kill you. I guess it would also be better if there were more people in there. It's a bit solitary.’

‘You're on your own in the nightmares,’ I said, ‘and that makes it worse. You've had these dreams before.’

‘That's right, But this last week hasn't been all bad,’ he said, leaving to one side my implied invitation to talk more about his dreams. ‘Remember how I was feeling anxious when police cars drove by or when the phone rang? Well last week, after our session, maybe because of our session, the anxiety went away. It's come back a bit since but it's not as bad as it was before.’

‘Except when you're having nightmares,’ I said, thinking that it was almost as if the badness was shifting away from the outside world of police cars and inside to his Joseph's internal world.

‘Hang on a minute Steve,’ said Joseph before I could say anything. ‘Mum's just got back. I'll just go through to the other room where I can talk in private.’

When he picked the phone up again in his bedroom, there was something distant about his voice.

‘Where were we?’ he asked

‘You were talking about the anxiety being less late last week and that it's recently come back a bit.’

‘Mmm.’ Then silence. Joseph's former engagement had disappeared. I decided to explore a thought that had come to me while he was moving phones.

‘I wonder whether there might be any connection between the feelings in the library and the feelings in the delirium?’

‘No connection,’ he said quickly. I felt the silence between us as a dead space from which nothing was going to grow. The ground had been Zero-ed. ‘It's nothing like that.’

‘There's no connection,’ I said, and we lapsed again into silence.

‘I'm wondering how you're feeling right now,’ I said at last.

‘I'm feeling nothing. Like there's no connection, that it doesn't matter.’ There was palpable hostility in his voice.

‘It seems as though a feeling state you were in when we first started to talk has changed.’

‘I kind of feel, not so much that it's changed, but that it's gone, it's cut off, it's hung up.’

‘So it hasn't changed. It's still there feeling whatever it was feeling. It's just that we're cut off from it. We can't hear it any more.’

‘It's as though it's behind a closed door.’

‘It's feeling what it's feeling behind a closed door.’

‘I don't know. I don't even know if there's anything behind the closed door.’

‘It's getting further away as we speak. You're feeling even more cut off from it.’

‘It's just like being alone... solitary ... nothing.’

‘Like in the delirium,’ I suggested

‘Maybe. I'm not sure.’ Joseph's voice had regained some of its earlier engagement, though I was still conscious of having to work much harder.

‘It sounds to me as though you've just been giving words to what it is that we're attempting to address here.’ Inwardly I cringed! These words were hopeless, a long way away from what I was actually thinking. I'd meant to say something like, ‘We're trying to find some words, we're trying to get closer to something.’ What I said was not right at all, but Joseph continued as if the right words had in fact been found.

‘It's like I've identified it,’ he said, his tone dry, cut off, disengaged. ‘Now we know what it is, what do we do about it?’

This was horribly familiar, an arid intellectual exchange that would get us nowhere. I tried to find a way back to the feeling life he'd been talking about when we started.

‘Perhaps we might think about what enables the feelings to be felt. You could feel them when we started today.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We have to create a setting where they'll feel safe.’

‘Something felt safe and then it didn't feel safe. Something changed.’

‘Mum coming home?’ he said. ‘Someone else here? Having to share the space? Feeling unsettled? Something along those lines?’

Again the distancing intellectualisations were familiar. Again I felt him giving me the ball. There was another silence.

‘Is there any way we can beat the silence blues?’ he said sharply. ‘It feels like these silences drag on, that nothing's happening. We're waiting for each other to speak and no-one's doing anything.’

‘I wonder if you feel irritated, pissed off, during the silences.’

‘Not pissed off or irritated. Just frustrated, frustrated because nothing's happening ...’ There was a short pause, and then he continued, ‘I'm going to say something so we've got something to talk about, so there won't be another silence. When I'm riding through Civic, when I see a young boy, I think to myself ‘Will it be him? Will it be one of the kids who was there on the day?’ I try to keep my sunglasses on. I'm hiding from it. If they say something to their parents or the police, then it will all start over again, it will all be sparked off again. I'm hiding from it, I suppose, I don't want to go through the same thing again. If someone says something to their parents and they go to the police, then the whole thing will be sparked off again.’

‘It's like sitting on a time bomb.’

‘I'm sitting on a time bomb and the question is how to defuse it?.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what might we do that would defuse the time bomb?’

‘Maybe talking together?’ Again there's this question which puts it back to me. Am I reluctant to take the initiative because, unlike someone like Winnicott, I don't credit myself with knowledge or authority in these matters? Is it that at moments like this I'm too much in the grip of Hillman's or Malouf's view that we cannot grasp essences, that things are too complicated, that there are always a quarrelling group of gods present?’

‘It seems to me,’ I said in an attempt to acknowledge complexity without losing the plot, ‘as though there are actually a couple of worrying time bombs. There's the one out there in the world as you ride your bike, to do with one of the boys recognizing you and making a complaint to the police. Maybe there's also a worry that that there is a time bomb inside you that could, in certain circumstances, be ignited again as it was in the library?’

‘Maybe,’ he said and I noted that he hadn't objected to the suggestion this time.

‘It's time to finish,’ I said.

‘Already? So it is. OK then, I'll see you next week.’

‘Today it's felt like we've been in and out of connection with each other,’ I said.

‘Has it?’ said Joseph. ‘I guess so.’

‘It was as if he'd been caught with his pants down,’ said Giles after I'd described the telephone conversation to him and the effect that his mother's return had had on Joseph. ‘As if he'd been caught in the act.’

‘What act?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don't exactly know,’ said Giles.’I'm just responding, I suppose, to the sense of it that I get from your description. It was like in that moment where his mother came back he'd been caught with his pants down or with an erection and he was doing everything he could to hide it. He was showing you something one minute, then whipping it away out of sight the next.’

‘When we talk like this Giles,’ I said, ‘I realize how suffocated I've become by the Freudian story of things.’

‘What do you mean? Does my Freudian imagery suffocate you?’

‘No, not at all. It's not what you're saying that's suffocating, it's the picture I have lodged deep inside me of what therapy is all about, a picture that we get from Freud I think. It's something to do with the static picture that Freud has left us with, of a psyche with layers, of an essential unchanging truth about people. Freud casts us as Oedipus sitting at the foot of the Sphinx trying to work out its essential riddle. Too often that's the way I sit with Joseph, looking for what's essential, what's fixed, what's unchanging. Looking for the single answer to the question.’

‘You've lost me here Steve. Why this thought at this time?’

‘Because of the way you said, "One minute he's showing you something and the next he's whipping it out of sight". It's dynamic, what's happening inside Joseph and what's happening between the two of us. Things keep changing. I keep missing these because I'm looking for what's fixed, what's essential, what's unchanging.’

‘It's changing all the time,’ said Giles. ‘And you don't always miss it, you talked to Joseph about things changing during the phonecall.’

‘I could feel it,’ I said. ‘First it was there, between us, we were talking about something. Then it was behind a closed door. Then it was as if it didn't exist, it was nothing and Joseph was feeling alone, solitary. Things were happening as we spoke, a scene from a story was being enacted, it was dynamic.’

‘Sometimes all we can do is notice this play of fast-moving shadows on the surface of the water and try to find words for them.’

‘I find that difficult.’

‘We all find it difficult. You're finding it less difficult than you used to.’

‘I found it easier when I was a teacher than I do now that I'm a therapist.’

‘You sometimes try too hard Steve. State the obvious. It's sometimes the most banal comment that has the greatest impact.’

‘I'm doing this work experience at a computer shop at the moment,’ says Joseph as we begin our third session since the incident in the library. ‘I love it! I'm being given all these interesting things to do, looking at codes, fixing dud machines. It's great.’

‘You're feeling really good at the moment.’

‘It's like all this other business is disappearing, getting further away.’

‘If you could fill your life with stimulating things to do, then the anxiety that you were feeling would disappear. You'd no longer be worried about the ticking of time bombs.’

‘No, it's more like this thing, what happened, this anxiety, is drifting out to sea on the tide, but I know that tides turn, and that it will come back. I want to make contact with it ... so I can work on it ….. get rid of it as quickly as possible. Get on with the rest of my life.’

‘You want to get rid of it so you can get on with the rest of your life.’

‘Yes, it's like I'm a computer with a hard disk that is full, something needs to be deleted before more can be added. This is how I feel about the problem, this is what I've got to do. I once saw this episode on TV where this man has to get to this enemy computer to delete certain files. He's let down on a rope from a hole in the ceiling. It's like you're the one letting me down, you're up there holding the rope.’

‘And,’ I said, ‘we have to keep in constant touch with each other as this operation is being carried out, you have to keep letting me know what you're finding down there and how you're feeling, so that I know when to let you down further, when to pull you up, when to give the rope a bit of a shake. It might also be that we'll find files that need to be retained and protected.’

Joseph ignores this last suggestion and instead closes his eyes and tells me that he is visualising the rope, the room, the computer.

‘There is a man sitting there,’ he says, ‘someone who knows that I am approaching but he doesn't know exactly where I am. He's determined to sit there pretending to play on the computer just to prevent me from reaching it.’

‘He's sitting there so you can't get at the computer,’ I say.

‘Yes. Perhaps I'll get a knife and stab him in the head!’ He opens his eyes, looking surprised by his own image, then looks for my reaction.

I remind him of his murderous rage in the dream, wanting to shoot someone. He doesn't react. I suggest to him that it's difficult for him to talk about anger.

‘I try to ignore my anger, or control it. Control sounds better, it sounds more powerful. If I act as though I'm not angry, then that frustrates people who are trying to make me angry. Like there was this boy who was getting at me at school and I simply ignored him and he went away. He wanted me to lose it, to lose my temper, but I didn't. I controlled it. That felt great.’

‘You don't express it. You don't lose it.’

‘I felt I lost it when that thing happened.’

‘You felt you lost it in the library when you masturbated.’

‘I think I was feeling a bit angry or something ... I'm not sure ... It's not easy to think about ... I think that earlier I'd been feeling angry and that somehow I'd not expressed or got rid of it all and it had built up and was a kind of a push to what happened ... I don't know.’

‘I wonder whether what you're saying is something like this,’ I say. ‘That over time you have been in lots of positions where you've felt got at by powerful people, and the anger has built up in you, and at this time you were able to let some of it out, to feel powerful in an exciting way.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That sounds accurate.’

Then, suddenly, he raises his eyes from his lap and looks at me.

‘You've suddenly looked into my face,’ I say. ‘You're dangling on the rope and you've suddenly looked at me. Checking to see if I'm still here.’

‘It's more to see if you're still interested. I suppose there was a worry that maybe you'd been distracted by something, or maybe you'd noticed a danger in the room.’

‘You're wondering if perhaps I can see something that you can't.’

‘Mmm,’ he says lethargically and I have that familiar feeling of the energy having been instantly drained out of the connection between us. Just like during the phone call. Something has happened. We sit silently while I try to make something of these feelings, while I try to think of something to say.

Perhaps to circumvent a looming silence, Joseph suddenly says, ‘Now it's as though I've gone to sleep while dangling on the rope.’

‘You're asleep on the rope,’ I say.

‘Yes.’ Joseph is smiling, though he's also giving a sense of wanting to renew our lost contact. This quite unlike how he was on the phone immediately after his mother came back.

‘And what about me?' I ask. 'What am I doing at the other end of the rope while you’re sleeping?’

‘I have the feeling that you've gone to sleep too. You're really tired and you're hoping that it's OK that you've tied the rope up and you've gone to sleep.’

‘I wonder how that feels. I wonder whether it's a relief for you that I'm asleep too?’

‘No I don't think so,’ says Joseph. ‘It's not a relief.’

‘What would you like me to be doing?’

‘Maybe give the rope a bit of a shake.’

‘Is that what you'd like me to do? Give the rope a bit of a shake.’

‘Mmm.’

‘You don't like it when it seems I've gone to sleep. You want me to be alert.’

‘Shaking the rope.’

‘Keeping you alert and on the ball.’

‘That's right.’

‘You're wanting this mission to be successful.’

‘I want it to be over!’

‘But we've got a man down there preventing you from getting into the computer. There's someone there blocking things.’

‘Mmm.’

We've run out of steam again. I decide to try a slightly different tack.

‘I wonder if the man sitting in the chair below you is a father?’

‘My father or someone else's father?’

‘Either?’

‘No, he's not my father... He's not a father at all ...’

‘What are your feeling towards him?’

‘Nothing really.’

‘You're no longer feeling the impulse to use your knife to stab him in the head?’

‘Actually he's not there any more. He knows that I'm asleep and so he's left the place, he's gone, he's not there any more.’

‘He only guards the computer when he feels there's a bit of a threat. He comes and goes ... A bit like your feelings sometimes,’ I say, casting around for something that he’ll nibble at. ‘They’re there for a moment but then they disappear, leave, they're not there any more.’

‘Mmm,’ seemingly only half listening to me, and suddenly I see that he's actually following his own train of thought.

‘Actually he's gone off to have sex with his secretary,’ says Joseph with a little laugh, as if surprised and maybe a little embarrassed by his thought, but enjoying it as well. ‘They've gone off to his place, but it's just sex really, nothing else. There's no real relationship, no friendship. He's quite alone, bored, with nothing in his life except his TV set really. And the sex doesn't do much for him either, it doesn't make him feel any better. He needs something to wake him up, to put a bit of life into him.’

As Joseph talks I struggle unsuccessfully to quiet my sleuth-mind, the part of me that wants to see every expression and gesture as the vital clue to the single riddle. I lose sight of what's happening at moments like this. I miss the poo-scented air because I'm too busy thinking clever thoughts.

‘I wonder, Joseph,’ I say, vaguely allowing these thoughts to form some kind of intuitive interpretation, ‘if one motivation behind your masturbating in front of the boy was to wake your parents up. Or perhaps yourself?’

‘No,’ he says after a short pause. ‘I don't think that's right. I don't think that was a part of it at all. I don't think that was an element...’ And then his tone changes. ‘I think it's wrong the way Mum has had to get involved in this ... It's as though I let her down, or .... having to talk to the librarian on the phone ... having to .... It's like I've put her through something .... It's like I've let her down ... or ....’

Joseph is struggling to find something here, actively searching (in a way that I've hoped he would) for something elusive.

‘It sounds like letting her down is not quite right,’ I say, responding to the furrow on his brow.

‘It's not,’ says Joseph, who for much of the rest of the session sits with his eyes closed, concentrating on the images that are forming in his mind. ‘There's something in my feelings here that has something to do with malice. With evil. With being naughty. Being defiant. There's something angry in there ... It's like there's a worm... no, a slug ... that has these evil qualities, and it's burrowing further and further down, making a hole as it goes, but the hole closes up after it, and eventually the closing of the hole will go faster than the slug and it will be squashed, it will become a paste. Then it will be washed out of my system.’

‘That's your hope,’ I say. ‘You're hoping that it will be washed away in the natural course of things.’

‘Mmm,’ said Joseph.

‘We've got to make sure that it's washed away rather than becoming part of your blood stream,’ I say.

‘Actually it's not really the blood stream,’ he says. ‘It's more in my head, and around my face. My chest maybe. And eventually this slug is going to hit some kind of barrier and then it will turn, and when it turns, that's when the closing hole will catch up with it.’

‘So perhaps our work is to do with making the barrier?’

‘No,’ says Joseph. ‘I have a feeling that the barrier is already there... The slug is moving through my feeling right now,’ he says, his eyes still tightly closed. ‘The field it's moving through is surrounded by barbed wire barriers that it can't get through ... I feel angry!’

After a little pause (I feel both a fascination for what's emerging and a niggling suspicion that he's putting on a performance) I say, ‘You're feeling angry.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘just then, for a second. It felt hot ... as I talk about it, it's disappearing, it's gone ... but it felt hot, like lava, like I had become the lava …’ He opens his eyes now, wincing as if the light were too strong. ‘Weird,’ he says, a little shakily. ‘I felt I was on some steps there which were leading down into a volcano crater filled with lava, that the lava was down there, quite a way away. I'm closer to it now than I was at the beginning of this session, but not as close as I was a few moments ago and it's still a way away. It's like I'm surrounded by the fumes or haze of it.’

‘You felt the lava, you were the lava, you felt the hot anger,’ I say, not knowing myself what to make of all of this.

‘It's almost like I'm being given an experience of anger so that I know what anger is, so that I will be able to recognise it.’

Again I don't know how to respond, what to say. I notice the clock. We've gone overtime.

‘Can I have some paper do you think?’ he asks me. 'I want to draw some of this stuff before it goes, while I'm waiting to be picked up.’

I give him the paper and he goes out to sit by the road.

‘Mmm’, says Giles when we speak on the phone the following day. ‘I’ve read your notes from the session. Where do you want us to begin?’

‘I don't know what to make of it Giles,’ I say.

‘Go on.’

‘It was all so unexpected, I suppose ... there's this pattern Joseph and I have which has become familiar to me, of him offering up little bits and then retreating into silence, or subtly attacking my thinking in the ways we've talked about before ... so usually I have this sense of trying to edge him closer and closer to some place where his feelings are more present ...’

‘A bit like a sheep dog moving a sheep towards a pen,’ says Giles.

‘Yes, something like that, that's what I'm usually feeling, like a sheep dog, but not a very clever one.’

‘... trying to edge him closer to some place where his feelings are more present,’ says Giles.

‘Yes, and he's reluctant to go there ....’

‘He's frightened of that place. And he tries to put you off, or distract you …’

‘And at the same time ... or this is what I'm now feeling Giles ... at the same time he's alarmed if he feels that he's successfully put me to sleep ...’

‘He doesn't like it when you fall asleep on the rope.’

‘He wants to wake me up.’

‘He keeps feeling things briefly but then the feelings go. He's wanting to make contact with something but he keeps losing it. He can't succeed here on his own. He needs you to keep things in your active mind. There was that moment when he suddenly looked at you to see if you were still interested.’

‘Something seemed to be actually happening inside his body,’ I say. ‘As we were talking, something seemed to be happening. Spontaneous things, unexpected things. Images ...’

‘Like the man guarding the computer files. He wanted to talk about this man.’

‘Guarding the files. Preventing access. It's Joseph himself, isn't it. That's the role he often plays in our conversations.’

‘And this is the man who goes off and has meaningless sex because he's bored,’ says Giles. ‘This was Joseph finding a way of talking about what happened in the library.’

‘But we didn't follow it up. I was too full of my clever Oedipal thoughts.’

‘There are undoubtedly Oedipal elements present here. Your clever thoughts weren't wrong, Steve, they're a part of this picture surely.’

‘But my thoughts stifled a less thinky way of playing with Joseph's image of the man going off to have sex.’

‘It would have been interesting to have heard Joseph going further into that. The man at the computer is an aspect of Joseph. This was an exciting and perhaps unsettling moment for him, dangling on the rope and seeing a problematic aspect of himself. He wanted to get a knife and stab him in the head.’

‘It's the Zero impulse again. Murdering the girls in the dream...’

‘It's related to those, but it's more immediate, more violent. More out-of-control angry.’

‘Present for just a split second,’ I say, remembering the way he suddenly opened his eyes and then didn't respond when I talked about the anger.

‘Anger is a terrifying emotion for him. To be avoided at all costs..’

‘But he's full of anger,’ I say. ‘I feel it when I'm with him. Behind the charming smile and the disarming questions about what I think might be the next step there's this buried fury.’

‘Buried? Did you say buried Steve?'

‘Yes, buried.’

‘It's the slug!’ says Giles. ‘I've been trying to place the slug, and this is it, isn't it?’

‘The slug is the anger?’

‘I'm not being quite as literal as that, I don't think. No, what I'm saying is that his experience in his head and chest ... that's where it was located wasn't it? …’

‘Yes, his head and his chest, and around his face.’

‘... this sensation of feeling a malicious, evil slug burrowing through his insides, this is the feeling he gets because he can't shout out his rage. It's internalised, it eats away at the insides of him ... this is why he has the sensation of being eaten by the slug ...’

‘And then,’ I say, ‘suddenly he's the lava, feeling the hot anger ... but just for a moment... it's something he can't tolerate for long ... he can't be angry with the world, with the bullies, because he's then out of control...’

‘It's the same in his family no doubt,’ says Giles. ‘He has power in as much as he can control his rage ...’

‘ ... I feel that when I sit with him, yes, that he's got some kind of power, that he can successfully stir me up or unsettle me, because he's got these strong angry feelings under tight control.’

‘So he can't be angry openly ... he doesn't even know that he's angry a lot of the time … so what does he do with the anger?’

‘He turns it inside,’ I say.

‘At crucial moments like in this session, he can actually feel it burrowing its way through his insides.’

‘Moving through a field, boxed in with barbed wire barriers.’

‘Feeling increasingly angry! Explosive.’

‘But only for an instant. As soon as he feels it, it's gone again. Talking 'about it makes it go away’

‘Talking about it took him into it Steve. He made contact with it. What was it he said at the end, "It's almost as if I have been shown what anger is like so that I will recognize it in the future." That's very important. He's absolutely right!’

I've been thinking recently how when I began this work with Joseph I was in a pleasant state of Hillman-intoxication. Reading Dream and the Underworld took me into that blissful space that I fall into when I read a good book or listen to a particularly good piece of music, where I feel closer to how life deeply is, closer to things-in-themselves, nearer to (to quote David Malouf)

all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too - that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own.(2)

This was the place to which Hillman's prose took me, into that deeply known but until now unarticulated space beneath the noise and chatter.

Reading Hillman had the effect of giving validation to (making glow with significance) my internal world, the one to which I turned as a boy when feeling abandoned to boarding school life, an internal world where another life (was it compensation? was it more deeply real and sustaining?) was being lived. It was here that I read about the bushrangers defying the authorities in Boldewood's Robbery Under Arms and it was here that I imagined myself playing full-forward for the Demons and kicking the winning goal after the siren. Like Malouf, Hillman speaks up for the archetypal, the inner realm of eternal significances. To quote Hillman:

It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate - an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence - that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. (3)

I suppose it was this very lack of connection ('independent of the events') that I experienced as such a solace. Hillman drew me inward and downward, to an 'inscape of personified images' (4) where mental events 'do not require and cannot acquire further validation by reference to external events' (5). He says that paying attention to the imaginal world returns the human psyche 'to its nonhuman imaginal essence' (6) In one of his rare passages of clinical material, he talks about how attention to images helped Hillman and his patient to avoid the vicissitudes of a potentially stormy and unstable working relationship:

Images provided the main place of connection between us. Rather than premature attempts at personal relatedness (which tended each time to develop into paranoid accusations and defensive denials - her usual pattern with others), feeling was given to the products of her soul. Our connection was below our disparities and was less in terms of the fluctuations of personal feelings toward each other, than it was valuing the impersonal psychic movements that went on at the common collective level. (7)

My intoxication with Hillman was intensified as I'd just finished a Masters thesis in which I'd used an Hillmanian perspective to illuminate some work I'd done with two young clients. It was a necessary intoxication, a vital balancing of the world's tendency to read events according to what is on the surface, an intoxication which remains deeply important to me. Thomas Moore (8) tells how Hillman was once asked to advise some town planners on the desirability of installing a recreational lake and his response was to reflect (with the planners) on the parched nature of the town's soul. Hillman's continual move is to look beyond the measurable and the visible and the literal, to stir up our complacencies, our acceptance of appearances. In this he reminds me of Nietzsche and it's a perspective which I hope continues to inform my attitude whenever a Joseph arrives for a session. Hillman argues that the psyche is polycentric, that mythology speaks to the psyche's fundamental experiences, that symptoms are evidence of neglected or repressed parts of the self, that pathology is not an aberration to be cured but an essential aspect of the human experience (9), that the significance of our actions is missed if only seen through a reductive historical lens (10), and that our experiences have 'inside meaning' (11) to which dreams and fantasies and impulses give us some access. I particularly value Hillman's love of language and have been guided in the writing of this thesis by ideas such as the following:

Psychological rememberance is given by the kind of speech that carries remembrance within it. This language is both of culture and uncultured, is both of art and artless. It is a mythic, metaphoric language, a speech of ambiguities that is evocative and detailed, yet not definitive, not productive of dictionaries, textbooks, or even abstract descriptions. Rather it is a speech that leads to participation, in the Platonic sense, in and with the thing spoken of, a speech of stories and insights which evoke, in the other who listens, new stories and insights, the way one poem and one tune ignite another verse and another song. It is conversation, letters, tales, in which we reveal our dreams and fantasies - and our psychopathology. It evokes, calls forth, and creates psyche as it speaks. (12)

But I'm beginning to realize that while my Hillman-intoxication was necessary and continues to be essential to me, it has also at times acted as a drug, as a kind of Lotos soul food insulating me from the painful realities of an actual lived life and taking the place of real relationships with real people. I find myself when under Hillman's spell like those of Odysseus's men who, when they ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

Never cared to report, nor to return;
they longed to stay forever, browsing on
that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland. (13)

What alerted me to this tendency, as I've tried to show in the narrative of those early sessions with Joseph, was my feelings of uselessness, of casting myself in the role of an observer of some Olympian drama in which I played no role. And, as I try to free myself from the temptation to remain blissfully and soulfully on the island, I find when I look back that there are parts of Hillman's perspective which are unrelational and which imply a kind of imaginal-real dualism which in the end I've found restrictive.

There's an implication in Hillman that either we're in the therapy room or we're out on the street engaged in the issues of the world. Whilst l agree that the therapeutic tendency to interiorise all experience can lead us to ignore ideological crassness and environmental breakdown, the dualism he implicitly assumes leaves out what the client is actually doing in the therapy session, which is to tell a story which not only expresses what is going on inside but is attempting to change something (in the first instance, the relationship with the therapist) on the outside. In other words, what happens in the therapy room, what happens when a dream is told or a feeling described, is to do with a present relationship (that between the client and the therapist) and is an attempt to live more relationally and actively with the world. Archetypal psychology implies that the meaning of communications is inner, poetic, or (to use Hillman's latest metaphor) that it unfolds according to its inner structure and coding like an acorn seed growing into an oak tree. (14) This is to miss its relational aspect, and in particular to imply that the individual grows according to inner processes, essentially untouched by current interpersonal experience. (15)

What seems to me now to be a more fruitful perspective – and one that contains all that is exciting and necessarily corrective about the Hillmanian perspective without falling down one of the polar traps of solipsism or unconscious activism – is one that sees the world as being minded (having a mind). In such a cosmology individual minds are not unique and isolated and unconnected, not encoded with unique patterns which then seek out their fulfilment in the world, but are rather ideas of the one mind and connected with each in some complex way which gives them both individual and collective being. This is a Spinozan viewpoint taken up by the Romantic philosophers and of course is not at all foreign to Hillmanian discourse (16) though it can be missed by too 'individually-soulful' a reading of it.

And of course what I'm commenting on here is not Hillman (whose writing is many-faceted, polycentric, deliberately shifting and subtle) so much as my too-individually-soulful reading of him, a one-sided intoxication which has supported my tendency to be an observer of archetypal affairs rather than a participant in human ones.

Endnotes

(1) For example [p44 Hillman (1995)] he writes:

Priapean enormity [Priapos, son of Aphrodite, had an enormous phallus] has many gods in it - lots of Gods. It can't be read simply ... Each Priaprean excitation has in it the powers of Aphrodite, Dionysus, Hades, Zeus, maybe Hermes, and so on... This is what polytheistic psychology teaches about any event. There is a complex imagination released rather than a simple explanation that identifies and closes the question. We get a story rather than a reduction or a moralism, and each mythical story involves another. As the German Romantics said, 'Never, never does one God appear alone.'

(2) pp 283-284 Malouf (1990)

(3) pp 20-21 Hillman (1990)

(4) pp 48 Hillman (1990)

(5) p 66 Hillman (1990)

(6) p 186 Hillman (1976)

(7) p 246 Hillman (1990)

(8) p 15 Hillman (1990)

(9) see for example pp 149-150 Hillman (1990)

The wound and the eye are one and the same. From the psyche's viewpoint, pathology and insight are not opposites - as if we hurt because we have no insight and when we gain insight we shall no longer hurt. No. Pathologizing is itself a way of seeing; the eye of the complex gives the peculiar twist called psychological insight. We become psychologists because we see from the psychological viewpoint, which means by benefit of our complexes and their pathologizings.

(10) see for example p 234 Hillman (1990)

(11) pp 19-29 Hillman (1990)

(12) pp 30-31 Hillman (1990)

(13) p160 Book Nine Lines 94-96 of Homer's Odyssey

(14) see particularly Hillman (1996)

(15) see for example pp 195-196 Hillman (1979)

(16) Hillman draws on the Romantic tradition when he talks about [p 97 Hillman 1996)

the quickening soul in which our lives are bedded. For Wordsworth and for mythic sensibility in general, the acorn in not embedded in me, like a pacemaker in my heart, but rather I am embedded in a mythical reality of which the acorn is but my particular and very small portion. What the Romantics called 'the quickening soul' is today named psychic reality. It is all over the place, although we insist it is invisible.