Chapter 9 Angry rumblings

Part B: Attempts at mating

A week later we had our next session and Joseph began by telling me about a new incident that had involved the police. I was surprised by the lightness in his voice. This time there was no hint of the sweaty anxiety he'd felt when cars in the street or a phone ringing reminded him that the police might get involved.

‘We had our school formal last night, and it was so fun, Steve,’ he told me, his narrative punctuated by giggles. ‘You should have seen the girls!’ They were wearing these hairdos full of hairspray, combustible material just waiting to be set off! Then after the formal me and some of my male friends walked home and when we came to this main road some of my friends started to 'moon' at the cars... you know, pulling down their pants and showing their bare bums to the drivers! It was a riot! We were laughing and carrying on, and then this car stopped and I saw it was a police car. The policeman came over and told us we could get into trouble for this kind of thing, he gave us a warning and told us to go home, then he drove off.’

‘Your heart must have been in your mouth,’ I said, struggling to make contact with what I still suspected was an underlying panic.

‘No, not at all. I didn't feel any of the old anxiety. That's gone now, almost entirely gone, except sometimes when I hear Mum on the phone and think the conversation might be about what happened, that there might be another parent who has complained or something. No, last night was just good fun. I seem to have disconnected myself from all of that old anxiety?’

‘You've cut yourself off,’ I said. ‘You're no longer connected.’

‘That's the way it seems,’ said Joseph. ‘You know, I had a dream last night that I've suddenly remembered. For some reason it's just come into my head. In my dream I was walking somewhere in my pyjamas, going nowhere in particular, through the streets of this city, and then I was floating or flying high up or walking through the air above the streets, walking between these high buildings. It was weird.’ Again he laughed, in the same kind of way he'd laughed telling me about the mooning. He seemed in a particularly good mood.

‘Does telling me the dream bring anything else to mind?’ I asked. ‘Does it remind you of anything?’

‘Well, again I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of when I was really little and wandering around the house one night. Sort of just wandering around going nowhere. I must have been about 2 or 3 at the time.’ Again Joseph laughed almost mockingly, as if the little Joseph were a figure of fun, like the girls with their extravagant and combustible hairdos. There was something about this little Joseph that he didn't like.

‘So little Joseph was just wandering aimlessly around the house at night,’ I said

‘Yes, he'd lost his teddy bear,’ said Joseph. ‘I don't really remember what happened except that I was upset because I couldn't find my teddy bear. I guess I was wandering around looking for it.’

'Miserable,' I said.

‘Yes, probably,’ Joseph said lightly. ‘Crying probably.’

‘I notice that you're laughing now as you talk about this distressed little boy who was you.’

‘Yes, it's like there's a gap between the sixteen-year-old me looking back and the three-year-old distress... it's like the distress no longer matters ... it's unreal.’

‘The sixteen-year-old you is floating up there above like in the dream, looking down on the little three-year-old, not feeling the distress. There's a gap between the observer and the hurt little boy.’

‘Yes, that's it,’ he said. ‘That's the connection with my dream.’

‘The gap exists because of the time, because you're looking back over time. But the gap also exists right now. It was there in the library when you masturbated, when ‘something came over you’, as if it had happened to another person.’

‘That's spot on,’ he said. ‘I think that's absolutely right.’

‘There's something that the little distressed boy had which you've lost. He could feel his little boy feelings. He could feel upset and angry and distressed. These things are difficult for you now. It's difficult for the big boy to feel these things.’

‘My "big boy" feelings are to do with computers and the TV,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That's what the observing you says. But what that leaves out are the big boy feelings to do with sex, power, hate, malice, evil ...’

‘And anger,’ he said. ‘I think you're absolutely right here. I feel that I'm being pushed….. that's not quite the right word, but it will do ... pushed back into my feelings.’

‘And perhaps you're feeling very angry with me because you feel I'm pushing you back to your feelings.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I feel relieved. I feel that I have to be pushed, that it's necessary, and it's a relief. I think this is somehow to do with discovering who I really am ... I've always had this thing about not crying ... It's so hard to show my feelings, even to feel them ... I didn't cry at all at my pop's funeral and people commented on that because I really loved him ... it was only when I got a glimpse of him in the bed in the hospital that I felt full of grief and I cried in the corridor ...’

He was quiet for a while. At the end of our session I asked if perhaps we might make another appointment before our scheduled session a week away, but he thought not. ‘I’m glad I talked about this,’ he said, ‘but I don't think I want to talk about it any more.’

After he'd gone I wrote up some notes in which I reflected on the session we'd just had. It had been a good one. He'd arrived feeling distanced from the anxieties that had beset him, a dream and a memory had taken us into a conversation which laid out very clearly the way he cut himself off from strong feeling, and we'd connected this to what had happened in the library. Joseph's disowning of his distressed self created a cut-off part that acted outside of his conscious control. He could see this as we talked, he seemed animated by the insight. He felt he was being pushed back into connection with this disowned part, and was feeling 'relieved'. The work we were doing, he had said, was ‘somehow to do with discovering who I really am’.

So I was feeling quite buoyed up when I rang Giles.

‘You're sounding very pleased with how it went,’ said Giles after I'd told him about the session. ‘Quite right too. You're sounding more confident, more able to access what you think and to say it.’

‘I'm feeling more like I used to as a teacher,’ I said. ‘Less careful, more able to jump in and take part in what is happening in the room.’

‘That comes across,’ said Giles.

‘So today I want to talk a bit more theoretically about what is happening in the room. I want to revisit a conversation you and I have had on and off over the past while, to do with what's real and what's created.’

‘You're not talking about these two as if they're different things are you?’

I was silent for a moment. That had been my presumption. I'd been thinking about the session with Joseph and how it had seemed that we'd got closer to something that was real, something that had existed all the time Joseph had been coming to see me, which was his tendency to shy away from deep feeling. And I'd been thinking about how Joseph had created a story around this ('Stuff doesn’t really bother me, you have to just get on with things'), and how internal and external realities were threatening this story, making it difficult to hold, breaking it down in some kind of way. So, yes, I was seeing the two as different, the creation being threatened by the reality.

‘I suppose that's exactly what I want to talk about,’ I said. ‘There's still a part of me that wants to see what is real and what is created as belonging to two different categories, even though I'm saying in my thesis that our stories are creations which determine our reality ... But ….. and this is what is confusing to me ... I do feel the distinction lodged somewhere deep inside me, a deeply ingrained conviction that there's a reality which exists separately from our experience or perception or thinking ... and maybe it's this conviction that keeps interfering with my ability to stay in the moment. I’m continually on the look out for what's real, what's hidden, what's behind the creation or the story presently being told .. and that feels both inescapable and limiting ... Is any of this making sense?’

‘Perfect sense Steve. I know exactly what you mean. To use the language of the philosophers, are there just appearances or is there a 'thing-in-itself’?' You, I take it, believe that there is a fundamental reality, something perhaps unknowable but real, something existing behind the appearances, in some kind of non-causal but intimate relationship with them?’

‘I want to try to keep this grounded,’ I said, ‘I want to relate it to the session I've just had with Joseph. What felt good about the session is that we seemed to make some kind of contact with something that was real, that resonated with Joseph's experience of himself. It wasn't just a clever and articulate interpretation of events by me, invested with my adult and psychological experience, it wasn't just a clever creation which worked well enough. Our session took us closer to something that was real.’

Closer to Bion's O (1),’ said Giles.

‘Exactly. For some reason … perhaps because of all the work we'd already done together ... Joseph and I found ourselves able to meet in some new territory, to talk about things that were present in the session as he talked about mooning, about his dream of floating above the buildings and about the lost teddy bear.’

‘I follow this Steve, but I'm not yet getting why you're seeing this distinction as so problematic, as something you want to talk about. Why does it matter?’

‘Because it flies in the face of postmodern assumptions about the nature of reality. As I understand it, it's fashionable nowadays to say that there's no fundamental reality, nothing holding it all together, no objective pattern, that all we have is our different stories or readings of events, each of which is valid or understandable or whatever.’

‘And isn't this what your thesis is saying?’ said Giles.

‘That's what's so puzzling at the moment,’ I said. ‘It does seem to be saying that. I like the idea of there being lots of ways of viewing an event, of none of them being fundamentally right, of each perhaps holding in it an aspect of something that's too complicated to be taken in from the one perspective.’

‘But you dislike the implication that anything goes, that one interpretation is necessarily as good as another.’

‘Exactly! Perhaps it's the older brother in me Giles, but I like the idea of rigour, of continuing to try to come up with an explanation of things that illuminates the multi-factorial dynamic complexity of phenomena, which resonates not just with the interpreter's world view but with what it is that the phenomena is complexly displaying. In other words I believe that the phenomena exists distinctly from the interpreter's interpretation. I believe that there is a sound in the forest, or something happening in the forest, even if there isn't any living thing there to hear it.’

‘And this is important for your work with Joseph because …’

‘Because if I didn't believe in any objective reality, if all that mattered was that I could tell a story about these events that would be convincing to me and probably convincing (because of my authority) to Joseph, then I would be stuck with the Hillmanian view of things which I find so exciting and stirring …’

‘ … but also limiting.'

‘I've found that it doesn't bring me closer to the actual person sitting in front of me.’

‘It gives you deep and soulful thoughts to have about the therapeutic encounter …’

‘It puts the focus in a Kantian way on my perceiving and on my story-telling, on my cut-off internal process, it prevents me from attempting to engage with what is actually happening in the room, with the person who is there with me and the interpersonal process that is taking place. My Hillmanian soulfulness is a barrier to my involvement. It doesn't help me to muck in there, to get involved, to feel things, to engage with a distressing and confusing and sometimes painful process.’

‘Joseph keeps telling you that he wants you involved. He wants you shaking the rope.’

‘It's changed, hasn't it. When he had the dream about the girl stealing his clothes, he was telling me that he didn't want me interfering. Now he feels differently.’

‘He feels other things as well as threatened by you.’

‘Yes you're right, it's never simple, it's not a matter of one feeling being replaced by another, but of things getting more complicated.’

‘Our job is to go for the complexity, complexify things, not to simply them.’

‘There's always more to be uncovered, to be revealed, to be expressed.’

‘As we've said before, we never reach some bedrock of fundamental truth. There's always more.’

‘And there's more because there is more, not because there's no end to the interpretations we can come up with.’

‘Steve, before you go can I read you a piece from Schopenhauer which perhaps you might enjoy, given what you've been saying today?’

‘The pessimistic Schopenhauer!’ I said. ‘This is sure to press some buttons.’

‘No, I think you'll like this one,’ said Giles. There a silence at the other end of the phone, and then Giles read the following:

To perceive, to allow things themselves to speak to us, to apprehend and grasp new relations between them, and then to precipitate all this into concepts, in order to possess it with certainty; this is what gives us new knowledge. ... The innermost level of every genuine and actual piece of knowledge is a perception... For this reason, the contemplation and observation of everything actual, as soon as it presents something new to the observer, is more instructive than all reading and hearing about it. For indeed, if we go to the bottom of the matter, all truth and wisdom, in fact the ultimate secret of things, is contained in everything actual, yet certainly only in concreto and like gold hidden in the ore. The question is how to extract it. (3)

Again, when Joseph arrived the following week, he was full of smiles and his tone was jocular. He was holding pages of scribbled notes in his hand, and began by saying, 'Well Steve, I've had a really long dream that I want to tell you about.’ He then began reading from his notes.

‘The dream began with Dad and my two brothers in this car travelling through Europe and we picked up this hitchhiker who was a farmer. But suddenly I was driving the car and the others were following behind in another car.’

‘Suddenly you were alone,’ I said.

‘That's right, though I knew the other were following. Anyway, I noticed that the car had only two foot pedals instead of three, and I thought it was missing a brake. Then just around the corner there was a traffic light on red and I didn't think I could stop so I stepped on the clutch hard and the car stopped. So then I realised that the car was an automatic and that what I thought was the clutch was in fact a brake.’

‘You thought you wouldn't be able to stop at the red light, but you discovered you could,’ I said. I wanted to press the brake myself, to linger for a bit with this image, but Joseph was wanting to tell me the whole dream. He was giving off the feeling that this was one of his creations and he wanted to parade it, have it appreciated, to lodge it inside me rather than have it dissected and analysed by my clever mind.

‘Then, suddenly, the landscape changed,’ he went on quickly. ‘Everything was dry, it looked like the Australian bush. We got to the hitch-hiker's place and suddenly the scale of things was all distorted, like lots of the houses were tiny, like toys. We drove down the driveway and right into the main bedroom of the farmer's house. My brothers and I got out of the car. Then three girls got out who we didn't know.’

‘You got out in the bedroom,’ I said. I had no idea why this mattered though the Freud-in-my-brain noticed which room it was. I hoped that by mentioning it Joseph might engage with the image but he was in no mood for slowing down.

‘Then we were outside walking down to where the miniature houses were, me and my brothers and the three girls, but the little houses had been demolished and removed and all that was left were the large tracks of a mini train and it was surrounded by lots and lots of flowers. The farmer was there and he told the lady who runs the place all about us and she was really nice and showed us around and answered all our questions. She said then that the houses were going to be put back soon.’

‘The kind woman was telling you missing things would soon be put back.’

‘This next bit is the best!’ he said, again ignoring me. I was feeling almost exhausted trying to keep up with the kaleidoscope of changing images. ‘We walked away to this bank that was covered in pansies and at first they were closed but as we looked they all opened at once and they looked absolutely beautiful.’

‘They opened up when you looked at them!’ I said, surprised and enjoying this image of flowers that opened up when looked at. Perhaps my spontaneous response had come from a different, less thinky part of myself than some of my earlier ones, and Joseph heard this one. He looked up and nodded, and I was encouraged to offer a further thought. ‘Maybe they opened up because you looked at them.’

‘I think so,’ he said, ‘I think that's right. It feels right... Anyway, then we did some swimming, first of all me with the group of boys that I hang out with at school. Then we got out and we were all sitting at this long table just like we did last week at the school formal. Then I was in the pool again, this time swimming with all of these girls. We connected ourselves up to each other and swam along one side of the pool and then we swam to the other side still connected. It was really weird.’

‘First you were with the boys, then you joined the girls,’ I said, feeling myself reverting to the banal but also wanting to engage with this dream, not just be whooshed along by it.

‘Yes, really weird,’ he said. ‘Then I noticed a spider in the pool and pointed it out, and everyone panicked and drained the pool so they could kill the spider. I thought it was a big fuss about nothing.’

‘They all seemed to think it was serious, but not you,’ I said.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured, looking fleetingly unsettled, sensing perhaps that my words were another attempt to make a link with previous explorations. But he was not going to be put off and again continued quickly. ‘Then the farmer took me to this place that I really liked but I wasn't able to stay there. I had to go back to the miniature place. But I really wanted to return to this place the farmer had shown me so I found a clearing in the bush and I flapped my arms and flew in what I thought must be the right direction.’

‘You could fly,’ I said

‘Yes, at first it was great, but then things kept happening to me. First of all there was a guy who was shooting ducks and started shooting at me but I called to him and he stopped, and luckily for me he was a hopeless shot. Then there were lots and lots of powerlines that kept getting in my way which I had to fly around or through.’

‘Powerlines kept getting in the way,’ I said.

‘I just couldn't find this wonderful place so I gave up and rang Dad to come and collect me, which he did. He wasn't angry just anxious to get me back in the car. On the drive back everything looked like it should …’

‘Looked like it should?’ I asked.

‘Well it had changed, it didn't look one bit like the Australian bush any more. It was green and lush and everything had grown. It was wonderful. The road was really hilly and windy and then I realized why they don't have a speed limit because you can't go that fast anyway otherwise you would come off the road.’

‘You have to slow down,’ I said, ‘Slowing things down keeps you safe.’

‘That's where it finished,’ said Joseph. ‘It was weird, weird and wonderful,’ he said.

I wanted him to take me back into it and tried a few more reflective comments, but all the while I was getting the message from him, ‘Don't touch this good mood. Don't try to get beneath the surface. I like where I am and I'm going to stay there. If you start delving around in here, this is the last dream I'm going to tell you. I'm showing you something. Just appreciate it.'

‘I have this sense,’ I said as he handed me the notes he'd been reading from, ‘that you're not wanting me work too hard on this dream.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. He looked more interested than defensive.

‘You want to tell me the dream but you don't want me to look beneath the surface, to try to see if it's significant in this work we're doing together.’

‘Yes, I guess that's right,’ he said. Then he laughed again. ‘It's as if you're crouching there in front of the safe and you know the right combination and you're trying to turn the knob the right way, but I keep coming past talking in my happy way and you pretend that you're not trying to get in.’

That was exactly how I felt!

‘But I don't know the right combination,’ I said, unfortunately focussing on my difficulties rather than on his happy talk. ‘I feel more like l'm trying to find it, trying to get us both working on cracking it together.’

‘How can we do that?’ His tone was back to that of the compliant student. He'd given me an opening to talk about his happy talk and I'd missed it, and for the moment it was clear that his recalcitrant impulse had returned underground where it would continue to disrupt and disturb.

‘Perhaps if we talk some more about the dream we might find a way in,’ I replied. This felt weak. I asked him about the landscapes, and he told me that there had always been a contrast for him between Australia (‘dry, brown, boring, flat and here’) and Europe (‘green, moist, beautiful, interesting, wonderful, and over there’). I expressed curiosity about the magical place the farmer had showed him, but he couldn't remember anything about it. His responses were as dry as the Australian landscape he found so boring.

I tried to get back to the image of the safe, but again my attempt missed the mark. ‘It's interesting that you used the image of the safe,’ I said. ‘Before today you've talked about whatever we're trying to find as being horrible, as being something you want to get rid of. But a safe holds valuable things.’

‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ he replied dutifully.

This was getting us nowhere, and mercifully the hour was soon over.

I rang Giles later that day for our supervision session, and this time my mood was more sober.

‘He couldn't stop himself,’ said Giles after I'd explained what had happened in the session. ‘It's like he's masturbating in front of you and you're trying to get him to think about it.’

Giles's response was, for a moment, shocking. I'd had lots of thoughts about what had happened, I'd filled a page with notes before my supervisory session with ideas that I wanted to discuss with Giles, but this cut through them all!

‘Are you still there Steve?’ Giles said after a moment.

‘I'm just trying to take in what you've just said.’

‘I'm sorry, it's not delicately put, but you know what I mean I think.’

‘I guess it's taking me a minute to assimilate it because it's not just a colourful way of describing the session, it makes this direct link with what happened in the library.’

‘It does, doesn't it,’ said Giles. ‘Do you know that hadn't occurred to me either until it was out. I was simply thinking about the scene in the session you'd described and I could feel Joseph's mounting excitement as he told you the dream and your attempts to slow him down, and the image popped out.’

‘I guess what's so shocking to me, and revelatory at the same time, is that the impulse or the compulsion to exhibit himself is so present. It was there in the room with us today.’

‘It's a part of him, Steve. It's what gets him into trouble.’

‘But what is it? What is it in its pure form?’

‘Goodness! What can you mean?’

‘What do I mean? Can I ramble for a bit. I'm not sure what I mean.’

‘Ramble away.’

‘Well, if I understand the implication of your intuitive response to Joseph's last session, there's a connection between Joseph wanking in the library and his exuberant and unstoppable telling of the dream to me. He has this impulse to exhibit himself. And I'm trying to get to the bottom of the nature of this impulse. Is it sexual? Is it to do with power? Is it sadistic?’

‘So this is what you mean when you wonder about its pure form?’

‘Not quite, I'm trying to get a grip on what the little boy in Joseph is trying to do. From what Joseph has said to me so far, the impulse is more to do with power and sadism, and revenge maybe, possibly more an adolescent urge to do something risky to wake people up ... anyway more in these areas than in the area of sex. The sex with the secretary was meaningless, it was just something to do. But what did the little boy in Joseph want?’

‘You're assuming here that what he wanted was denied to him, and that as a result the impulse has got twisted, perverted in some way, like the slug continually running into barbed wire barriers.’

‘It was when he was talking about the barriers that Joseph felt the hot lava, the anger,’ I said. ‘Yes, I'm talking about what the impulse was in its essence, before it got perverted.’

‘You resist the idea that evil is evil. For you it's the good perverted.’

‘I'm feeling uncomfortable with this word "perverted". It's got too many perjorative associations. Frustrated would be better. Yes, I think that evil is goodness frustrated.’

‘Lucifer loved God more than the others, that kind of thing.’

‘Melanie Klein said something similar about criminality, that crime is an enraged frustrated love.(4) But I don't want to get too theoretical here. I want to try to make contact with Joseph's primary impulse here. What was it he was trying to do when he told me the dream in the way he did? If I can get at that, maybe I'll be closer to understanding what he was trying to do in the library that day.’

‘He was wanting to impress father-Steve with his good-object dream,’ said Giles. ‘It was like a kindergarten show-and-tell.’

‘That's exactly what it was like!’ I said. ‘He was so keen to tell me the dream but reluctant to reflect with me on it. He was in performance mode. It was as though he was saying to me, “Look Steve, look at this wonderful creation of mine. Look how vividly my unconscious mind constructs things. Look at the fabulous complex and beautiful world that is shaped in my mind when I'm asleep. I want you to be swept along by my creation, impressed by it. I want you to be like the pansies which open themselves in appreciation because I am there.” He was a little boy showing me the blood on his knee, the balloon he'd just blown up, the cardboard cubby he had built and painted. It's all so familiar! This is what I used to see day after day when I was a school teacher!’

‘And while he didn't mind you slowing things down a bit, he didn't want to get thinky about it. He wanted you to respond, to be affected. His happy talk is developmentally vital to him, he's got to get you away from that safe for his own good.’

Again I felt brought up short by what Giles had just said.

‘You're saying that I have to get away from the safe?’

‘No, he's saying that. The part of him that is still motivated by what you've called the frustrated love. I'm not saying that.’

‘What are you saying then? Should I move away from the safe when he gets into his happy talk.’

‘Not move away, no. Just lean back against it and let him chatter on. Enjoy his dream, enjoy his performance. It is, after all, entertaining ... it's full of interesting stuff. Don't be the drama critic so much as the appreciative audience. But he doesn't want to lure you away from the safe either. He doesn't want his happy talk to work too well. He's relieved, remember, when you keep him on the job.’

‘Or he was in the previous session. Not in this one.’

‘It comes and goes. As I've said before, we're all like these twinkling stars showing different aspects of ourselves. Our twinkles come and go.’

Our session is about to begin. I've been thinking more about some of the images in Joseph's dream: the discovery of the brake at the red light, the miniature houses (reminiscent of previous nightmares), the car in the bedroom, the flowering pansies, the swimming in the spider's pool, the farmer's mysterious paradise, the fruitless and fraught flying, the winding road that imposes its own limited speed. But he doesn't want me tramping around in his dream in my clumsy boots. It's a poem, after all, with complex layers of unconscious meanings and webs of interconnections within and to the outside. It's a poem to be appreciated, and to hold now as part of our shared experience. We can refer to it, if the moment is right, but I mustn't reach in with my disembodied mind to pull it apart. He's looking for a different kind of engagement, one that brings his feeling life back into the foreground of his experiencing.

Joseph is looking preoccupied, moody, as he arrives, and as soon as he sits down he fixes me with a rather cold look.

"You're not looking very happy,’ I say.

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I'm fine,’ he says.

‘Your words are telling me you're fine, your body seems to be saying that there are some other feelings there as well.’

‘I'm a bit sick of having to come here,’ he says. ‘I suppose I feel frustrated, confused. And maybe embarrassed.’

‘You're are embarrassed as well as frustrated and confused.’

‘I suppose I feel like I'm on a stage in front of hundreds of people and I have this feeling that they'll see something inside me that is not natural, not acceptable. I want to get rid of it so I can get on with things.’

‘You're keen to get this done quickly,’ I say. ‘You're impatient to get on with things.’ I'm doing my level best to follow where he is taking me, but he's taking me back to the frustration and away from the embarrassment. I think the embarrassment is closer to the crux of the matter, but I'm quickly losing my own connection to it. It is possible that this is because at some level I'm aware that I might feel exposed or embarrassed if he shows me this embarrassing thing.

‘I feel frustrated because it's like we're not getting anywhere.’

‘We're not opening the safe,’ I say.

‘The safe's combination is in your hands, but the actual mechanism has the wrong number of pieces,’ says Joseph.

‘So the combination doesn't fit the mechanism. The combination doesn't work.’

‘I feel frustrated. It's so slow. It's like one day I went out fishing with some friends and the anchor got stuck and I was trying to row back to shore with the anchor partly down. They laughed at me, but I didn't realize what was happening. That's what it feels like now, that the anchor is down and we're going too slowly.’

Again there's a part of my mind that is telling me that this profusion of images – exposed on a stage, holding a combination that won't work, rowing a boat with its anchor down – are coming partly from an overactive intellectualising mind, that he's operating in a domain that denies feeling. What's the feeling? I think it's something to do with shame.

‘I guess rowing with the anchor down could be embarrassing too if the others are laughing at you, I say,’ trying to get back to what I think I'm hearing is the deeper and more painful feeling.

‘I just want to get the anchor up and the boat moving,’ he says, moving me back up to the surface frustration and away from deeper waters where shame might be lurking.

‘Perhaps then we could talk some more about speed,’ I say. ‘I've been thinking about it as I thought some more about your dream. You remember the windy road didn't need speed limits because cars had to travel slowly. Maybe that's true of what we're doing. We need to go slowly.’

‘I couldn't stand it,’ he says forcefully. ‘Really, I just want to do what I have to do here and then get on with things. There's lots I want to be doing during these holidays. I want to move quickly. I want to be finished by the end of next week.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I might be wrong but I don't think that's being realistic, not unless we were to meet twice every day.’

‘You're joking!’ he says incredulously, looking me now full in the face.

‘I don't think it's wise to rush through this,’ I say. ‘If you want things resolved by the end of next week, then I think we've got to try to fit about ten sessions into the week.’

‘I want it to be finished,’ he says tersely.

‘I'm making no guarantees. Even if we had two sessions a day for the next week, there's no guarantee that we'd be finished. But we could try?’

‘I don't know ... I don't think I could manage that ...’ he says, his mind apparently racing as he tries to process and adjust to what I've been saying. ‘It's like taking a whole week out of my holidays ... but if I have to, I suppose I have to ..’

For a few minutes we negotiate times. Then Joseph resumes his stiff and hostile coldness.

‘Well?’ he asks.

In the past I've experienced this as an absence of feeling, but I'm now aware that intense feeling is present. It's concentrated, condensed, cold and controlled.

‘Well, where are we?’ he repeats.

‘Yes, where are we?’ I parry. There's an immense distance between us.

‘I have no idea where we are,’ he says icily. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Disengaged,’ I say.

‘What!’ he cries incredulously. ‘Disengaged from what?’

I laugh. Am I retaliating now, paying him back for his hostility? Or just struggling to stay in control myself?

‘Lots of answers come to mind,’ I say. ‘Each other?’

‘I don't know what you mean?’ he says. It's clear, as we sit in the thickening silence, that he's becoming increasingly agitated and angry. For a while he drums his fingers loudly on the armchair. Then he slaps his thighs with a rhythm that expresses increasing fury.

‘Well?’ he cries at last. ‘This is getting us nowhere. Yes, I feel frustrated, and angry. We're sitting here, there's nothing in me, I'm not feeling anything in particular, there's nothing to work with, I've got better things to be doing with my time, things I could be doing if I were at home. Of course I feel angry. Nothing's happening.’

‘Something's happening,’ I say. ‘You're feeling agitated and angry.’

‘So? What's the point? Where does this get us?’

‘Anger has been something that's been difficult for you.’

‘So, I sit here and feel angry and some of it seeps out of me and I go home feeling less angry? Is that the point? Is that what's going to happen?’

‘I don't know.’

More silence. Increasingly intense, then disengaged with yawning.

At one point I say, ‘Your silence is very powerful. It destroys anything that comes near it, then you feel angry that there is nothing near.’ Joseph just grunts, his face set angrily, his eyes staring out the window.

A lot of time has now passed. We've been sitting in this hostile silence for over half an hour and there are just a few minutes to go before the session is supposed to end.

‘I wonder,’ I say ‘if there's anything that can be done about these silence blues.’

My remark, echoing one of his own when we'd been speaking on the phone a few weeks back, seems to have punctured the mood, exposed a less intransigent Joseph who actually wants things to move on in some way.

‘Mmm,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Well, you know how we've sometimes thought of this block of mine as a wall or a barrier, with feelings on the other side? Well, it's as though the mortar is made of my anger, and as I sit here feeling the anger the mortar is crumbling and so the wall isn't going to be such an obstacle any more.’

Quite out of the blue I feel a rush of fury. Even before he's finished speaking I've expelled a loud breath and am shifting agitatedly around in my seat. He keeps talking till he's finished his sentence, but I can see he's aware of my unexpected reaction.

‘So the work is done and you can leave!’ I say sarcastically. ‘The wall is now about to crumble and everything is OK. Come on Joseph!’

He's sitting there, looking surprised by my outburst but not shocked.

Then, as suddenly, I feel composed. I'm momentarily at a loss, confused about my reaction though I'm sure it was real. Was I angry because he felt like the devil tempting me to believe that the work was nearly done? On the spur of the moment I decide to try to look at his anger as if it were an object which belonged exclusively neither to me or to him, like one of Bion's thoughts looking for a thinker.

‘I just felt this enormous rush of anger,’ I say. ‘It's as though your mind has expelled it from your body and it's rushed into me.’

‘That sounds like science fiction,’ he says.

‘It does a bit, doesn't it,’ I say. ‘Yet I'm not sure how else to talk about what I've just experienced. It's almost like there's this anger in you that you get in touch with intensely now and then, but which is usually kept at a distance. You don't like being angry. It leads you to lose control with the bullies. But there are lots of things you actually feel angry about, so there's this question for you about what to do with that anger that you don't want, that leads to you to lose control.’

‘You're saying I've got anger that I can't do anything with?’

‘I'm saying that you've got to do something with it. One thing you might do is to expel it so that it enters into other people, and other people then find themselves all stirred up and out of control.’

‘That's weird!’

‘I wonder. Isn't that what you want to happen with the bullies for example. You like it when you make them lose control. It's like a victory for you. When the bullies get upset, when your brother gets upset, when I get upset, it's a victory for you.’

‘I don't really get it, though it's interesting,’ says Joseph. ‘Are you saying that the anger you felt was my anger that somehow I'd expelled into you ... that's weird! … or that you were just angry with me because somehow I'd annoyed you, I'd got under your skin?’

‘To be honest,’ I say, ‘I don't know. It feels like both are partly true, though not the whole truth. I don't know. We need more time. Maybe we're going to find out some more about the way you use anger, the way you control it and use it. I don't know.’

‘So we'll just see,’ he says.

‘I guess so,’ I say. ‘But anger has certainly been present today. It's not spent all it's time on the other side of a wall. The gap hasn't been so wide today!’

‘We're getting somewhere,’ he says.

‘It seems that we're getting somewhere. But I'm still wondering what will happen if we haven't got far enough after our intense work, two sessions a day, next week?’

‘Continue I suppose,’ he says, again looking unhappy and agitated.

What is the nature of learning? It's a question whose answer is buried under a mountain of rubble constructed out of a Cartesian and Lockean mindset which equates learning with order, mastery, progress and a disciplined and distanced cerebral objectivity. We can no longer see what without the rubble would be obvious: that to want to live is to be gripped by a compulsion to learn, that learning and loving are intertwined in ways that might almost be called sexual, and that a blocked pathway to desired knowledge can make us mad. There's an urgency there and a hunger, an agitation and seeking for satisfaction.

‘What?’ objects the mindset. ‘How long is it since you were in a classroom? Learning is a chore, an obligation, a good idea... more a duty than a passion.'

But the urgency is as likely to take us violently away from the classroom and the status quo as it is to impel us to sit receptively at our desks. It's almost always accompanied by discomfort (otherwise why change anything?) and also by notions (often unconscious) of an unavailable good. (5) (The soul, so both Plato and Hillman remind us, is drawn to beauty.) The agitations which attend learning are upsetting, upsetting of balances and equilibriums. In the disequilibrium something new can be admitted to the system.

This urge to learn is located as much in our bodies as in our heads. I stroke my beard, pace around the house or through the woods, smooth out the first page of my new book and appreciate its aesthetics, chew my lip, speak my blocked thought out loud in my solitary study. Our desire to take in more of the world of 'not me' is felt as much in our pores as in our synapses ... or, as Spinoza would say, in both simultaneously because in reality there's no distinction.

(Behind everything is its opposite, Giles would sometimes say to me. Behind the urge to know is the wish to shut the world out, to stay within the walled garden of what we know. Energy is spent on this project too.)

The upsetting agitations of learning, the pain and the pothos, are what drives the urge to know. Research is not the result of a dispassionate standing back from, and rational sifting through of, the objective scene that presents itself (though this might be a part of the process once it's underway); rather it's fuelled by a bodily-felt need to reduce the discomfort and/or pursue the longed-for good.

To feel useless (as I did at times in my work with Joseph) was to feel the lack of something. Pain and pothos. It was to feel empty, to feel that something essential was missing. Either I didn't have inside me what it took to be a therapist, or there wasn't a sufficient connection with Joseph (i.e the world out there) to make my capacities useful. I'd experience it as a kind of not living, a lack of vitality, a lacuna, experienced as a disengaging tightening around my eyeballs and a sagging in my shoulders. At times I'd withdraw into a soulful despair or engage in a gushy activism, each of which made a distance between me and the emptiness.(6)

But while making a distance relieved the symptoms temporarily, it wasn't sustainable. The horror of the Hannibal dream, the ongoing challenge of clients like Joseph, the willingness of Giles to engage with these questions, all encouraged me to learn something new. I was feeling useless, often did, and it was a constant puzzle to me that others didn't seem to feel so useless ... people I admired, whose professional practice seemed more vital, less hamstrung ... Giles, for example. As in the famous orgasm scene from the film When Harry Met Sally, I wanted some of what they were having, and in this case (with Giles) what he seemed to be having was an ongoing relationship with a dynamic body of thought, informed both by the philosophers who preceded Freud and Jung and by the analytic thinkers who succeeded them. I wanted more of that.

This feeling of being gapped, of being incomplete, of wanting more of the good and less of the painful, inevitably expressed itself in a series of questions. That's what question are, expressions of a perceived lack, attempts to find something to fill in the gap, to relieve the tension of there not being enough.

So the questions came crowding in. I was feeling useless. It wasn’t that I hadn’t felt useless in other situations or with other clients. It’s just that for whatever reason the feeling had become intolerable in its present state. Why was I feeling this way? Was it that I was myself flawed, unable to provide this young person with what he needed? Was it some resistance in Joseph himself, something to do with his nature? Or was it the therapeutic project which was flawed, promising relief that it was unable to deliver?

Other questions clustered themselves around these ones, and in particular the big one: What is a person? When a Joseph arrives at my door, what is the nature of this being? Is this some intricate system boundaried by skin, burdened with a malfunctioning part and in need of a healer? Or is it perhaps an evolving being looking for a particular kind of partner?

These questions implied others, to do with the nature of the therapeutic relationship. Do we therapists sit there having things done to us, to which we then react? Or are we more actively and creatively involved from the outset?

I like questions. They focus my thinking and seem to excite my molecules; I feel more energetic and active when I'm gripped by them. They get me searching, digging, observing, wondering, experimenting, talking and writing, and I end up seeing the original problem from different angles. The circumambulation around questions gives me more room in which to move: unambiguous answers push me into a corner from which there is only one (hemmed in) way of seeing things. (7)

To ask a question (to engage in research, to learn) is to look around for connections which might fill up a gap. No, that's not quite the right image. It doesn't fill up the gap so much as enliven the gapped space which before felt dead. It excites sluggish molecules. It gets things moving, animates and unbalances, and has the potential to reconnect the ailing part with an alive world

This is familiar territory in the psychoanalystic literature. Jung wrote about it as being at the heart of both the psychic life, where opposites are continually manifesting each other and producing an intolerable and enlivening tension which must be attended to. Klein wrote about the battleground where loves vied with hates, goods with bads, and Bion then used Kleinian concepts to suggest that our thinking is characterised by the continual tension and interplay between the fierce, destabilising, energetic certainties of the paranoid-schizoid position and the more tolerant ambiguities of the complex depressive position. (8) This line of thinking found its own expression amongst the post-Jungians with Fordham's states of deintegration where the primal self opens itself up to the outside world, incorporates some new experience and then reintegrates back to a state of perceived wholeness with the new 'deintegrate' a part of an expanded world.

And it was Giles, in our conversations and in his published writing, who kept reminding me that the urge to open ourselves up to the world was relational, that it was to do (fundamentally) with other people. We are animated, Giles would say, by what he called 'the relational energy', that vital force which leads us instinctively to make contact with others in the world. This is

a vital force or urge which energetically permeates the psyche-soma and naturally and necessarily reaches out to mate with the human environment, in other words with other embodied vital persons. Initially this is the mother's body, or experienced aspects of the mother's body including the insides of mother and her mind ... It seems that this is like a primal vital spark which instinctively lives itself out between me and the world, making life between me and the world, seeming to find it. (9)

And while this 'vital force' can be thought of as being like a substance located inside us (so that some of us have more of it than others, or so that we have more of it at some times in our lives than at others), it is not actually experienced as being an individual attribute ‘coming from the inside', but more as something that permeates the world (the anima mundi) and in a sense comes from the outside.

I am here really trying to re-emphasize Jung's understanding of the reality of the psyche and to acknowledge its plurality and creative vitalism. It gives each of us our experience of being forcibly pushed around by a multiplicity of unconscious affective complexes, or subpersonalities, in such a way that they disillusion and relativize our sense of being in control and instead make us question our sense of unity. As Jung said, our unconscious psychic complexes (as well as contingent acts of nature) sometimes disturb our conscious intentions so utterly and shockingly that such a fateful personal experience can legitimately be called God. (10)

The urge to know more is another form of the urge to connect, which is always an attempt to establish relationships. (11) In hindsight I can now see that asking myself why I was feeling useless had as much to do with deepening my relationship with Giles and an intellectual tradition which could sustain me in my work as it did with finding some answer to a riddle.

There's a philosopher's question that has affected me since I was a little boy. Does an idea about something have to explain the place and nature of that idea in the thing that it is attempting to explain? Or, to put it another way, does the idea belong to the system it is purporting to explain (and therefore must the idea itself be included in the phenemenon being addressed), or does it exist outside the frame, looking in from the outside, as it were, and therefore not needing to be itself explained by itself?

It has always seemed natural to me that the idea must be included. I've always found myself uncomfortable with a particular brand of rationalism that assume an ability to see from on high, or from the outside. I'm intuitively suspicious of any implication that the thinking or the thought has enabled the thinker to so distance himself from the phenomena that he is free of its imperatives. I think this is why I'm drawn more to Jung than to Freud, to Spinoza, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer than to Descartes, Kant or Hegel, to Hillman than to Klein. We're in it, a part of it all, and our thoughts are a part of what we're in (and must therefore be explicable by themselves).

So this little thesis-section on the urge to know applies not just to the Steve-over-there and his need to address a gappy space; it can also be read to be a comment on itself, on the project of writing the section, a project which was attended with all the lip chewings and restless pacings and other bodily agitations which are a part of all my attempts to know.

ENDNOTES

(1) Eigen [pp 219-220 (1985)] says :

Bion (1970) associates the struggle to know (K) with possessiveness (Keat's "irritable reaching after facts and reasons"), sensuousness, and the container-contained relationship. Strictly speaking, the date of psychoanalysis are non-sensuous and ineffable. Faith is the medium of access to psychoanalysis data. It undercuts and transcends our controlling needs and enables us to experience the impact of emotional reality in a way that allows the latter genuinely to evolve.

Bion uses the sign, O, to stand for the emotional reality of moment, or, in general, ultimate reality as such. In itself it is unknowable but the analyst opens himself in the faith that he will meet it. He aims at the emotional truth of a session. The impact the patient has is translated into guesses or convictions about what is truly happening. The situation is both Kantian and mystical. The analyst aims at ultimate reality but must work with hyptheses. The subject becomes more-at-one with himself and his capacity to experience. A paradoxical result is that faith enhances rather than mutes precision. One's contact with subtle nuances of experience deepens as one develops an appreciative sensibility for what remains out of reach. The very taste of experience gains new meaning. The subject learns the gesture of repeatedly starting from scratch, of living in a wall-less moment and sensing his walls in ways that make a difference.

F in O approaches an attitude of pure receptiveness. It is an alert readiness, an alive waiting. Bion describes how uncomfortable one may be in this open state. One must tolerate fragmentation, whirls of bits and pieces of meaning and meaninglessness, chaotic blankness, dry periods, and psychic dust storms.

Or as Bion himself puts it [p 145 Bion (1967)1):

The psychoanalyst accepts the reality of reverence and awe, the possibility of a disturbance in the individual which makes atonement and, therefore, an expression of reverence and awe impossible. The central postulate is that atonement with ultimate reality, or O, as I have called it to avoid involvement with an existing association, is essential to harmonious mental growth. It follows that interpretation involves elucidation of evidence touching atonement, and not evidence only of the continuing operation of immature relationship with a father. The introduction of "sense" or "direction" involves extensions of existing psychoanalytic theory.

(2) Jarman's Wittgenstein expressed this as follows [Jarman (1994)]

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

(3) Quoted pp 475-6 Magee (1998) from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea

(4) See Chapter 7 above, endnote 1.

(5) Adam Phillips and Iris Murdoch suggest that to understand a thought we must know what the thinker is frightened of and what the thinker loves Ip xi Phillips (1995)]. Eric Rhode argues that ideas derive from two sources: mental pain and a notion of the ideal Ip 3 Rhode (1994)]. Charles Taylor talks about thinking as being our stepped reaction to an inadequate framework [pp 57-73 Taylor (1989)] and our behaviour as being animated and shaped by our notion of the good [pp 42ff Taylor 1989].

(6) Rumi says [quoted Hollis (1998)]:

Unconscious and insane, I spill
sad energy everywhere.

(7) Hillman [p 7 Hillman (1971)] expresses this sentiment as follows:

We shall today be entertaining a theme, rather than answering a problem, hoping our method to move us through a series of reflections on the same subject, like a string of water colours, evoking insights, perspectives, emphasizing metaphorical speech, aiming to suggest and open, and where the aim is not a conclusion, not to close the subject, but to open it further.

(8) For Bion, says Eigen, [p 213 Eigen 1993],

the double function, Ps < D, is at the centre of a theory of the mind. It represents the elemental and ubiquitous presence of the mind's ability to divide-and-unite..... For Bion the breaking-up of D has as much primal value as its creation.

(9) p 366 Clark (1996)

(10) p 347 Clark (1995)

(11) This is also another way of talking about Spinoza's idea about conatus, Hegel’s guest, Schopenhauer's will, Nietzsche's will to power, Freud's life and death in individuation and Hillman's acorn theory. While these are of course not identical, each of these is an attempt to describe the sense we have of being driven by forces beyond our rational control.