Introduction

Clearly there's been a paradigm shift since Freud articulated the psychoanalytic project, from an intrapsychic drive theory to one which focuses on the intersubjective, whether that be expressed in terms of projection and projective identification (1), the four basic transference types (2), the infection of the analyst's unconscious (3), the nature of the countertransference (4) or the existence of a creative potential space (5). When a therapist sits with a client these days, she is more aware of her participation in a living process and less hung up in elusive attempts to identify a drive, reveal a repression or solve a riddle. This is a new paradigm, a new way of understanding the therapeutic drama, a new theoretical perspective which has come partly as a result of experienced limitations with the old paradigm, partly through the revelations of infant research (6) and partly out of sympathy with a postmodern consciousness which casts doubt on the possibility of objective certainty.

It's a new paradigm that I am eager to embrace. It makes more sense of what I experience, it sits more easily with many of my other consciously-held assumptions about human relationship and psychological pain and pleasure.

But I've discovered that it's not as easy to free myself of the old paradigm as I thought it would be. The old paradigm, I have found to my consternation, is inside me, is in my body, shaping (along with more postmodern sensibilities) the way I experience the world, the way I conduct my psychotherapy practice. Sometimes this old paradigm presents itself in its traditional shape (encouraging me to try to behave like a Freud) and sometimes it crops up disguised in more postmodern dress (encouraging me to act more like a Hillman (7)). In whatever form, it lulls me into the position of observer of, rather than participant in, events. In the end (rather like Freud in his more pessimistic moments) I end up feeling useless.

In a sense, then, this thesis is about the difficult experience of attempting to free oneself of the old in order to embrace the new. It suggests that the first step in this is to recognize the sometimes unconscious grip of the old and implies that the grip of the old is more tenacious than the current professional literature admits. The old paradigm lives, even if only partly consciously and in an uneasy relationship with the new, and it effects the way we go about our work. Or at least it has with me.

This thesis also suggests that the point about recognizing the old is not simply to eradicate it. There's what I hope is a more subtle suggestion being made, that the process of identifying what is actually present (rather than operating as if it didn't exist) is in itself valuable. There is blocked energy in what is felt but denied space in consciousness, blocked energy which is unavailable because confined. I felt useless but tried for a while to ignore this. It was only when I allowed myself to really feel the uselessness, the frustration, the anger and the humiliation that I found I had energy for something more. In this sense recognising the old, turning my attention to it, allowing myself to feel its existence in my body, helped me to move towards something less constricting.

It helped, but it wasn't the whole story. Allowing myself to feel what I was feeling released energy, but I needed to find some way of channelling it. The energy needed some constructive (and constructed) channel down which to flow. In other words, I needed to think. This thesis, then, is also an account of the ways my mind attempted to construct a useful theoretical perspective.

One aspect of this thinking was to learn how others had thought about these matters. Jung, Klein, Bion, Kohut and Winnicott had all found aspects of Freudian thinking limiting and had thought their way to new paradigms. Others had followed in their footsteps. Conversations with my clinical supervisor Giles Clark (8) – who, from now on, I'll call simply Giles – deepened my appreciation of these thinkers, helped me to see ways in which adopting their perspectives threw light on my own experience and pointed the way towards a more active and effective engagement.

The conversations did more than that. They revealed some of the foundations on which the philosophical thinking of Jung and Freud stood, the ideas of Spinoza, Kant, Herder, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Romantics, and the Enlightenment thinkers. These sources, as both Taylor and Ellenberger (9) point out, not only informed Freud's thinking but exist in an uneasy alliance of mismatched assumptions behind our own postmodern consciousness. Knowing more about the philosophers meant that I knew more about unconscious aspects of my own thinking patterns.

So, could I transcend the limits of the old paradigm by adopting the conceptual framework of one of the many who had? If I could think more like Jung, or Hillman or Winnicott... or if I could go back further and think more like Spinoza or Goethe or Nietzsche ... would I free myself? Or if I could simply adopt Giles's theoretical perspective, would the problem be fixed? I tried all of this, as this thesis reveals, and not without some success and obvious practical benefit.

But neither was that enough. I somehow had to make the thinking mine. It had to be, to a certain extent, a creative and individual process, something that grew out of my own experience and preferred ways of processing the world. Klein and Bion had moved the Freudian project on by imagining evacuations and injections of affects, Winnicott by writing about play and the use of the transitional object, Jung by seeing therapy as an alchemical process, Kohut by distinguishing between different developmental needs as reflected in the transference, and Giles by highlighting the consequences of a 'relational urge'. What could be my own take on this shift?

I discovered that what made most sense to me was to think about the therapeutical interaction in terms of story-telling. To make this shift, to think of therapy as two people telling stories to each other (10) suddenly allowed room for the drama, the complexity, the dynamic nature of what I actually experienced.

My fifteen-year-old client Joseph tells me a story. It's an exciting story and I rush off and include it in a talk I'm giving to the local Jung Society. But then my next session with Joseph is unexpectedly flat, I have a disquieting dream and I find myself wondering if I somehow missed the point of Joseph's story. So I talk to my supervisor Giles and I tell him the story (and the story of my confusion) and Giles tells me a story or two of his own. At our next session Joseph tells me some more stories (by now I'm using the word 'story' to describe many different kinds of things, but more of that in the body of the thesis) and the stories I tell him back have incorporated in them some Joseph-bits and Giles-bits. This three-way storytelling (with cross-fertilisations) continues for over a year and I then write a thesis (another story!) about it.

As soon as I began to think about my work in this way using the language of story-telling, the question around which my thesis must revolve became obvious. What's all this story telling about? What is going on here?

I knew that at one level the answer was obvious, hardly worth bothering about. A story teller is trying to tell a story. There's something that the story teller is trying to convey. There's a story that the story teller knows and he or she wants to tell it to someone else. It's simple.

But the more I reflected on my experience, the more I found that it wasn't quite so simple, that this apparently transparent and natural act was (like the act of breathing for example) made up of a myriad of subtle and complex sub-processes. And the more I discovered about these less obvious aspects of story-telling and the more I thought about what these less obvious aspects were telling me about the nature of story-telling, the more I found myself receptive to what it was that Joseph was trying to do when he talked to me... the more, in the other words, I found myself released from some of the limitations of the Freudian paradigm.

I discovered, for example, that the idea that a story teller is trying to convey something is an inadequate idea, that it contains an assumption that can be quite limiting to the therapist who is listening to the story being told. I can best explain this by describing the difference between thinking of a story as a noun and thinking of story-telling as a verb.

When as a therapist I think 'story-as-noun', my focus is on the story as an object, on some kind of package in which a chunk of meaning is wrapped. When my thinking is being organised in this way (when it's being shaped by this assumption) what I experience is a client presenting me with a carefully wrapped object and saying something like, 'Here, make sense of this, what does it mean?' And I take the object and my intelligent mind attempts to engage with it, to unlock its hidden aspects and to reveal its meaning. My mind seeks to perceive the story's essence. I turn it over, I look at it from different angles, I remember all the other stories this client has told me, I make some tentative comments and a conversation gets going. The story, after all, is something that the client knows (even unconsciously), it is a chunk of meaning, and the client is trying to pass this thing over to me for my analysis, for my insight. When I think 'story-as-noun', I'm unconsciously a part of a Freudian and Cartesian perspective.

But I began to feel constricted by this kind of thinking. Something was missing. I noticed, for example, that with clients like Joseph I was feeling oddly powerless and that my most intelligent observations didn't seem to be moving things on much at all.

Things change when I think of 'story-as-verb'. Straight away I'm aware that there is something happening here. There is a process going on, or perhaps many. The client, for one thing, is trying to make sense of something, is trying to bring order to something that he or she is experiencing as chaotic or disordered or frighteningly meaningless: there's an attempt to change something going on through this attempt to communicate. And when I think 'story-as-verb' I remember that the verb has an object, me, that the client is trying to do something which will involve me in some way, that there's an interpersonal process going on at the same time as there is an internal process happening. When I think this way, when I'm aware of processes taking place in the room as we talk, I experience myself quite differently, no longer the observer but a participant. The telling of a story is drawing me into the teller's world. I no longer feel powerless because I now feel involved. When I think 'story-as-verb' I feel myself being connected to Spinozan and Darwinian perspectives.

At one level, then, this thesis is about the breakdown of one paradigm and the construction of another using the language of the dynamic act of story telling. It's about my attempt to find a different and more empowering way of thinking about these acts of story-telling that go on in therapy, one based on the idea that the telling of a story is an attempt by the teller to mate with a wider world.

The above account of the way my thinking moved is, of course, utterly misleading. It gives the impression of Steve, sitting alone in his study after difficult sessions with Joseph, progressively trying to think his way out of a feeling of limitation. Steve the lonely brooding thinker, finding his own way to his own paradigm through the hard slog of solitary and disciplined thinking. Though I did my fair share of brooding and thinking, this was by no means how the shift actually occurred.

Bion once suggested that there were thoughts in search of a thinker, a fanciful idea perhaps but one which conveys our sense that the thoughts we think are not generated in the lonely chambers of our disembodied minds. Instead (to adopt an ugly modern phrase which is surprisingly apt here) our thoughts are out-sourced. We think in particular ways, Wittgenstein insisted, because we belong to particular worlds (11), and in my case there were three particular worlds of which I was a part which account for the genesis of the ideas explored in this thesis.

First of all I belong to the world which is made up of my body-mind. I think particular thoughts because my body feels particular things (12). My body has both a history and a network of current relationships, both of which leave impressions on my body, and my thoughts are shaped by (Spinoza would say that they are aspects of) these bodily impressions (13). I feel useless and excluded partly because current experiences in my therapeutic interactions with fifteen-year-old Joseph are touching sensitive areas of my body. My thesis, if it is to be an attempt to account for the nature of the ideas it expresses, must be in part an account of these sensitive areas of my body. For this reason each of the chapters (except the final one) has attached to it a glimpse of an aspect of my particular history and current relationships, this world made up of my body-mind system (14).

Secondly I belong to a world made up of my client and myself. I've written about a boy called Joseph and certain ideas came to me either because he put them into me (to use a bit of Kleinian shorthand) or because they came out of the particular dynamics of that interaction. We related in a particular way, we created in our meetings a relationship with a particular mix of hope and fear, expectation and yearning, love and hate, and out of that ideas were generated and entered the minds of the two thinkers involved. His thoughts and feelings turned out to have an odd similarity to my own. It is partly for this reason that my account of a developing thesis is told in terms of a case study.

Finally I belong to a wider professional world, made up of colleagues and supervisors, professional organisations and bodies of literature, mentors alive and dead. Thoughts enter me through that medium too, out of the dynamics of that world and that relationship. After I'd written a draft of the thesis (in the form of a more traditional case study and without much reference to what I've experienced as a seminal relationship with my supervisor), I realized that my account left out what was in many ways the most important aspect of what it was purporting to show, that we develop particular ideas not just to make more sense of what we experience but also to connect us to others. Particular ideas became attractive to me because they were attractive to Giles. If that sounds immature, then so be it. What I'm suggesting in the thesis is that this attempt to connect with 'the good' is at the heart of much of our story-telling, an aspect of which is the way we are inducted into various ways of thinking by those (alive and dead) whom we admire or wish to emulate in some way. For this reason it was necessary for me to find some way of building into my thesis my own "relational urge', and so I've made the weekly supervision sessions with Giles central to the structure of each chapter.

Either our thoughts are aspects of our nature (and are therefore embodied aspects of our relationship to the worlds we inhabit) or they are disembodied, solipsistic and unrelated to our everyday experiences. Spinoza argued the first, Descartes the second. We suffer catastrophically from our tendency to believe Descartes rather than Spinoza, and one way of reading this thesis is to see it as an attempt to move from the unrelational and disengaged world of the Cartesian paradigm to the more connected and empowering world of the Spinozan.

But to say this takes me into a new maze with its own difficulties, in particular a typically postmodern lather about the nature of the stories we tell, be they Cartesian, Spinozan or whatever. If the telling of stories is in part about constructing an empowering narrative, and if theories are no less stories than are fairytales and dreams, then what is the status of the theoretical framework I'm attempting to construct in this thesis? Is it a conceptual framework that brings me closer to the way the world actually is? Or is it simply an energetic fiction told to make life possible in the face of the deeper reality of meaninglessness, chaos and deconstructible complexity?

The same question may also be asked about the stories my clients tell me. Is the story-telling we do in the consulting room now more effective because these are truer stories we are telling each other, more in tune with the actual undercurrents in our disturbed and difficult lives? Or is this story-telling more effective simply because we're better at investing faith in these supporting fictions, especially now that I'm helping us to see them as verbs being enacted in the present rather than nouns fashioned by the past?

For some this is a non-issue. What does it matter? If the story works, if it makes a life more active or less fractured, why worry? They're all fictions anyway, all susceptible to endless deconstruction, all undergoing constant change as circumstances shift.

It matters to me. The stories we tell and believe organise our thinking and organise our behaviour. One theoretical framework suggests that the client is giving me nouns and consequently I'm one kind of therapist: another framework suggests to me that I'm involved in a verby process and I become a different kind of therapist. The framework that involves me more in life by moving things along more juicily is a better story because it's closer to how things actually are. Life itself is something that moves things along juicily: life itself is more about process than content, more about verbs than nouns. Spinoza's system is closer to the way the world actually is than Descartes': it's a better story not just because it's easier for me to have faith in it but because it reflects better the world I experience (15). There are, in other words, stories which deepen our understanding of the world as it actually exists and there are stories which limit our experience. Both kinds of stories can be comforting and perhaps even necessary, but that doesn't mean that they are of equal value. Some stories are better than others, some have a better connection to the world: they make more sense of things and they expand our capacity for involvement. Such, anyway, is a part of the argument of this thesis.

So this is a thesis about stories and the thesis is itself a story. It is, in other words, a thesis that seeks to say something about its own nature; it attempts what the therapist attempts, to have a double vision which looks outwards and inwards at one and the same time. There are times in the writing of it when it's become dangerously close to disappearing up its own bum. It has helped when I've remembered that story-telling is a dynamic natural process and that stories attempt to describe dynamic natural processes. Things don't get stuck in nature, or not for ever. Crafting my thesis as a story has helped me to move on through (and perhaps even enter into) the bogs and roundabouts.

But this wasn't the only reason why I felt I needed to write the thesis in the form of a story. It seemed to me that the theoretical underpinnings of my thesis, its metaphysical and its epistemological assumptions, made it inevitable that my research would come out of an actual experience of working with clients like the fifteen-year-old Joseph and that the meaning of the research could only be expressed in the form of some kind of narrative. I want to try to explain this.

The thesis assumes (an assumption that I've tried to make explicit and have attempted to examine) that reality is too complex and dynamic to be imprisoned in a static conceptual framework and indeed that all understandings, however painfully won, in the end break down under the pressure of complex and chaotic reality ... or at least that they must continually be adapted, supplemented and pruned, and that in their evolution they must always allow for concurrent diverse perspectives and apparent contradictions (16). This is a statement I'm making about stories, it's a statement I'm making about reality, and it's a statement that I can only demonstrate by presenting my research as a dynamic, unfolding, multi-perspectival and nonlinear story (17).

I have always felt oppressed by the stifling notion I took away from my own schooling that truth existed as a pre-packaged item delivered to some and denied to others. Deliveries went to Plato, Jesus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Dickens, Tolstoy, Mozart, Churchill and probably Sir Robert Menzies (18), but to very few others and certainly to no-one I knew. These lucky ones were either given the gift at birth, or at some moment in their lives there was a revelation: one moment they didn't have it, the next the postman had thrust enlightenment into their hands. Eurekas in the bath, apples on the head, voices from the clouds. As a result there's a part of me that spends inordinate amounts of time waiting to hear the postman's whistle.

But I now know (as surely I must have known as a schoolboy) that truth is not like that, not for the famous nor for the rest of us. It comes (and goes) in bits. It comes to us all as a result of our experiences, it comes over time, and the package is never complete. Charles Taylor talks about 'reasoning in transition', by which he is referring to the Hegelian notion that our thinking moves through a series of transitions each of which is constructed and invested with energy in order to eliminate an error or resolve a contradiction or confusion (19). This is the way my thinking has moved during the years of this research and I've wanted to keep these transitions visible, to show the way they spiral and coil back on themselves as I keep revisiting and re-experiencing errors and insights. Writing the thesis as a story helps me to do this. The truth is not delivered as a package, nor would we have the perceptual equipment to take it all in if it were. All we can do is wander into it, or into bits of it, and as we do so we can reflect and act in order to establish more solidly our relationship to this package, this world (or these worlds) in which we find ourselves.

Other considerations also pointed me in the direction of narrative. If I'm writing about the nature of story telling, I'm inevitably brought face-to-face with questions about the tellers themselves, about what it is to be human. Who is this Joseph telling me stories? What is his nature, his essence (did he have one?), his connection to others? Where are his boundaries? Who am I and where are my boundaries? These questions (as I've already suggested) inevitably took me into the realms of philosophy and in particular into reflections on the nature of the cosmos to which we seem to have a peculiar relationship, both a part of it and (through the existence of our Cartesian minds) split off from it, apart, at a distance. These were reflections which could easily become ungrounded, could easily waft away into the ether, and so I wanted to keep them tethered to an actual experience. Writing my research as a story offered me, I hoped, this kind of ballast.

There was also the hope that in a thesis-as-story I might capture some of the many different perspectives, often unconsciously held and in conflict with each other, that formed an uneasy committee in charge of my perceptual apparatus. I'm forever detecting these in myself, occasionally being overwhelmed and incapacitated by their clashing and uncomfortable coexistence. Writing the thesis as a story might, I thought, make it possible for me both to bring out some of these often unconscious perspectives more clearly, see the ways they interacted in practice, and possibly also make the complexity less daunting.

There were other factors too. There's a body of research in the human sciences which deals in diagnostic descriptors and psychological categories, a way of thinking that implies there are generalisable ways of behaving, that there are categories into which human beings fit. I've found it more useful to focus on my clients' complexity and uniqueness. For example, I like to think about the Josephs who come to see me as having not one true self which is telling stories but many selves, not one persona with many hidden faces but many more or less equal sub-personalities each with its own needs and way of looking at things. This in turn implies a temporal dimension where sub-personalities are vying with each other in shifting internal and external collaborations; things are constantly changing (20). Furthermore there are internal dramas in clients like Joseph, battles going on inside, and there are winners and losers, with the losers seldom killed off but instead finding some cave or dark forest in which to lick their wounds and continue to exert an unseen influence on our lives. Denied parts of oneself continue to live on and act out, and continued efforts by the 'victors' to deny the existence of these banished victims seem to leads to a kind of enervating narrowing of life possibilities. Conversely, letting these denied parts into a more conscious lived experience leads to more spark or oomph or (in Winnicott's sense) authenticity. This is an idea about energy, zing, vitality, and also therefore about lethargy, purposelessness, sickness and psychic death. So if each personality is made up of a unique combination of different sub-personalities, internally squabbling and collaborating in unique and shifting ways, then when Joseph arrives at my doorstep, it's not a dissociated personality that I treat (though there are aspects of his self that are split off), it's not a case of arrested emotional development or narcissistic wounding or of a failure to negotiate the Oedipal complex or of an incomplete and unsuccessful attempt to repress both rage and fear that is at the core of the Joseph's being (though each of these can be seen to be present at different moments). It is Joseph himself who is wanting in some way to be seen and experienced (which is more than, or different from, understood) by me, in something approaching his unique and multi-personalitied individuality.

If in fact there are sub-personalities (or if this is a helpful fiction, or a good-enough conceptual approximation to how I experience the world), if in fact the coalitions are shifting and the boundaries permeable and unstable, then the only possible way of writing about this that could possibly do justice to the dynamic complexities is through a narrative, by telling a story. Stories, with all their ambiguities and inevitable connections with what Jung called 'the collective unconscious' and Coleridge called 'the Vast' (21), are able to carry within them more complexity than other forms of writing. Or at least that is my experience. To adapt an idea of Wittgenstein's, stories can show what cannot be explained. I have found myself imagining fancifully at times that the fundamental building block of the universe is not an atom or a quark or whatever it is that the scientists are positing, but a story ... or that when the atom or quark is looked at in a particular way the dynamic shapes of its myriad sub-processes and the internal and external attractions and repulsions have the characteristics of a story. 'I will tell you a story,' says the novelist Vikram Chandra, 'that will grow like a lotus vine, that will twist in on itself and expand ceaselessly, til all of you are a part of it, and the gods come to listen, til we are all talking in a musical hubbub that contains the pasts, every moment of the present, and all the future’ (22).

So it was important to me that the thesis take the form of a narrative of my work with an adolescent client, that I tell a story. But this created a major problem. How could I write a narrative when the therapeutic process must necessarily remain confidential?

The solution has been to create a fictional client, Joseph, who is in fact a composite of a number of clients (with a dash of invention thrown in). No such person as Joseph exists, though all the conversations, stories and dreams which I've used in this thesis are based on real conversations, stories and dreams with real clients.

There will of course be those who will object that this means that the thesis is built upon a fiction. I disagree. The character of Joseph is believable, I think, and the interactions which I describe between Joseph and the world and Joseph and myself are believable because they are constructed out of the sometimes painful experiences of real clients and my reactions to them. So while therapeutic sessions with a person called Joseph never took place, the essences and flavours of the interactions I've described in this thesis are as close as I can make them to those that I actually experienced with a number of clients.

The same fictionalising process has been at work in this account of my conversations with Giles Clark. The conversations here, like the sessions with Joseph, are my inventions, however much they are each based on conversations and sessions that actually took place. As Bruce Chatwin once put it, I want to 'alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work’ (23). Some of the words I here attribute to Giles are ones he actually said to me; some are what I imagine he would have said given the drift of the conversation; some are words others have said but which (for narrative purposes, to tell a more coherent story) it seemed best to attribute to Giles; some are words which it simply suited me to put into his mouth in order to move the conversation on in a particular way. So the Giles that exists in these pages is, like the Joseph, a construction of mine (24). My debt to him (and of course to the clients who gave me the material and experiences that enabled me to create Joseph) is real.

There were others who helped me during this difficult period, two Jungian analysts (Glenda Cloughley and Craig san Roque), and David Russell who was the main supervisor of my academic work. Conversations with each of them have informed this thesis, and in some cases words that I've put into Giles's mouth actually came from Glenda, Craig or David. My debt to Giles is made clear in the text: I want to acknowledge the others as well.

Giles Clark 1947-2019

Endnotes

(1) The post-Kleinians like Bion (1967, 1978), Ogden (1989), Milner (1969), Alvarez (1992)

(2) Kohut and the self-psychologists. See for example Kohut (1984)

(3) Jung and the post-Jungians. See especially Jung (1946)

(4) This has been a preoccupation with all the post-Freudian schools of analytical thought.

(5) Winnicott (1971), Ogden (1993), Eigen (1993), Phillips (1993, 1995). Lomas (1993) Clark (1996)

(6) Stern (1985) and Zinkin (1991)

(7) James Hillman, ex-Jungian analyst and author (see bibliography)

(8) Giles Clark was a senior training Jungian analyst, formerly from the UK and then based in Sydney.

(9) See Taylor (1989) and Ellenberger (1970)

(10) The idea that therapy is two people telling stories to each other is one that permeates the writing of Adam Phillips (1993, 1995)

(11) Derek Jarman has his character Wittgenstein say

We learn to use words because we belond to a culture, a form of life, a practical way of doing things. In the end, we speak as we do because of what we do. And all this is a properly public affair. Philosophers in the tradition of Descartes start from the lonely self brooding over its private sensations. I want to overturn this centuries-old model. I want to start from our culture, our shared practical life together, and look at what we think and feel and say in these public terms. (Jarman 1994)

(12) "Behind your thoughts and feeling, my brother,' said Nietzsche 'there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body'. [Zarathustra quoted pp 67 - 68 Kauffman (1992)]

(13) Spinoza suggested (see for example the Postulates following Prop 13 in Part 2 of Ethics) that our body is made up partly of impressions made as a result of collisions with other bodies and that these impressions have their necessary correlations in the mind as thoughts (and for Spinoza an emotion is a type of thought). I'm claiming, therefore, that to have an appreciation of the nature of particular ideas (such as those expressed in this thesis) one must know something about the bodily impressions out of which the ideas came.

(14) These sections come after the asterix towards the end of each chapter. The fact that there is a shift in character in these passages as the thesis progresses (from internally-preoccupied to finding-a-voice-in-the-world) is both deliberate and a part of what felt like a natural process, suggesting (I'm hoping) that my experience with Joseph and with Giles led to some shift not only in my thinking but in the more grounded state of my body-mind system.

(15) As Timothy Sprigge writes: 'Spinoza has been more variously interpreted than most philosophers. Perhaps this only shows his system's resemblance to the universe it mirrors.' P 845 Honderich ed. (1995)

(16) For, as Jung [p 78 (1954)] reminds us

The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully catches one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole. One never considers that a total apprehension is right out of the question ... This self-deception certainly promotes peace of mind: the unknown is named, the far has been brought near, so that one can lay one's finger on it. One has taken possession of it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a slain creature of the wild that can no longer run away. It is a magical procedure such as the primitive practises upon objects and the psychologist upon the psyche. He is no longer at its mercy, but he never suspects that the very fact of grasping the object conceptually gives it a golden opportunity to display all those qualities which would never have made their appearance had it not been imprisoned in a concept ...

(17) In some of his later writings (Bion 1967), Bion doubted the possibility of written case studies (for example, this thesis?) ever being able to capture the reality of psychic phenomena.

The more experience a psycho-analyst has of psychotic phenomenon, the less room he has for doubt of their reality. They "evolve"; they are there and are replaced by a further "evolution". Fortunately for psycho-analysis, these events can be demonstrated between psycho-analyst and analysand, but unfortunately for the science they cannot be demonstrated in the absence of the phenomena. (p 160 Bion 1967)

(18) I went to a conservative school and Sir Robert Menzies was the conservative Prime Minister at the time, seemed to have been Prime Minister for ever, a kind of timeless fact of life.

(19) See pp 57-73 Taylor (1989)

(20) As Taylor (1989) points out, 'human life is irreducibly multilevelled ...The recognition that we live on many levels has to be won against the presumptions of the unified self, controlling or expressive.' Taylor devotes many chapters to showing the ways in which over the centuries and in many different ways we have been attempting to free ourselves of the myth of the unified self.

(21) Coleridge (quoted p 48 in Ackroyd 1990)

... from my early reading of fairy tales and genii etc etc my mind had been habituated to the Vast and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great, and the Whole.

(22) Chandra, V. (1995) dust jacket

(23) p xi Chatwin (1989)

(24) In particular I have taken the liberty of making the Giles in these pages give extended spiels about this-or-that, something the real Giles almost never does during our supervision sessions.