The inner worlds of students. Part 1: Ben
Newsletter 10: September 4, 2024
1.
In this newsletter, I want to do something different. I want to tell the story of a boy, Ben, who came to see me when I was working as a psychotherapist in the 1990s.
Why tell this story now? And in the midst of a number of posts about schools and teaching?
I want to tell it because I think it says something about the complex inner worlds, often unconscious, that all students have (and which indeed all humans have).
Not all inner worlds are as urgently in need of attention as Ben’s.
But for all of us - students and teachers - unconscious wishes and impulses influence our behaviour and responses to the world. (See, for example, the story of the five students in a secondary English classroom here.) The classroom, consequently, is a far more complex world than that described by neat teacher plans and orderly outcome-driven curricula. Most teachers, school leaders and curriculum specialists know this, either consciously or in their bones. Bureaucrats and politicians - those with their focus exclusively on the grand plan - tend to be less aware.
2.
The year is 1993.
It’s six years since I left full-time teaching. I’ve trained as a psychotherapist and am now working mainly with school aged students.
A white car has pulled up outside and, as I watch from my study window, I can see Ben's mother emerge from the driver's side into the winter sunshine. She is talking and laughing as Ben's door opens, as if they've been joking in the car. She puts her arm around his shoulder and they walk up the path together.
This is to be Ben’s last session with me.
Ann is tall and slim, a touch tentative in her high heels on the rough brick path. Ben is only seven and barely comes up to his mother's hip. He has a cricket bat in one hand, and a roughly wrapped parcel in the other.
3.
As I watch from my window, I am remembering his first session nearly two years ago.
His mother arrived and introduced me to a five-year-old boy with dark curly hair and narrowed slightly puffy eyes, a little boy who held his mother's sleeve and looked at the ground as she tried to interest him in all the toys around my room.
After she left, I suggested Ben choose some toys to play with. He selected a small, locked treasure chest, and I gave him the key. He opened it up and looked at the coins, beads and trinkets. Then he took each out in turn, and hid them - under the seats, under the rug, beneath a cushion, behind the curtains.
"You're hiding all the pieces of treasure," I said as I sat on the carpet next to him.
“I'm hiding all the bits so that if anyone wants to come and steal the treasure, they won't be able to find it.”
I thought about what his parents had told me the week before when they'd come to see me. “They don't see his lovely side at school,” they said. “At home, and especially when we're on holiday, he's calm and relaxed and very affectionate. But at school he's wound up, aggressive, and has a nose for trouble. He can't settle to anything, but instead wanders around the room provoking fights. Things have got so bad there that the teacher suggests that we take him away and try kindergarten again next year.”
4.
At our second session, Ben again wanted to play with the toys. I cleared a space on the carpet, and he collected together the toys he wanted to use: the dinosaurs, a snake, a spider, some soldiers, some monsters and lots of babies (baby monsters and baby dinosaurs). He built a castle out of blocks, and then began his game. The soldiers and monsters who lived in the castle all went into the main room, and then the baby dinosaur came and knocked the castle down and killed them all.
Soon afterwards he told me - in a baby voice that he was coming to use more and more during our sessions - another story about a destructive baby:
Once upon a time there were four monsters sleeping in their house.
They had treasure in the garden.
The little dinosaurs came to steal the treasure.
They got it, and they put it in their home.
Then they woke the monsters up and they killed them.
Then they had all the treasure to themselves.
These dinosaurs became his favourite toys during these early weeks, and he invented a game which we would play over and over again. He would get down eight dinosaurs, four big ones and four little ones, and tell me that they were going to have fights, “Ben's team against Steve's team,” he announced, again in his baby voice. Then he would give me all the little dinosaurs, taking the big ones for himself. His team always won. We began to laugh together at the unfairness, and occasionally I'd try unsuccessfully to steal one of his bigger friends.
5.
What was happening during these early sessions? Like all my students, he was working out the parameters, finding out what he could and could not do, teasing out the unwritten rules of this new place and this new relationship.
Could he be a baby? He found that he could, it was allowed.
Could the babies and the dinosaurs be aggressive, could they do nasty things? He discovered that they could.
He was, I guessed, exploring his unsettling and unconscious feeling that there was a wild and potentially destructive baby doing its work somewhere inside him.
Then, one day about three months after he first came to see me, he began some play which became for him a decisive step forward into his exploration of his own aggressiveness, his own wildness. We were sitting on the carpet, having just finished a game of chess. (I'd been winning, and he'd just gleefully tipped over the board.) There were some blocks around us, and some toys, so I took some of them and started to tell him a story:
“There was once a prince,” I said, “who lived in a castle with the king and the queen. And one day the prince went up to the queen and said that he wanted to go out into the world. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Don't go!’” Ben told me emphatically.
“So he went to the king,” I continued, “and asked him ...”
“And he said not to go,” said Ben.
“So the prince stayed in the castle.”
Immediately Ben began to build the castle defences, thick and strong so that nothing could come and disrupt the prince's secure life in the castle.
Then he picked up the dinosaurs that he had played with so often during our sessions.
I was expecting him to make the dinosaurs attack the castle, but instead he placed them around the perimeter of the castle, facing outwards.
“The dinosaurs are standing with their backs to the walls of the castle,” I said.
“The dinosaurs are guarding the castle,” Ben explained. “They stop the baddies from getting the king and queen and prince.”
Ben was here describing for me, in a far more graphic way than his conscious mind possibly could, that his aggression at school had a purpose. He didn't feel ready to venture out into the world, a world which seemed to stir up a demon inside him, a world he had to face without the warm and secure relationship he had with his parents. He'd found going to school, being separated from his parents, disturbing. At home he continued to suck his fingers and cuddle his sheepskin, and he still needed an afternoon sleep. In this story, the strong and aggressive dinosaurs protect the prince from the outside world, just as his own wildness was a kind of defence against a world that he found puzzling and upsetting and invasive. He needed to hide the treasure. There were dangers everywhere.
6.
One day, when his mother was interstate for a week, he arrived very withdrawn. He began to talk in the baby voice which (his mother told me) he often used at home.
“Is Ben a little baby today?” I asked gently. “Does he want me to get a blanket and some soft toys?”
He smiled broadly, clearly enjoying the picture of himself tucked up on the couch as a baby.
“No,” he said after a moment, and then, “Baby Ben's mummy is away. Baby Ben not happy.”
“I will write a story for Baby Ben,” I said, and wrote:
The Day Baby Ben Came to Visit
Today Baby Ben came to Steve's house.
He played with the toys.
He played with the computer.
He made baby noises.
Baby Ben's mummy is away in Melbourne.
She is coming home tonight.
That will be good.
I read the story out loud as I typed, and Ben threw his head back and forced out a long wild laugh. He laughed so hard he dropped the toy he was holding and then he fell off the chair. I continued typing.
Baby Ben liked Steve's story. He laughed and laughed.
He played with the teddy.
He dropped little teddy on the ground.
Then he fell off the chair.
But he didn't hurt himself.
What a clever little baby Ben.
7.
Several months later he again arrived in a subdued mood. He sat next to me for a while, answered some of my questions about his week at school, and then we lapsed into silence. His face reflected passing thoughts and feelings, but he wasn't articulating them. He said something about travelling through space to another world, and I asked him if he'd like to do that.
“No,” he said.
We talked haltingly about space for a minute or two, and then he dropped back into his baby voice.
“Ben wants his mummy to come and take him home,” he said.
“Little baby Ben wants mummy to come to take him home,” I replied.
Again he smiled, and then his expression changed - he grimaced, pouted, clenched his teeth, his eyes narrowed and intensified, as if he'd just thought of something dark and exciting.
“Does little baby Ben still want mummy to take him home?” I said after a short silence, using a baby voice myself.
“No,” said Ben, “Want mummy to take baby to school.”
He had drawn his legs up to his chest by this time, into what was almost a foetal position, with his feet resting on the edge of the couch. Then he started to rock, and then to jump up and down on the couch. He picked up a cushion and threw it at me, first of all tentatively, and then (when I didn't complain) with a bit more oomph. “Baby angry with Steve,” he said. “Baby going to kill Steve.”
“Baby Ben is jumping on the couch,” I replied, “saying he is angry with Steve and wants to kill him. What will happen when baby Ben gets to school?” I asked.
“Baby Ben will get all the kids in a circle and tie them up, then take them and throw all the kids in the sea.”
“All the kids will be drowned,” I said in my baby voice. “No more kids.”
“No more kids,” said Ben.
“What will teacher do?” I asked (all of this in baby voice). “Will teacher be very cross with baby Ben?”
“Baby Ben climb a tree and push it down on teacher.”
“Teacher be dead now,” I said. “What does big Principal do?”
“Ben hides from big Principal. Principal look and look, but he no find baby Ben. Ben hiding.”
“Big Principal looks everywhere, and there's no Ben. Can't find Ben anywhere,” I said. “What happens when Mummy comes? Is Mummy angry?”
“Mummy doesn't know what happened. Mummy takes Ben home.”
“Will baby Ben be lonely at school with no kids to play with?”
“No, new kids come, and baby Ben tie them up and chuck them in the water too. Ben very naughty.”
For the twenty minutes of this play, Ben was both wild and controlled. He threw things around, but very carefully so that nothing was damaged. He threw things at me and walked on me as I sat on the floor, but did it very carefully so I wasn't hurt at all.
Suddenly, with about five minutes to go before his mother arrived to pick him up, he said in his usual Ben voice, “I want to play on the computer now.”
“OK,” I said, standing up and going over to the computer desk. “Could you put the toys and the cushions back, and then come over to the desk and we'll work at the computer.”
When his mother arrived, she found us sitting together at the screen, deep in conversation about some puzzle we were trying to solve. It must have looked like the end of a calm and gentle session.
8.
For some time now, we had been going on regular walks with my dog Bella. One morning we walked through the pine forest near my house, and as we entered the dark still space underneath the forest canopy, Ben told me that he used to think there were monsters in forests.
“But I don't think that now,” he said.
I told him, as we walked, the story of a boy who found a dragon in a forest cave, a terrible dragon who guarded a priceless pearl of great beauty, and how when the boy grew up he went back to the cave and found that the dragon had shrunk and the pearl was unguarded. He listened very carefully.
Then we made up a fantasy that Bella - part Staffordshire, a strong and formidable dog - was our lion and that she would protect us from anything.
“With Bella our lion, we can now do what we want, go where we want,” I said as Bella ran around us, her tail wagging, recognising her name. “We can now be brave enough to do whatever we want.”
“Yeah,” said Ben fiercely. “We could even bash a police car.”
It was a lovely morning, and we were in high spirits. He told me about dogs he had known, we tasted blackberries, and he collected cocky feathers to put in my hat. As we marched through the forest, with Ben on my shoulders, we sang Yankee Doodle:
Yankee Doodle
went to town
Riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called him macaroni.
On another walk, Ben talked a lot about wildness. “Do you still have times when you feel wild at school?” I asked.
“I feel wild all the time at school,” he said.
“All the time. You feel wild all the time.”
There was a silence for a while, and then he said, “Sometimes I'm wild at your house.”
“Yes,” I said. “And that's OK.”
“I can do whatever I want when I'm at your house.”
On one level I wanted to say that no, there were boundaries. But instead I said, “Yes, you can do whatever you want.” It was important that he know that, when he was with me, he could bring up whatever he wanted to, be whatever he wanted to be. In that accepting and safe space, he could look at his emotions, explore them, play with them, see my reactions.
We walked on in thoughtful silence for fifty metres or so, and then Ben suddenly bent down and picked something out of the long grass. It was an old rusty key.
“This is the key of wildness,” he said, holding it up for me to see.
“That's the key of wildness,” I said. “You've found the key of wildness.”
“Yes,” he said, and walked over to a lamp post. “With this key, I can make this lamp post wild.” Then he looked over at Bella. “And I can turn the wildness off in Bella.”
“With the key that you're holding,” I said, “you can turn the wildness on and off.”
Several weeks later, we were out walking and Ben again took up the theme of controlling the wildness. When we got to the forest, we let Bella off the lead and I hoisted Ben up onto my shoulders. Before long, he started to exert pressure with his knees to steer me, as though I were a horse.
I responded, and even jogged a bit when he signalled (again through his knees) for a bit of speed.
“You're my wild robot,” he said.
“I’m your wild robot,” I replied, “and you're controlling where I go and how fast I go.”
“And Bella is a wild lion,” said Ben, “and I can control when she comes and when she goes.”
“You have got a wild robot and a wild lion,” I said, “and you are able to control them both.”
9.
Ben continued to play with this notion of control back in my room. One day he told me he wanted to draw, so he sat up at my desk and I sat on the couch.
He started to draw, but then every now and then he would look around to see what l was doing, and after a while I made a game of this by pretending to be caught out when he looked around, as if I were a lazy pupil and he the stern teacher.
“Sit up straight and do your work!” he barked, pointing his finger at me and frowning. I sat at attention and pretended to write on the page.
“I'm going to tell your father that you've been a naughty boy,” he said.
I feigned panic, and protested that I was trying to be good.
“You've been a naughty boy. Do some work. Write a story.”
“What will I write about?” I asked.
“Write about Leonardo losing his sword.”
He had always been fascinated by the Ninja Turtles - Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello - and in fact was drawing one of them while we played this game. So I wrote:
Once upon a time, there were four turtles. Their names were Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello.
One day they went out fighting the evil ones. They left their home, each one armed with a magic sword. With this sword, the Ninja turtles could defeat everyone.
But Leonardo was careless. While they were travelling through the underground pipes, he dropped his sword and it fell down an iron grille. He couldn't get it back.
’Don't worry,’ said the others. ‘We'll protect you.’
Then the enemies attacked. Leonardo stood behind the other three turtles while the enemies attacked.
When all the enemies were dead, the four turtles went back to their home, and Leonardo made a new sword. He was safe, and ready for his next adventure.
I had the feeling, as I watched Ben listening to my story, that he understood all about feeling defenceless, all about the need for friends who would protect you, who would make a safe space for you, all about the need for swords.
A couple of weeks later, he returned to this game of being the teacher in control. He wanted to finish off one of his Ninja Turtle drawings, and while he did that I sat on the couch and picked up the newspaper.
“No reading!” he barked from my desk. “Just sit there while I'm drawing.”
I dropped the newspaper and sat up straight.
“Do work!” he said, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “Do a drawing. A black drawing.”
10.
One morning I got the blocks out while he was drawing, and I began to build a castle. I put the king and queen in the castle, and a treasure chest, and a long path leading to the castle door.
When Ben finished his drawing, he joined me on the floor. Just as he'd done before, he got all the dinosaurs and lined them around the castle facing outwards, “to protect the people inside”. But this time the dinosaurs were joined by, amongst others, the prince who had moved from inside the castle (not wanting to go out) to outside the castle walls. He then put little barriers between all of the monsters and dinosaurs, “to stop them fighting with each other”. Next, he put barriers on the outside of all the dinosaurs and monsters, “to stop them from running away and leaving the castle”. Then he strengthened the walls of the castle, “in case the monsters and dinosaurs decided to attack the walls and get the king and queen”.
He was getting increasingly agitated towards the end of this play, as though quite new or uncomfortable things were being brought out. Ben knocked over a wall and I sensed that he wanted to knock over more. But his father had arrived to pick him up.
This seemed like a profound shift inside Ben. When he had first come, there was play about destructive babies and hiding treasures so that no-one could find them. Then there was a baby phase, and an increasing exploration of the feelings that go with wildness and control. During all of that time, the dinosaurs were seen as necessary protectors. Now he was playing with the sense that they are potentially more than this, that they might fight against each other or even harm the king and queen. In his play, he was trying to control the dinosaurs with these barriers.
11.
In the middle of a session some weeks later, Ben suddenly appeared restless.
“When's my dad coming to pick me up?” he asked.
“In about twenty minutes,” I said, and he counted to twenty.
“I think that's just twenty seconds,” he said, and we talked for a while about ways of counting seconds - 'cat-and-dog' and 'Mississippi".
“Now you do some playing,” said Ben.
“What with?”
“With the dinosaurs,” he said. “And you have to do the tidying up.”
“If I'm the one who plays with them, then you think I'm the one who should do the tidying up.”
“Yes.”
So I built a castle, and got out a king and queen. Then I arranged all the monsters and dinosaurs around the castle, facing outwards, and checked with Ben to see that I was doing it right. He said I was, and helped get the rest of the monsters, who were “the guards of the palace”. Then Ben went over to my toy collection, and got the treasure box. He opened it, and started to give bits of treasure to each of the monsters.
“This is their reward for guarding the king and the queen.”
“They've done a good job,” I said, “and you are giving them a reward for doing such a good job.”
He was sitting on the carpet, throwing the bits towards each of the monsters. It felt good, a little bit like a celebration.
“Now you tidy up,” he said.
“You want me to tidy it all up,” I replied, and got up to put the things away.
“No, I'll tidy away the treasure, because that's what I played with. You do the animals.”
As we tidied up, he talked about school. Things were going well at school, he said without a trace of conviction in his suddenly flat voice. Then he started to tell me about fights at school, and about how he and a friend put themselves between the other kids to stop them from fighting each other.
It sounded just like the barriers he put between the monsters.
12.
He was experimenting with control both at school and at home. His mother told me how desperate he was to do some more challenging school work, and how the school's response to this was that he would have to show some more maturity before he would be allowed to join the older kids for maths. So he decided, during a discussion with his mother, on a strategy. He would ask the teacher if he could sit in on the older maths class for just one day. Then, when he demonstrated that he could handle the work, he would ask if he could perhaps go again. When this worked, he'd try a week or longer. The strategy worked like a charm, and he was soon doing a lot of his work with the older children.
13.
Our time together in front of the computer was another space where Ben could explore the concept of control. Whenever we played a new game, he would ask me to take over the controls, and he would watch. Then, after a while, he would sit in front of the screen and play the game himself, but would quickly relinquish the controls back to me if he suffered any set-backs. Then he would watch again until the confidence built up. Making mistakes was devastating for him, and I wondered whether this was another factor in the difficulties he was continuing to have at school. One day Ben got some scissors and chased another child. Soon after that, he was sent out of the classroom and he turned the fire hose on the windows. If he was still playing with wildness, it was not something the school felt it could tolerate, and there were more phone calls homes.
At about this time, I asked Ben if he still had the key of wildness. He told me he had taken it to school to turn off the wildness in the other kids, but that it hadn't worked. “Maybe they had their own keys to turn it on again,” he mused. He told me that he had secret safe places at school where he could hide when other kids tried to bother him. “But some of the other kids have discovered where a few of these are,” he told me.
“Do you think you'll ever get the key back again?” I asked.
“I don't think so,” he said.
We were out walking with Bella at the time, and he suddenly smiled. He held Bella's lead with one finger.
“But look Steve,” he said. “I can control Bella with one finger.”
On another occasion as we were walking along with Bella, he suddenly said, seemingly out of the blue, “I wish I could find that key again, the key of wildness.”
“What would you do with it if you could find it?” I asked.
“I'd turn the wildness on in you!” he said, pretending to turn a key in my chest. I growled and made faces - much to his delight and Bella's consternation - and then I stopped.
“I can turn it off, too.” I said.
“No you can't,” said Ben.
“Try me again,” I said, and he turned it on.
I went wild for a while, and then I turned it off.
14.
He was stealing money, from his parents and possibly from school, and one morning while we were playing with a ball out in the street he dropped some coins on the ground. He told me he had taken it from his parents.
“Please keep it a secret,” he said to me.
"Things aren't going so well for you at school at the moment, are they?"
“No, they're not,” he said. There was a silence for a while.
“Do you remember the day you found the key of wildness in the forest?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you lost it, didn't you? I wonder where it might be.” Ben was silent, thoughtful.
“I have a feeling,” I said, “that it would be useful to find it again.”
“Yes, so I can turn off the wildness inside me.” said Ben.
“I know a story about a boy finding the key of wildness,” I told him.
He looked interested, and for the next half an hour the two of us stood in the middle of my street (it's a cul-de-sac, and so has almost no traffic), Ben looking up at me and listening, the ball in his hand, me in storytelling mode, putting on different voices and acting out some of the scenes as I came to them.
It was the Grimm story of Iron John, a story about mysterious and strange forces in a dark forest, and about a destructive wildness that is pacified by a boy’s courage.
As I told the story, Ben listened with rapt attention. He had never let me tell him a long story before. He had always needed to be pretty much in control of what was happening in our sessions. But now he was lost in this world. At one spot in the story a wild man has been brought out of the forest, and is now on public show. Ben clutched the ball to his chest as he listened.
15.
Ben himself was changing rapidly during these months, physically as well as in confidence. His hair was thicker, his face more open, his eyes no longer puffy. Ben's parents took him out of the school and, at the age of six, he started in a new classroom with new classmates. The new school was working out well, with the expectations and boundaries so clear-cut as to pose no threat to him. He wanted to show me all his homework, and to talk about what they did in class and “how you have to keep your writing between the teacher's lines”. This was perhaps an unconscious metaphor for the whole of the new school experience, where he lived between the lines drawn clearly by the teachers.
I asked him one morning how school was going. He didn't respond at first, and so about five minutes later I asked him how the wild man inside was. He smiled and said he was fine.
“Calmer?” I asked, and Ben nodded.
“Maybe the spell has been broken,” I said, “and the wild man has been restored to his king shape again,” I said, referring to a Grimm story I’d told him.
Ben didn't respond, so I thought it had gone over his head. But ten minutes later, while we were looking at his spelling words, he pointed to the word ‘king” and said, “That's me”.
16.
And so, a couple of weeks ago, his mother and I agreed that the time had come to finish our sessions together.
The sun is out and Ben has arrived.
He walks up the path with an enormous smile, a different person from the withdrawn boy who arrived for his first session.
“Hi Steve,” says his mother when I open the door. “Ben says I'm not allowed to talk to you for long because it's his last session here and he wants enough time to make a hundred in your cricket match. But I've just asked him if it's OK to tell you what he said to me last night.”
Ben goes into the study, pretending not to listen.
“Ben told me last night that he used to be wild, but that Steve made him calm. I told him last night that this was nonsense, that it was he who deserves the credit, he who had done the work. But I thought that I’d tell you what he said.”
I look over at Ben. He has changed so much since I first saw him nearly two years ago. Then he was inward turned, pouting, seemingly held tight by inner turmoils and dramas; now he is cheeky, warm and looks me in the eye.
“I’Il go and get the rubbish bin for the wickets,” says Ben. Then he remembers the parcel. “This is a present,” he says, “for being my teacher.” I open the parcel, and find in it a ceramic fish which Ben has made at a pottery class. It is blue with black stripes.
His mother leaves. I watch Ben placing the rubbish bin on the road and then waiting for me there with his cricket bat.
I'll go out in a minute, and he'll score 100 runs to my 20.
He'll gloat, and he'll cheat and he'll be sunny and delightful.
“Isn't life grand,” he'll exclaim (like he did during last week's session) as he hits me for another six.
“Things are looking good,” he'll exude as (with me batting now) he hovers over the rubbish bin, ball in hand, with me stranded half way down the wicket.
“What a shame, Steve, bad luck,” he'll chortle as he gives me out LBW when the ball never went near my legs.
Last week, while I was batting and feeling quite pleased to have reached 15, I wondered how many Ben had scored. Using the gruff Australian masculine sporting voice that we both adopt for these outings, I called out, “What are ya?”, thinking he was probably already close to 60.
“A cheat,” he shouted back.
We couldn’t stop laughing.
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The painting at the head of this post is by Solomon Karmel-Shann. It’s now part of a private collection.
I choose these paintings for my Newsletters not because they illustrate what I’m writing about (though occasionally they happen to), but because I like having my son’s marvellous paintings scattered around the home page of my site.