4th week

Personal Helicon

By Seamus Heaney(1939-2013)

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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4th week

2. The Neurosis of Our Time ⑶

These narcissistic persons have many acquaintances but no close friends. They are sex
ually liberated but they experience no passion. They generally are well educated, but the
y gave up most of their intellectual interests when they graduated from college. The nar
cissistic type is often skilled at stocks and bonds, but sooner or later this seems a purp
oseless game. They usually make very good salaries―sometimes in the millions―but it
gives them little satisfaction. In short, they have everything that is promised in the TV a
ds to bring happiness―travel and shiny cars and beautiful women―but happiness elude
s them. They are often celebrities, but they find this also to be exasperatingly empty. T
hey are modern and sophisticated and they come in increasing numbers to psychoanaly
sis, but therapy is difficult and slow.

Most of all, such persons are exceedingly lonely. It seems the only emotions they feel
as a mild but permeating depression and a sense of having missed out of the joys of li
fe even though, paradoxically, they have had everything. As de Tocqueville tells us, “The
y never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.”

The narcissistic personality can be considered in America as a further development of

American individualism. But this also brings new difficulties in that the development of t
he technique of psychoanalysis seems increasingly to support the narcissism rather than
to analyze it away. Therapy, for a number of reasons―some financial, some theoretical,
and some simply an outgrowth of the behavioristic trends in our traditional American ps
ychology―moves toward narcissism and excessive individualism, each empowering the ot
her. Our psychotherapy then tends to be problem-centered rather than person-centered.
from The Cry for Myth by Dr. Rollo May(1992)

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