(Tavistock Clinic Series.) Klein, Melanie - Bell, David - Psychoanalysis and Culture - A Kleinian Perspective-Karnac (1999)

Psychoanalysis and Culture
Tavistock Clinic Seria

Nick Temple, Margot W a d d d (Seria Editors)
Published and distributed by Karnac Books
Other tides in the Tavistock Clinic Seria:
Arsesnent in Child Psychotherapy

Mvguet Rustin and Emanuela Quagliata (editors)
Facing it Out: Clinical Pmpectives on Adohcent Disturbance

Robin Anderson and Anna Darringron (editors)
Insidr Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Pmonaliiy

Margot Waddell
l n t m l Ladcapes and Foreign Bodies: Eating Disordm and Othrr Pathologies

Gianna Williams
Minor w Nature: Drama. Psychoana&~ and Socieiy

Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin
M&p& Voices: Narrative in Systemic Family Psychotherapy

Renos K Papadopoulos and John Byng-Hal1 (editors)
P y h t i c S u m in Children
Mvgver Rusrin. Maria Rhode, Alex Dubinsky, HClkne Dubinsky (editors)
Reason and Passion: A CcLbration of the Work of Hanna Scgal
David Bell (editor)
Sent w o r e My Time: A Child Psychotherapisti Vinu of Lifc on a
Neonatal I n m i r n Care Unit
Margaret Cohen
Surviving Spare: Infint Obsmation and Other Papm

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Undmtanding Trauma: A Psychoanalyh;c Approach

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A Kleinian Perspective
David Bell
Editor
KARNAC
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Fint published in 1999 by
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This revised edition published in 2004
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Q 1999 by David Bell
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Contents
...
Preface V~II
Foreword ix
Contributors xi
Introduction: Psychoanalysis, a Body of Knowledge of Mind
and Human Culture David Bell 1
Art and Literature

1. Primal Grief and 'Petrified Rage': An Exploration of
Rilke's Duino Elegies
Ronald Britton 27
2. Death by Daydreaming: Madame Bovary
Ignis Sodre' 48
3. The Singing Detective: A Place in Mind
David Bell 64
4. Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover Up for Oedipus
John Steinn 86
Mind and Society

5. Psychoanalysis: The Last Modernism
Michael Rustin 105
6. Emotion and the Malformation of Emotion
Ricbard Wollheim 122
7. Pride
Michael FcUman 136
8. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration
Lcdn G r i n b q and Rebeca G r i n b q 154
9. 'In My End is My Beginning'
Peatl Kng 170
10. A Psychoanalyst's Look at a Hypnotist: A Scudy of
Folic 2 drux
AA. Muon 189
References 209
Select Bibliography of the Work of Hanna Segal 219
Acknowledgements 222
Index 223
Epigram
To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time,

a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task
approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly,
without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes
in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibrations, its colour,
its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the
substance of its truth - disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and pas-
sion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded
attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may per-
chance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented
vision of regret or pity, or terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts
of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of solidarity in
mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds
men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
Joseph Conrad
Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)
A Tribute to Hanna Segal
Preface
Since it was founded in 1920, the Tavistock Clinic has developed a

wide range of psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health which
have from the beginning been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis.
In the last thirty years it has also developed systemic family therapy as
a theoretical model and a clinical approach to family problems. The
Clinic has become the largest training institution in Britain for mental
health, providing post-graduate and qualifying courses in social work,
psychology, psychiatry, child, adolescent and adult psychotherapy and,
latterly, in nursing and primary care. It trains about 1,200 students
each year in over 45 courses.
The Clinic's philosophy has been one of influencing mental health
work towards therapeutic methods and has, as an aim, the dissemina-
tion of training, clinical expertise and research throughout Britain and
internationally. This series makes available the clinical and theoretical
work that has been most influential at the Tavistock Clinic. It presents
new approaches in the understanding and treatment of psychological
disturbance in children, adolescents and adults as individuals and in
families.
Psychoanalysis and Culture: A Kleinian Perspective is a collection of
papers by leading psychoanalysts and academics who have been
inspired by the work of Hanna Segal and her contribution to the
understanding of art and sociocultural processes. The papers are set in
context by an introduction to the field provided by the editor.
The book shows the relevance of psychoanalysis beyond the con-
sulting room to the understanding of human affairs in general. It is
perhaps particularly fitting that this book is in the Tavistock Clinic
Series,.given the Tavistock's long tradition of engagement with the arts
and with social theory.
Nicholas Temple and Margot Waddell
Series Editors
Foreword
Otto E Kernberg, M. D.
Hanna Segal is the leading clinician and theoretician representing

Kleinian psychoanalysis within the psychoanalytic community, and her
work has shown the importance of this approach both to clinical psy-
choanalysis and to its applications. Her development of psychoanalytic
technique, which is closely related to her theoretical contributions, has
brought together an understanding of the most primitive mental states,
anatomically anchored in bodily phantasies, with a more contempo-
rary focus on the functioning of primitive conflicts in the transference.
Both in her clinical work and in her applied work Segal has, impli-
citly, defended an objectivist, that is a philosophically 'realist',
position. This is made explicit and discussed at some length in David
Bell's introduction and is crucial to her views on socio-political con-
flict. Drawing on the work of Bion she has investigated the splitting
and projective processes that dominate much political 'thinking' and
in so doing has made fundamental contributions, complementing
Freud's original investigation of the regressive qualities of large groups
and mass movements.
Segal's work on symbolism and on the nature of the creative
process has been among her seminal contributions to psychoanalysis.
She addressed not only issues of the content of works of art but
brought to the field a clear account, from a psychoanalytic perspective,
of its structure and form. She has shown how the understanding of the
struggles and painful conflicts that characterise the depressive position
brings a vital perspective both to the creative process in the mind of
the artist and to the nature of the audience response. I particularly
have in mind the acknowledgement of the indissoluble linkage of love
and aggression that characterise the achievement of the depressive
position. The interplay between creativity and symbolism, as formu-
lated by Hanna Segal, inspires most of the contributions to this volume
and provides the reader with a new perspective for approaching the
work of art.
Perhaps the most courageous of Hanna Segal's contributions to cul-
tural analysis is to be found in her understanding of the contemporary
political scene. More than anyone else, she has stressed the importance
of mutual projection and 'demonisation' that characterise the propa-
ganda of international conflict, whilst emphasising the responsibility
of the individual t o confront such a regressive culture. In the light of
this she is acutely aware of the significance of the denial that charac-
terises the 'thinking' about nuclear weapons and so brings an
important psychoanalytic perspective to the 'nuclear debate'. Insofar
as these views have led Hanna Segal to undertake partisan positions in
concrete political conflicts she has not been afraid to raise controver-
sies. She objected to the cultural 'ivory tower' atmosphere that
threatened some psychoanalytic communities, believing that psycho-
analysts, like anyone else, have social responsibilities.
Over time, this courageous integration of theory and practical
engagement, of maintaining strict technical neutrality in psychoana-
lytic work with patients together with a clear socio-political
engagement, has been a major gift from Hanna Segal to the psychoan-
alytic community.
All these themes are richly articulated, illustrated and expanded in
this excellent collection. There could be no more effective expression
of gratitude and homage to the contributions of Hanna Segal than the
present volume.
This volume is the second of two books in honour of Hanna Segal.
Whereas the first, Reason and Passion, focused on clinical and theo-
retical work, this volume celebrates Hanna Segal's contribution to
Applied Psychoanalysis. The essays collected here, in their breadth and
depth, certainly d o justice to the richness of her contribution. Each
author, although specialising in a particular field, draws on multiple
aspects of her work in such a way that the internal structure of her
'oeuvre' comes to life through these essays.
The introductory chapter by David Bell provides both a very
thoughtful perspective on Applied Psychoanalysis and offers an
explanatory overview of some of her principal contributions to it.
Notes on Contributors
Ron Britton is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Society. He was formerly Chairman of the Child and Family
Department of the Tavistock Clinic. He has published extensively on
clinical and theoretical issues in psychoanalysis. H e has also written a
number of important papers that discuss literature and psychoanalysis.
His recently published book 'Belief and Imagination' explores psycho-
analytic, literary and philosophical themes.
Michael Fcldman is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Society. Until recently he was Consultant Psychotherapist at the
Maudsley Hospital, London. For many years he has been preoccupied
with the detailed understanding of mental states and in showing how
such understanding is critical to issues of technique in psychoanalysis.
He co-edited, with Elizabeth Bott Spillius, 'Psychic Equilibrium and
Psychic Change', the collected papers of Betty Joseph.
Ledn Grinbcrg is a Training Analyst of the Madrid Psychoanalytical
Society and a past President of the Argentine Psychoanalytic
Association. He was also the first Vice President of the International
Psychoanalytic Association, for Latin America. He is the author of
numerous papers and his published books include 'Guilt and
Depression' and 'The Goals of Psychoanalysis'. In 1982 he was invited
to be the AndrC Ballard Lecturer in New York.
Rcbeca Grinbcrg is a Training Analyst of the Madrid Psychoanalytical
Association and past Director of its Training Institute. She was a
founder member of the Psychoanalytic Association of Buenos Aires.
She is the author of numerous clinical and theoretical papers on adult
and child analysis.
Rarl King is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society, of which she is a former President. She has also been Secretary
of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In her position of
Archivist to the British Psycho-Analytical Society she made a very
important contribution to the understanding of the history of
Psychoanalysis. This work led to her editing (with Riccardo Steiner)
'The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-1945'. In 1992 she and Hanna
Segal were both awarded the Sigourney award for contributions to
psychoanalysis.
Albert Mason is a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He

is a Training Analyst of the Psychoanalytic Centre of California and the
Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and also holds the post of Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California. He is
a member of the House of Delegates of the International
Psychoanalytic Association. He has published numerous papers and
has an enduring interest in very disturbed mental states.
Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East

London, a department that runs a joint Masters Degree in
Psychoanalytic Studies with the Tavistock Clinic, where he is visiting
Professor. He has long been interested in the relationship of psycho-
analysis to social theory. He is co-editor of 'Soundings' a journal that
explores politics, literature, social theory and psychoanalysis. His
book 'The Good Society and the Inner World' explores the relevance
of psychoanalysis for social theory.
Ignts SodrC is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Society. She has published a number of psychoanalytical papers of a
theoretical and technical nature. She has been deeply involved in
exploring the ways that psychoanalysis can contribute to the under-
standing of literature. Her book 'Imagining Characters', which she
co-wrote with A. S. Byatt, explores in considerable depth the various
meeting points between psychoanalysis and literature.
John Steiner is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society. He was formerly a Consultant Psychotherapist at the Tavistock
Clinic. He has published extensively on psychoanalytic theory and
technique particularly as regards the understanding of very disturbed
states of mind. His central ideas were brought together in his book
'Psychic Retreats'. He has also edited a collection of Hanna Segal's
later papers entitled 'Psychoanalysis, Literature and War'.
Richard Wollheim is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

California, Berkeley and Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at
the University of California, Davis. He was formerly Crote Professor
of Mind and Logic at the University of London. He has had a lifelong
Contributors
interest in Art, Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Mind and has
published numerous papers on these subjects. His books include 'The
Thread of Life', 'The Mind and its Depths9 and 'Freud9, the latter
being a concise and masterly explication of Freud's theoretical devel-
opment.
Introduction
Psychoanalysis, a Body of Knowledge of
Mind and H u m a n C u l t u r e
David Bell
This book is dedicated to Hanna Segal's contribution to the psycho-

analytic understanding of art and culture. It is not, however, best
understood as a book on 'Applied Psychoanalysis' for reasons which
will become evident.
Hanna Segal has, in the tradition of Freud, demonstrated the rele-
vance of psychoanalytic ideas to human knowledge in general. Yet
these contributions did not arise from her 'setting about' applying psy-
choanalysis to other fields but have always been emergent from more
immediate clinical and theoretical concerns.'
In order to appreciate the relevance of her ideas it is necessary to
consider more generally the relationship of psychoanalysis to these
broader fields of enquiry, apparently far removed from the exigencies
of the consulting room.
In the first part of this introduction I will offer a perspective which
views psychoanalysis as a body o f knowledge o f the mind, conceptu-
ally distinct from the application of that knowledge. I will suggest
that this position provides a coherent basis for the psychoanalytic
contribution to the understanding of art, literature and sociocultural
processes.
I will further suggest that there is an intimate link between this
account of psychoanalytic knowledge and an epistemological position
based on realism, as distinct from a contemporary trend which has dis-
carded the notion of 'reality' or 'truth' for a more relativist position.
This commitment to realism is made most overt within the Kleinian
tradition, of which Hanna Segal is the foremost exponent.
Hanna Segal's contribution is premised on the difficulties the mind
encounters in facing reality, internal and external, and this is as true of
her work on aesthetics as it is of her political contributions. Without a
conception of 'truthfulness' or 'reality' there can be no place for cate-
gories such as 'deception' or 'illusion'.
On October 15th 1897 Freud, in the midst of the struggle of his
self-analysis, wrote in a letter to Fliess:
A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found in my own

case too [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous
of my father, and now I consider it a universal event in early childhood,
even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical.
(Similar to the invention of parentage [family romance] in paranoia -
heroes, founders of religion.) If this is so, we can understand the grip-
ping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections that reason
raises against the presupposition of fate; ... Our feelingsrise against any
arbitrary individual compulsion ... but the Greek legend seizes upon a
compulsion which everyone recognises because he senses its existence
within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus
in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfilment here
transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which sep-
arates his infantile state from his present one. (Masson, 1985, p. 272)
This is Freud's first mention of the Oedipus Complex, but it is not for
this reason that I quote it here. I want to draw attention to an impor-
tant dual quality of the above statement which I think captures
something of the nature of what psychoanalysis is. Freud has made not
one discovery but two. For, as well as making a fundamental discovery
as regards mental life, he has provided us with the outline of a theory
of aesthetics. Sophocles's great tragedy has endured. It continues to
have such a grip upon us through its capaciry to draw us into identifi-
cation with its central characters who enact before us human conflicts
which are fundamental. It is not only the content of the play which
provides the key to its power but also its formal qualities. The Delphic
oracle has decreed that Laius will be killed by his son and measures are
taken to prevent this from happening yet Oedipus, despite himself, is
driven on to the terrible act. In facr the very actions he takes to evade
his fate (killing his father) turn out to be, tragically, part of the chain of
events chat eventuate in its realisation. Manifestly, the driving force
derives from the will of the gods but at a deeper level the fate motif, so
central to this play, gives dramatic form to our own apperception of
forces within us which we cannot control, our own unconscious.
This dual quality where psychoanalysis, Janus-like, looks both
inwards to the workings of the mind and outwards to culture and
society is not accidental but is central to what psychoanalysis is and it
is to this question that I now turn. Discussion of it will, I hope, pro-
vide a frame within which the contributions to this volume might be
considered.
The term 'psychoanalysis' refers to three separate but interdepen-
Introduction
dent entities: it is a body of knowledge about the mind, a research
activity and a form of treatment for psychological disturbance (both
these latter activities deriving from Freud's invention of the psychoan-
alytic setting). The first of these is, however, crucial and it is as a body
of knowledge that psychoanalysis has to be judged. Psychoanalytic
treatment is, from this perspective, an applicution of psychoanalysis
and is not coextensive with it. To many this may seem surprising but
conceptually it is, I believe, crucial and indeed this appears also to be
Freud's view. He says in 'The Question of Lay Analysis':
For practical reasons we have been in the habit - and this is true, inci-
dentally of our publications as well - of distinguishing between medical
and applied analysis. But this is not a logical distinction. The true line
of division is between scientific analysis and its applications alike in the
medical and non-medical fields. [By 'scientific' Freud is referring to the
theoretical structure of that body of knowledge that constitutes psycho-
analysis.] (Freud, 1926, p. 257)
It is often considered that 'the line of division' falls in a different place,

that is, between clinical psychoanalysis and its 'applications', the latter
covering the applications of psychoanalysis to the understanding of
such phenomena as the arts, groups, institutions and sociocultural
processes. According to this view 'applied psychoanalysis' is in a fun-
damental way lesser, more speculative than 'pure' psychoanalysis. It is
certainly true that developments of psychoanalytic theory derive from
clinical work and that a deep psychoanalytic understanding of the
mental life of a particular individual can only be drawn from the psy-
choanalytic setting (though it may derive support from elsewhere).
But, the central discoveries of psychoanalysis are not tested or proved
by the practice of psychoanalytic treatment - the existence of the
unconscious, the phenomena of transference, projection, the core
mental constellations, such as the oedipal structure, form part of a
general theory of mind. In fact many of the main findings of psycho-
analysis were as much discovered from a study of the ordinary
phenomena of everyday life such as dreams, parapraxes (i.e. bungled
actions) and jokes as they were from the symptoms of neurotic
patients.
A glance at the psychoanalytic approach to groups illustrates this
point. The understanding of group and social phenomena cannot be
reduced purely to models derived from the functioning of individual
minds. Other levels of explanation such as those derived from social
and economic theory are relatively autonomous. However, a compre-
hensive account of group and social processes will necessarily derive
some of its content from knowledge of what individual minds are like.
'Croup Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' (Freud, 1921) is not
an account of the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to group
phenomena. In fact it can be read in the exact opposite direction. The
study of group phenomena (such as the marked magnification of
affect, the loss of individual identity and of certain ego functions, the
excessive devotion to the leader) and the attempt to account for them,
led Freud to fundamental discoveries concerning the functioning of
individual minds. This work is an essential part of the thinking that
went into the formulation of the 'structural model'. In 'Group
Psychology' he rebuts an idea, popular at the time, of there being such
a thing as a 'group mind'. For Freud there is no conceptual distinction
to be drawn between the individual and groups in terms of human psy-
chology. He says:
In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a

model, as a helper, as an opponent and so from the very first individual
psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words,
is at one and the same time a social psychology as well. (Freud, 1921,
P. 6 9 )
Although Freud specifically addresses human culture in general in
works such as Totem and Taboo (1912), The Future of an Illusion
(1927), Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), it would, I think, be an
important misunderstanding of his work to consider these books as his
principal contribution to this area of knowledge. The conviction as to
the cultural relevance of psychoanalysis runs through all his work. For
example, in 'Obsessive actions and religious practices' (1907), Freud
shows the parallel between the strange private ceremonials and rituals
of the obsessional neurotic and those that accompany religious prac-
tices. Both centre on the need to keep separate good and bad, the
sacred and the profane, and both have intense feelings of guilt and
ways of dealing with it as essential to their content. The difference is
that obsessional rituals are idiosyncratic to the individual whereas reli-
gious ceremonials are collective and stereotyped. Freud elsewhere
makes the point that neurotic symptoms can be viewed as caricatures
of ordinary cultural phenomena:
It might be maintained that hysteria is a caricature of a work of an, that
an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of religion and that a paranoiac
delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system. (Freud, 1913, p. 73)
Like all good caricatures something that is essential to their object is

exaggerated and, through the exaggeration, this aspect is made clear
but also, in so doing, the part is made into the whole. This demonstration
Introduction
of the continuities between the apparently bizarre and abnormal and
so-called normality is, of course, typical of Freud's thought. He goes on
to say:
The divergence [between neurotic symptoms and cultural achievements]

resolves itself ultimately into the fact that the neuroses are asocial struc-
tures; they endeavour to achieve by private means what is effected in
society by collective effort. (Freud, op. cit., p. 73)
So, psychoanalysis is first and foremost a body of knowledge about the

mind. This point is conceptual and does not undermine the crucial link
between psychoanalytic knowledge and the psychoanalytic practice
upon which its very existence depends. Freud, also in 'The Question
of Lay Analysis', stresses this critical dialectical unity between theory
and practice:
It was impossible to treat a patient without learning something new; it

was impossible to gain fresh insight without perceiving its beneficial
results. (Freud, op. cit., p. 256)
Most of the discoveries of psychoanalysis have not arisen from its suc-
cesses but from attempts to deal with practical problems that presented
themselves as obstacles to treatment (this is true, for example, of
Freud's discovery of the transference, the negative therapeutic reac-
tion, the later discoveries of the imporrance of envy). A particular
strength of the psychoanalyric 'research programme' has been its
capacity to generate new discoveries within broadly the same explana-
tory system, discoveries drawn from these unexpected obstacles to
successful treatments.
-The conceptual distinction to be drawn berween psychoanalysis
as a body of knowledge and iu various applications has important
epistemological implications. There is a growing tendency within
psychoanalysis to view the truthfulness of interpretations as a purely
P"fr tic question. Psychoanalytic concepts arc from this perspective,

use 1 metaphors for describing experience but do not r&r to objects
that are 'real'. What psychoandysis offers to patients, according to this
view, is a possibility of freeing themselves from one repetitive 'narra-
tive' and replacing it with another which serves them better, providing
them with greater freedom. The new narrative is judged by its consis-
tency, its coherence - truth not being a relevant criterion. This
suggests, implicitly, that the aim of analysis might be to find a more
helphl narrative 'of the patient's life', as if this were a matter of choice.
Further, if the truth of psychoanalytic assertions is to be judged only
by pragmatic concerns then psychoanalytic knowledge itself can have
no existence which is independent of its practical use. The validity of
psychoanalytic concepts then collapses into their capacity to effect
changes in patients.' This is the position taken by a number of critics
of psychoanalysis who have looked for validation of its core claims
within the accounts of treatments (usually by re-examining Freud's
cases, e.g. Griinbaum, 1986).
The view that I am suggesting entails a 'realist oncology' for the
objects which psychoanalysis investigates, i.e. that the objects of our
enquiry have an existence that is ontologidly distinct from our way of
describing them. The words 'transference' and 'projecrion' are not
metaphors but refer to real phenomena as present in everyday life as in
the analyric session, though the latter provides a method of making them
more 'visible'. They are in this sense as ' r e d as tables and chairs. This
view opposes the relativism that characterises the extremes of the 'post-
modernist' view where the 'reality' of the objecrs of enquiry is regarded
as a fiction. According to that perspective, all that we have is different
descriptions or discourses which cannot be judged or compared for their
truth content by any independent means. Bhaskar (1986) has suggested
that to fail to distinguish between the objects of our enquiry and our
ways of describing them is to commit what he terms the 'episternic fal-
lacy'. By this he means that ontological questions ('What sort of things
exist?') have to be distinguished From epistemological questions ('How
does knowledge of these things come about?'). He suggests that the very
intelligibility of science depends on the idea that the objects of investi-
gation have a reality independent of us. Will (1986) and Collier (1981)
have shown how this epistemological position relates to psychoanalysis
and the human sciences in general but there is not space here to develop
the theme further. (Michael Rusdn discusses this issue in his contribution
to this volume, Chapter 5.)
The view that psychoanalytic knowledge is conceptually distinct
from its applications is, I think, implied by its location within such a
realist or 'transcendental realist', as Bhaskar (op. cir.) terms it, account
of scientific knowledge. The credibility of central psychoanalytic asser-
tions is from this realist perspective an entirely separate matter from
whether or not they are useful in helping patients.
The reason for this philosophical digression is not only to develop
furrher my theme concerning psychoanalytic knowledge, but also
because this sense of a struggle for truth, coming to know reality,
internal and external, is in fict central to the Kleinian tradition. Klein
suggested that there exists in the mind an 'epistemophilic instinct', in
other words an instinct for knowledge that cannot be reduced to other
instincts. The struggle between patient and analyst is not, from this
perspective, to find 'useful narratives' but, as far as possible to be
truthful. This struggle for truthfulness has to be distinguished from
Introduction
fundamentalist assertions of absolute Truth with a capital 'T', which
derive from omniscience and are an attack on the capacity for truth-
fulness. The truth is complex and the struggle is inevitably
never-ending. But recognising the complexity of reality is not the same
thing as believing that what constitute truthful descriptions of reality
are a matter of choice.' Bion (1970), whose work has been very influ-
ential on Hanna Segal and on all the authors in this volume, thought
that truth is to the mind what food is to the body, and that lack of
capacity for truth leads to a kind of mental rickets. Such a mind would
not be able to distinguish what was true from what it wished were true
and thus reverts to a state of mind preceding that which Freud char-
acterised as existing prior to the inception of the reality principle
where:
...what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable
but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting
up of the reality proved to be a momentous step. (Freud, 1911,
p. 219, italics in the original).
The 'pragmatic' version of truth of psychoanalytic interpretations

leaves no place for this crucial distinction between truthheality and
comforting wish-fulfilments. It also situates psychoanalysis within an
epistemological framework which cannot encompass the idea of psy-
choanalysis as a body of knowledge logically distinct from its practice.
No place is available, in this framework, for what is usually termed
'Applied Psychoanalysis', which is thus demoted, at best, only to a sort
of analogical or metaphorical reasoning.
Psychoanalysis and Art

Freud's work, generally speaking, illuminates the content of works of
art and literature showing how they give expression to struggles and
conflicts within our inner worlds as for example, in his discussion of
Oedipus Rex, but he does not give any account of what it is that dis-
tinguishes a work of art from something more ephemeral.
His study of Leonardo da Vinci (Freud, 1910) has principally a bio-
graphical intention - namely to show a thematic connection between
certain critical events and memories of the artist's childhood and the
content of his work, but says nothing about Leonardo's art as art,
makes no comment on what it is about the work or the artist that
makes it great. He does suggest that intrinsic to the capacity for genius
is the ability to strike out on one's own without need to derive
authority from the past, to repudiate the authority of 'the ancients',
standing symbolically for the parents. But this may be true of greatness
in general and says nothing about the work itself that takes us further
in our understanding of great art.
In 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming' (Freud, 1908), one of the
few places where Freud explicitly discusses the nature of artistic cre-
ativity itself, he fails to make an adequate distinction between a
spontaneous defensive daydream and the real creative work of the
imagination (see Britton, 1995). Although Freud shows in this paper a
tendency to view works of art as defensive, it is unlikely that he him-
self believed this to be the case, but he lacked an adequate theoretical
framework to address this problem. It is here that Klein's work makes
its most significant contribution to this field of enquiry. But before
touching upon this I would like, briefly, to consider an oft presented
objection to a psychoanalytic approach to the understanding of art.
It is sometimes suggested that the very attempt to illuminate the
nature of artistic greatness can only detract from it. The implication
appears to be that art, to achieve its effect, must hide the nature of its
work behind some cloak of mystery, that the experience of mysteri-
ousness is a necessary part of artistic appreciation. The psychoanalytic
tradition represented by the contributors to the present volume takes
an entirely different view - namely that understanding enriches appre-
ciation. Freud has this to say:
... [some have suggested that] this state of intellectual bewilderment is a
necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects.
It would be only with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself
to believe in any such necessity. (Freud, 1914b, p. 212, quoted by
Wollheim, 1973)
Great art is surely not so vulnerable that probing of its nature will
cause its greatness to dissolve. Awe, an important element of the aes-
thetic experience, is likely to have a genetic relation to primitive
experiences, such as the infant's wonder at his mother's body and its
contents, but this knowledge in no way detracts from the nature of
that experience. The idea that the object of awe has to be protected
may itself derive from fantasies concerning both the nature of the
object and the process of understanding: namely the object may be felt
to be both powerful and brittle and the process of understanding be
thought of only as dangerous and intrusive.
In the above I said that generally Freud does not address the ques-
tion of the actual creative work itself but this is not entirely true. He
did lack a theoretical framework within which to address this problem
but, as elsewhere, Freud, when faced with such difficulties, turns either
to literature itself or to a more anecdotal form, in which he can
express himself more freely. His paper 'On Narcissism: an
Introduction
Introduction' (Freud, 1914a) touches on the need to create something
in order not to fall ill. He wonders why man ever leaves the satisfac-
tions of his narcissistic state to face all the pain of the struggle with the
real world. His theory could not provide an answer but he found one
in the poet Heine's 'picture of the psychogenesis of creation': God is
imagined as saying 'Illness was no doubt the final cause of the whole
urge to create. By creating I could recover, by creating I became
healthy'.
In 'On Transience' (Freud, 1916), written at the same time as he
wrote 'Mourning and Melancholia', he discusses a poet and a 'taci-
turn' friend who could not enjoy the beauty of their mountain walk.
Their awareness of its beauty was spoiled as it also brought awareness
of the transience of life. This was not a problem for Freud. As he put
it 'Transience value is scarcity value in time ... a flower that blossoms
only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely'.
He agreed that awareness of all beauty must bring thoughts of death
and the passing of all things but, as he pointed out, '... since the value
of all this beauty and perfection is determined by its significance for
our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore
independent of its duration'. These considerations, however, had no
effect upon his friends, which led him to the conclusion that a 'pow-
erful emotional factor was at work' and he went on to describe this as
'a revolt in their minds against mourning'.
Here Freud bases the capacity for aesthetic experience on the
mind's ability to engage in the work of mourning. It fell to Klein, how-
ever, to provide a theoretical structure which could d o justice to
Freud's intuition. Her theory of the psychic changes that take place at
the inception of the depressive position, in which the mind develops
the capacity to bear particular types of pain and anxiety, formed the
basis for the development of the psychoanalytic understanding of cre-
ativity. But it was Segal who provided us with a comprehensive theory,
and a number of the contributions in this volume draw substantially
on Segal's work in this area. Before outlining Segal's contribution,
however, it is necessary to provide a brief account of the depressive
position as described by Klein (1935, 1940).
The Depressive Position4

In her work with young children Klein came to understand how the
child divides his world in a manner that is extreme but necessary in
order for development to take place. It is easiest to examine this in
terms of the infant's relation to what is termed his 'primary object',
normally referring to his image of his mother. On the one hand there
is a mother who is present and who is felt to provide for his material
(food, warmth) and emotional (love, understanding) needs. The child
develops a highly idealised relationship with chis psychic objecr who is
felt to be quite disrincr from anorher objecr that is not available and
is thus frustrating. T h s latter object is, consequently, felt to be hateful
and is hated. Although, in rdiry, these are one and the same object, the
infant cannot manage that complexity and instead maintains them in
his mind as quite d i ~ r i n c r .In
~ this way he can preserve his relation to his
'good objecr' and protecr it from all his violent and desrrucrive feelings
which are then direcred only towards the 'bad objecr' who deprives him.
Feelings direcred towards the primary objecr are generalised to the world
which is thus felt to be divided along chese lines. Klein also makes it clear
that such division of objecrs cannot take place without a division in the
ego itself.
Klein also shows how exrernal objecu are internalised and ser up
within the self, there being a constant interplay of projecrion and intro-
jecrion from the beginning of life. As the child manages to esrablish
within himself a secure relation to a good, albeir idealised, internal objecr,
a vital stage of development takes place in which the infantile mind
becomes able to appreciate that the good and bad objecr are not, in real-
iry, disrincr - the mother who frusrrates him by not being continually
present is the same person as the mother that feeds him. This integration
of the perceptions of the objecr and thus of the self, brings a very acute
and poignant mental pain which is made up of two fundamental com-
ponents. Firstly, ic provides the basis for the awareness of separateness
from the objecr, the recognition that ir has a life of its own, and this
becomes the source of an intense pining for the object. Secondly, the
recognition that the good and bad objecr are one and the same brings
anxiery as to the safery of the good objecr, now felt to be in danger
from the violent attacks. The infant is faced with profound feelings of
guilt and concern for the srate of his object. Prior to this development
the infant feared only reraliadon for his own attacks. This wodd, which
Klein (1946) described as che paranoid schizoid world, is thus amoral.
But, as the depressive posirion is esrablished the feelings of guilt and
concern bring the child into a moral world where there can be genuine
concern for the ocher. If all goes resonably well, there being sufficient
internal and external SUppOrK, the mourning process consriruted by
chese feelings of pining and guilt, u n be borne, the ego is suengthened
and there is a release of reparative impulses. For Klein creative work is,
at depth, derived from these reparative impulses which seek to repair
and resrore the damage felt to have been done to objecrs, inrernal and
external. This model of reparation as a basis for creative work is quite
disrincr from Freud's concept of sublimarion, for, unlike sublimarion,
which is a re-channelling of insrincrs into a socially acceptable form,
reparation is not a defence in any classical sense.
Introduction
The establishment of the depressive position brings a number of
other fundamental changes to mental life. Of these, two are centrally
related to the theme of this book, and both have been extensively
elaborated in Segal's oeuvre. Firstly, the withdrawal of projections
from objects brings the capacity to distinguish the real qualities of the
object as distinct from the self. The recognition of the internal world
as distinct from the external world, yet having its own reality, pro-
vides an important basis for the free use of imagination. The
depressive position also brings the capacity for symbol formation.
Klein (1930) described her now famous patient, an autistic boy,
'Dick', whose interest in the world was profoundly inhibited. This
inhibition arose from his limited capacity for symbol formation.
Objects in his world that might, for example, have symbolised his
mother's body were treated like the original object and therefore
associated with the same overwhelming anxiety. With the establish-
ment of symbolic function, the symbol stands for the object but
remains distinct from it, retains its own qualities and so can be used
freely by the mind to represent things. Segal, as I will discuss below,
elaborated on Klein's work in this area and in so doing made a fun-
damental contribution of her own.
The above exposition might appear to imply a rather linear devel-
opmental model and this would be misleading. According to this
account, there is from the beginning of life some rudimentary capacity
for integration which, however, is easily overwhelmed by the splitting
and projective processes brought into operation by the unmanageable
primitive anxieties. As development takes place there is an increasing
capacity for integration. These quantitative steps transform into a
qualitative change when the capacity for bearing depressive pain
acquires a resilience. Klein was not only describing two phases of
development but also two fundamentally different ways of being in the
world. Each developmental challenge throughout life involves a
reworking of the anxieties of the depressive position often resulting in
a move back into the paranoid schizoid mode of functioning. In good
circumstances, such de-stabilisation results in further development,
whilst in other less favourable circumstances it can bring profound
regression and illness. It is for this reason that Klein used the term
'positions' rather than phases:
to emphasise the fact that the phenomenon she was describing was not
simply a passing 'stage' or 'phase' such as, for example, the oral phase;
her term implies a specific configuration of object relations, anxieties
and defences which persist throughout life. (Segal, 1964)
H a n n a Scgal's Contribution t o the Understanding of Culture
Segal's contribution to the understanding of culture can be divided
into three broad areas. Firstly, her early work on aesthetics and sym-
bolism made a seminal contribution to the understanding of art.
Secondly, she has used psychoanalytic theory to illuminate a number
of works of literature and in so doing made further contributions to
psychoanalytic theory. Lastly, there are her socio-political contribu-
tions. However, in the same way described above in relation to Freud,
I think Segal's work has the quality of looking two ways - inwards
towards the individual mind and outwards towards human culture in
general. It is for this reason that her ideas have been taken up with
such avidity by the academic world.
'A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics' (1952) is one of Segal's
seminal contributions to psychoanalysis. Freud, through focusing
largely on the content of artistic works (recognising in them universal
themes, or certain infantile situations from the life of the artist), could
not provide an account of what it is that distinguishes a work of art
from more ephemeral products of the mind. It is this that Segal
addresses. As she put it, a central question of aesthetics is 'What con-
stitutes good art and in what essential respects is it different from
other human works from bad art in particular'.
As I put it in Reason and Passion
Segal puts the capacity to mourn, now enriched by Klein's elucidation

of the inner struggle that forms the basis of the depressive position, both
at the centre of the artist's work and of the audiences aesthetic response.
Works of a n derive their aesthetic depth from the artist's capacity to
face the pain and guilt inherent in his perception of damage done to his
good object and, through his creation of the work, to give substance to
this struggle and to overcome it, the work itself being an act of repara-
tion. We the audience are gripped by such works as we identify with the
author's confrontation with the pain of his shattered internal world and
obtain reassurance from his abilicy, through intense psychic work, to
overcome it and depict it in his work of an.
Segal also points out that if beauty is the basis of one aspect of the aes-
thetic experience then its contrary cannot be ugliness but only 'aestheti-
cally indifferent'. Ugliness, being part of human experience ofien evokes
aesthetic reactions of considerable depth and from which we d o not
recoil. Further, the apprehension of beaury does not only bring joy,
but also terror, here recalling Rilke in his Duino Ekes: 'Beaury is
nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to
Introduction
bear'. She goes on to say, referring to a book by Hans Sachs 'Beauty,
Life and Death':
...he says the difficulty is not to understand beauty but to bear it, and
he connects this terror with the very peacefulness of the perfect work of
an. He calls it the static element; it is peaceful because it seems
unchangeable, eternal. And it is terrifying because this eternal unchange-
ability is the expression of the death instinct - the static element
opposed to life and change.
Both beauty and ugliness together provide at depth the aesthetic expe-
rience. This is seen clearly for example in the great Greek tragedies
whose content reflects the horror and ugliness of life, whilst its beauty
is expressed in the form.
In her classic paper on symbolism (1957), Segal drew on her work
with artists blocked in their creativity and on her work with psychotic
patients. In both situations there were important problems in the
capacity to create and use symbols. Segal showed the crucial link
between the capacity to mourn the loss of an object and the capacity
to symbolise its loss. As briefly outlined above these functions develop
as part of the negotiation of the depressive position. Freud (1923)
described the ego as the 'graveyard of abandoned object cathexes'.
Proust, using the same metaphor, described a book as 'a vast graveyard
where on most of the tombstones one can read no more than faded
names' (quoted in Segal, 1952). However, both these metaphors sug-
gest a rather static situation. Segal shows how the capacity to
symbolise lost objects creates an inner enrichment and freedom.
I remember a patient whose girlfriend, to whom he was deeply
attached, died suddenly. She had been an opera singer and in the ini-
tial stages of his mourning he could not bear to listen to any opera or
any classical music. Later he could listen to opera but only the operas
in which she had sung. However, at the end of his mourning process,
which took some years, he developed a new interest in modern opera
(which had not been part of the repertoire of his lost love). He had
thus given up his determination to hold on to his lost object through
only listening to 'her music', an enslavement of the ego, but could
symbolically express his continued love for her through his musical
interests, now very much his own. A similar process of enrichment of
the self consequent on mourning was described most beautifully by
C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed. Having gone through a long process
of mourning for 'H', he described how the end of this process did not
mark the final loss of 'H' with all the impoverishment that this would
bring, but instead a re-finding of her. 'And suddenly, at the very
moment when ... I mourned 'H' least, I remembered her best. Indeed
it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous unan-
swerable impression . . . I (quoted by Pedder, 1982).
Prior to the establishment of the depressive position, the symbol is
equated with the thing symbolised forming what Segal termed a 'sym-
bolic equation'. The attenuation of anxiety that full symbolisation
brings, is not available in this situation. This leads, as in the case of
Klein's patient, 'Dick', t o extreme restriction of interest in the world,
and thus profound limitation of creativity.
Segd has given special emphasis to the capaciry for perception and
she regards artists as having a very highly developed r d i r y sense both
of their own inner worlds and of outer reality. The imagination can
thus run free, anchored as it is in this reality sense. Without this reality
sense artistic creativity easily slips into delusion, a process which Segd
(1974) traced in her very compelling account of William Goldingi The
Spire. Here she draws the contrast beween Jocelin, who believes he can
build a spire completely ignoring the most elementary engineering
rinciplcs, and the master builder, Roger Mason, whose sober judgement
Lds him m the conclusion that the spire will not stand, as the cathe-
dral's foundations are too w u k to support it.
Caper summarises this aspect of Segal's paper and puts it thus:
The contrast between Jocelin and Roger Mason is one between

grandiose delusional narcissism and sober realism. But it is also a con-
trast between sterility and creativity. Jocelin claims that the spire is an
expression of his love for his object - God. But it is clear that he has
identified himself with God and that the spire is really an expression of
his love for an idealised image of himself. He is inupable of con-
structing anything real, however, because he sacrifices his perception of
reality for the sake of maintaining narcissistic delusions. Like the cathe-
dral, his delusional system lacks foundation in reality. Roger Mason's
view of what he can do is constrained by reality, and is hence much
more modest, but, unlike Jocelin, he is capable of creating something
real. (Caper, 1997, p. 46)
The theme of the distinction berwccn defensive daydreaming and real

imaginative work is further elaborated in the chapter by SodrC and
myself.
A Note on Psychoanalysis and Literature

Psychoanalysis meets literature on a number of different terrains. A
piece of literature may be used to illustrate a psychoanalytic theory, or
a psychoanalytic approach may be used to illuminate the work.
Inevitably these two are closely related and there is often considerable
overlap. Klein wrote three papers with predominantly literary themes:
'On Identification' (19SS), 'Infantile Anxiety Situations as Reflected in
a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse' (1929) and 'Reflections on
The Oresteia' (1963). 'On Identification' is the best known of these
and seems to belong to the former category (i.e. a work of literature
being used to illustrate a psychoanalytic theory). It achieves its main
effect through its use of Julian Green's novel 'If I were You' to illus-
trate her model of the inner world and, most particularly, the workings
of the mechanism of projective identification. The central character of
Green's novel makes a pact with the devil wherein he is permitted to
enter into other people's bodies, taking them over, leaving his victims
inside his own discarded body. Klein meticulously examines the
motives for each object he chooses and charts the effects upon his
character, of these transformations.
Similarly, she uses Ravel's opera The Magic Word as an illustration
of certain clinical phenomena that she has encountered in her work
with young children. The child in the opera, after arguing with his
mother about not wanting to do his homework, makes attacks upon
various objects (these include smashing a teapot, trying to stab a
squirrel and a furious attack upon a grandfather clock which involves
removing the pendulum). The objects that have been attacked swell
up, come to life and persecute him but when he shows concern for a
squirrel that has been bitten and binds the little creature's paw, the
world is restored to order.
In these papers Klein is, so to speak, having a conversation with the
artist who through his ability to be in touch with primitive areas of
mental life, and give them form, had discovered the very same phe-
nomena that she encountered with her young patients. Her paper on
the Oresteia is in the same mould but her account of Aeschylus's play
also makes an important contribution to our understanding of the
enduring greatness of that work.
These papers deal only with the work of art itself. Klein does not
discuss the authors. A psychoanalytic meeting with art and literature
may also have an explicit biographical focus, showing how the work
emerges from particular struggles in the life of the writer.
Segal's 'literary' papers span all the above categories. Her paper on
Conrad (Segal, 1984) uses his work to illustrate the relation between
the working through of the conflicts of the depressive position and
creativity in general, most especially as it applies to the mid-life crisis.
In addition she gives a psychoanalytic account of the novel itself and
relates its themes to critical biographical aspects of Conrad's life. The
paper on William Gelding's The Spire, already referred to, is more a
meeting between a psychoanalyst and an author who, coming from
different perspectives, have made the same discoveries. Both Golding
and Segal clurly share an interest in the difkrentiation of imagination
from delusion.
There are four chapters in the current volume that deal explicitly with
works of literature. Both SodrCi contribution and my own (Chapters 2
and 3) use psychoanalytic theory to explore the nature of the greatness
of certain works of an, Madame Bovary and The Singing Detective respec-
tively. SodrC views Flauben's novel as an account of the terrifying dete-
rioration of a character that results from her addiction to daydreaming,
which SodrC views as a deadly activity quite distinct from the use of
imagination. The central character of The Singing Detective is viewed as
facing a mid-life crisis in which he confronts the central traumas of his
life and is in so doing relased from the mental paralysis thac has been a
lifelong illness. He moves from daydreaming to imagination.
Britton's contribution (Chapter 1) elucidates Rilke's Duino Efe i s
showing how they give form to cerrain primitive mental states. In a di-
tion, by bringing certain biographical material, he shows how Rilke,
f'
through his writing of the Efegies (which took him ten years) transformed
himself
..
in the process, emerging with a new voice and a place in the
world.
Steiner's paper (Chapter 4) comes into a slightly different category. He
reexamines Oedipus Rex from a new and starding perspective.' Cenain
patients, he shows, live in a world of both knowing and not knowing the
truth. They know thac something is wrong with their world but they
'turn a blind eye to ic'. He then shows how Sophocles's great play, viewed
from this perspective, acquires a further tragic dimension. The central
characters seem to both know and not know the truth, or rather, 'turn
a blind eye' to it with terrible consequences. His paper is therefore both
an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory and to classical
scholarship.
Hanna Segal's Contribution to Sociopolitical Understanding

Since she was a teenager, Scgal has had a passionate interest in social
and political issues and an abiding commitment to the 'Lefr'. Although
she lectured on these subjects, she did not make any written contribu-
tions to social and political issues until the 1980s. The early eighties
marked a low point in the 'Cold War' and many believed that nuclear
war was no longer a distant threat but was in danger of becoming a
reality. The Medical Campaign against Nuclear Weapons was already well
established and sought to provide the public with more objective infor-
mation as to the nature of the danger facing them. It aimed to counter,
with scientific evidence, the reassuring voices of government who claimed
that nuclear war need not have catastrophic global consequences and
that individuals would be able to protect themselves in the event of a
Introduction
nuclear catastrophe. It was in this context that Segal, together with
Moses Laufer (another senior psychoanalyst), organised some meet-
ings of the British Psycho-Analytical Society' to provide a forum to
consider in what way psychoanalysts might make a contribution to this
issue. Both felt strongly that a dangerous attitude of denial of reality
permeated the public attitude to nuclear war. They believed psycho-
analysts might have something to contribute to an understanding of
this process given that dealing with anxieties that result in a 'denial of
reality', and tracing the effects of such denials, are part of their daily
concern.
Inevitably, many thought that such a direct involvement in political
issues ran counter to the psychoanalyst's need to maintain neutrality."
Segal and her colleagues believed that the situation had become so crit-
-
ical that to sav nothing was in itself a kind of involvement. It was a
-
collusion with the forces. internal and external. that sought to main-
tain silence in the face of the catastrophe.
'Psycho-analysts for the Prevention of Nuclear War' (PPNW) was
formed in 1983 and its activities included arranging joint meetings
with like-minded organisations, a series of public lectures and the pro-
duction of pamphlets. Forces were also gathered on an international
scale and in 1985 at the Hamburg conference of the International
Psycho-analytic Association, the International Psychoanalysts against
Nuclear Weapons (IPPNW) was formed. The British organisation pro-
duced a number of important papers by Jane Temperley, Geoffrey
Baruch, Judith Jackson and Ronald Britton - all examining different
aspects of the 'nuclear mentality'.
&gal's paper 'Silence is the Red Crime' (Segal, 1987) was given a t
the inaugural meeting of IPPNW. In this paper she examines the escala-
tion of the arms race and its ideology from a psychoanalytic perspective,
showing how processes of denial and splitting bring a vicious circle of
ever increasing destructiveness, helplessness, paranoia and fragmentation
of responsibility. She makes a penetrating critique of the ideology of
nuclear 'deterrence' showing how langua e is distorted in a perverse
!
way so that its real meaning is hidden rom view. 'Deterrence' and
'Strategic Defence Initiative' in reality, meant preparation for first strike
capability. It is a very chilling experience to re-read that paper and recog-
nise how near the brink the world was during that time. T h e war
ideology machine fuelled the massive projection into the enemy of all
that is disowned in the self - the Russians are 'an evil empire', 'monsters
who have no resoect for human values' etc. She auotes Ronald Reasin "
commencing on'the shooting down of a ~ o r e a ; airliner 'We have a
different regard for life than those monsters do. They are godless. It is
this theological defect that gives them less regard for humanity or human
beings'.
These proccsxs of denial, projection and contempt, taking place on
such a massive social sale, l a d to situations that, in any individual,
would be taken as evidence of serious m e n d disorder. In groups and
their leaders there is both an amplification of such disturbances and a
massive denial of irs nature. As Regan uttered these words, 35 million
Americans (according to various sources), including some of their
leaders, were 'Born Again Christians' who believed the coming of
Armageddon was to be welcomed. As the world hurtled toward
nuclear catastrophe, millions felt only acitement and hope. Segal has
always emphasised the importance of primitive destructiveness, and
uses this knowledge to great effect when trying to come to grips with
these horrifying social processes. What better description of the most
primitive destructive drives could there be than this 'welcoming of
Armageddon, idealised as the will of God and a prelude to eternal
bliss'.
Beneath these powerful defensive manoeuvres that bring such des-
truction in their wake, lie, according to Segal, anxieties that cannot
be borne; anxieties concerning not death but total annihilation. She
draws on the work of Lifion (Lifion, 1982) who pointed out that
when we contemplate d a t h we gain some reassurance from the idea
of our symbolic survival through our family, work, and through the
survival of civilisation itself, of which we are put. Following a nuclear
war, however, there would be no symbolic survival, only total annihila-
tion. This nightmare scenario of annihilation is part of the inner
world of some psychotic patients but, as Segal makes clear, all of us
are rone to such anxieaa to some degree. Thus threat of nuclear war
!
con onts us with our wont nightmare made real and so brings a par-
titular unbarability of recognising its true significance, resulting in
a tendency to be reassured by the crazy pronouncement of 'limited
nuclear strikes'. In Britain the government even issued guidebooks on
how to survive a nuclear attack. As Segal points out they were, not
surprisingly, uninterested in the response of The British Medical
Association to their civil defence plans. It pointed out that, given that
there could be no preparation for a nuclear blast and that after such
a blast there would be no communications, no doctors, no nurses and
no food, d k of making any preparation for survival in such a situation
was entirely meaningless.
Segal's paper is a passionate 'cn' de coeur' and she takes her title
from a passage in the book Hope Against Hope by Nadczhda
Mandelstam (1971). Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was
hounded by the Stalinists and sent to the Gulag. Nadezhda
Mandelstam contemplates what sort of reaction might be the appro-
priate human response when facing such horrors and warns of the
dangers of the quiet acceptance that some might regard as dignified.
Introduction
She thinks of the cow on its way to the slaughter, of its bellows, kicks
and s c r d e s , seeing this as the more apt response for, as she puts it,
'Silence is the red crime'.
With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc many have been lulled Into
thinking that the world is now a safer place. The initial hope of
'Perestroika' in Russia soon gave way to an escalation of poverty and
all the social problems that go with it. Segal is wary of being drawn
into a false sense of security. In 'Hiroshima, the Gulf war and after'
(1995) she focuses attention on a particular new danger the world
faces. She draws on insights from her clinical work, pointing out that
when paranoia lessens there is a real possibility of mental develop-
ment. This is, however, inevitably associated with a great deal of pain,
as the individual comes to rccognise the delusional world that he has
occupied, and the damage that this has caused. However, if this pain
cannot be stood there can be a dangerous manic response where the
self is idealised, all damage denied and further destruction takes place,
inevitably recreating the paranoid world.
Segd, drawing on the work of Bion, shows how these extreme defen-
sive manoeuvres are intensified in groups, most especially those large
groups that we call 'nations'.' The collapse of the cold war did not lead
to any restitutive efforts. Nuclear armaments were maintained. The
inability to face ~rcssingproblems 'at home' such as poverty and unem-
~ l o ~ m eand
n t of course the terrible waste of human resources in the arms
war created the necessity to find another enemy, another 'evil empire'.
Of course, as we h o w now, it did not take long to find one. Saddam
Hussein, whose despotism had not re vented his being an ally of the
West, who armed him to supporc his aggression against Iran, was rapidly
transformed into the required 'evil monster'.
Segal draws attention to the dangers of 'manic triumphalism'. The
western ideologues, triumphant over the collapse of the Soviet Unionlo
and the eastern bloc, now believe they can rule the world with no
obstacles in their way. Any 'unfriendly' state can be immediately
threatened without recourse to negotiation with other world powers
and, of course, as ever, displaying complete contempt for the United
Nations.
In the face of these situations, Segal believes that psychoanalysts
should not be neutral as some contend. Analytic neutraliry refers to the
neutrality of the analyst in the session but when it coma to the world
around us Scgal believes that because analysts have a pmicular under-
standing of the creative and destructive processes in the individual
mind, processes which are intensified in social movements, they have
a responsibility to counter the deceptions of the perverse ideologies
that our rulers thrust upon us, which of course have their appeal. AS she
has put it, believing in the importance of analytic neutraliry of the clin-
ical setting should not be confused with neutering oneself when it
comes to thinking about the nature of the world that we live in.
Whereas Reason and Passion centred upon Segal's influence on psy-
choanalytic theory and practice, this volume reflects her broad
influence on fields of enquiry far removed from the privacy of the con-
sulting room. I have already had cause to mention the four 'literary'
papers (Britton, Sodri, Bell and Steiner) and will now turn to the other
contributions.
Michael Rustin discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to the
'modernist project', firstly clarifying the different meanings of the term
'modernist'. In one sense it refers to the project of the Enlightenment,
the movement to demystify the world and understand it through the
powers of reason. In another sense it refers to the announcement of the
end of that project - i.e. the dawn of post-modernism. Rustin makes
clear the Fundamental distinction between a world view which, although
smuggling to expand the realm of human freedom, at the same time
accepts inevitable limits or constraints, and a world view which sees no
neccssiry in accepting such limitations. From this latter perspective, we
are viewed as entering an era in which there can be a transcendence of
limitation, individuals 'choose their own identity and life trajectory . . .
reason floats free in this model, without limits or obstruction', in a world
of infinite possibility. This latter view, essentially post-modemist, Rustin
shows, is quite at odds with the psychoanalytic project.
Rustin's position calls to mind the work of Christopher Lasch (1984),
who is qually sceptical of ideologies that promise limitless freedom. For
him, it represents the extension of the commodiry form into all spheres
of life so that identities, sexual partners and ideological commitments
can be exchanged in the same manner that we choose a brand name on
a supermarket shelf. What manifests itself as freedom, according to Lasch
is really (and the use of the word 'redly' here is imponant) an enslave-
ment to narcissism." Post-modernism from this perspective would
represent the penetration of the commodiry form into epistemology
If choice does not bring with it limitation to further action, then it is
not really choice. Psychoandysrs observe a cenain sort of deep freedom
that arises when individuals who have spent their lives trying to escape
all constraints come to accept some of the inevitable limitations of
being human, and to distinguish the awareness of such limitation from
phantasies of being imprisoned. Freedom is indeed the recognition of
neccssity.12
The paper by Richard Wollheim is framed as an answer to the ques-
tion that Segal put to him many years ago. He has been centrally
occupied with the architecture of psychoanalytic theory, drawing out
the implications of psychoanalytic explanation and giving an account
of the sort of mental world it necessarily assumes. He thus makes a con-
Introduction
tribution both to the epistemology of mind and to psychoanalytic phe-
nomenology. His contribution reflects both aspects of his work.
Michael Feldman draws on ancient literature to illustrate an impor-
tant phenomenological distinction between on the one hand Pride based
on a realistic sense of self-worth and, on the other hand, Pride as a
manifestation of arrogance and superiority. Whereas that pride which
derives from self respect has no need of an enemy to denigrate and
destroy in order to preserve itself, the pride which is rally arrogance
seems to rquire this. He brings clinical illustrations from patients for
whom t h e issues were of crucial importance. Feldman clearly believes
that making subtle distinctions between phenomena that superficially
can appear to be similar, is an important part of analytic work Making
such distinctions is very characteristic of Segal's work and Feldman's
chapter reflects this tradition.
The contribution by Le6n and Rebeca Grinberg also bears on phe-
nomenology, but in a different sense. Theirs is a unique study of the
vicissitudes of the phenomenon of migration, from a psychoanalytic
perspective. As they point out 'migration myths' are central to our cul-
ture (the myth of the Garden of Eden, or of Oedipus can be viewed
from this perspective). Moves from one 'world' to another charac-
terise many fundamental psychic shifts which are associated with
major changes in personal life and are also part of any analysis. John
Steiner (1994) has described how some patients live, psychically, in a
protective haven (a 'psychic retreat') and movement from this is often
experienced internally, as a migration to an uncertain world. In this
sense, the work brought together in this chapter has a bearing on uni-
versal human dilemmas.
Pearl King reviews the psychoanalytic approach to work with the
elderly. She was much influenced by Segal's paper 'Fear of Death:
Notes on the Analysis of an Old Man' presented to the Paris Congress
in 1957. This paper marked a break with the traditional views concern-
ing work with the elderly. Although advancing years inevitably makes
death more of a raliry, Segal showed how it was the unconscious
phantasies that attach themselves to the &a of death, that were the cause
of her patient's persecuting anxiety. Kin draws on her own experience
B
with this group of patients and distils om it the difficulties and the
rewards encountered in chis work.
Albert Mason suggests that the phenomena of hypnotism can be
understood as a 'folie A deux'. Hypnotist and subject share the uncon-
scious phantasy of entering another mind and controlling it from
within. The hypnotist makes his phantasy real through his ability to
affect his subject and his subject achieves the same result through
allowing himself to be controlled by the hypnotist. Mason goes on to
show how such phenomena, where two parties participate in the
Psychoanalysis a n d Culture
enactment of a shared unconscious phantasy, and thus constitute a
'folie a deux', are common, and brings clinical examples t o illustrate
this point. O n e might a d d that this brings a new slant on certain group
situations, most especially charismatic religious and political groups.
The leader and the led, like the hypnotist and his subject, though
apparently distinct, have more in common than one might at first
imagine.
Segal, in her paper 'Psychoanalysis and Freedom of Thought'
(1981),emphasises the centrality of the idea of freedom t o the psy-
choanalytic endeavour. Freedom of thought is an essential feature of
mental health. H e r commitment t o freedom extends to her deep love
of the artistic imagination and t o her political convictions. Her contri-
butions both to psychoanalysis and t o human culture in general, all in
one way o r another reflect the view that knowledge brings freedom,
and self-deception only enslavement. T h e breadth of her influence o n
the world of ideas is reflected in the scope of the contributions t o this
volume.
Notes
1. This and other similar comments are based on interviews with Dr Segal
carried out in November 1995.
2. This was clear for example in a recent paper in the lntmrarional Journal
of P s y c h o a ~ ~ sby
i r Owen Renik (Renik. 1998a). He views truthfulness in the
psychoanll~ics k i o n as a pragmatic question and made it clear in discus-
sion of his paper that for him psychoanalysis could be judged only by its
success in helping patients and had no distinct stam as a body of knowledge
(Renik, 1998b). Essentially the position is a relativist one. there being no
independent arbiter of truth, only different ways of looking at things each of
which may have its own validity. Choosing between them is based on png-
matic issues, what is helpful to the patient. not veridical ones. For a more
detailed account of the 'narrative' approach to psychoanalysis see Spence
(1982), and for critical discussion of it see Strenger (1991) and Fiapatrick
Hanly (1996).
3. Feldman, in his chapter in this volume, cites Bion's suggestion that in
the personality where the life instinct predominates, pride becomes self-
respect, whereas where death instinct predominates, pride becomes arrogance.
It seems to me that a similar differentiation can be made on the issue of corn-
plexity. The appreciation of the complexity of the world when allied with the
life instinct brings the awareness of the painful suuggle to apprehend this
complexity, when allied with more deadly processes complexity becomes
'reality can be whatever I want it to be' and so the painful struggle is replaced
by the omnipotent assertion that truth is purely a matter of choice. Aristotle,
according ti his commentator Themistius, pointed out 'that which exists does
Introduction
not conform to various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to
that which exists' (cited by Norris, C., 1995).
4. For a fuller account of the depressive position see Segal (1964), Ch. 6.
5. A further feature of this situation is worthy of note. The absent (good)
object, an unimaginable idea to the infantile mind is replaced by an object that
is present, but persecuting.
6. Bion (1958) engaged with Oedipus Rex in a similar spirit, viewing it
from the perspective of the dangers of the arrogant pursuit of the truth regard-
less of costs and without heed to warnings.
7. I am grateful to Geoffrey Baruch for helping me with some of the fac-
tual information on the formation and activities of IPPNW.
8. Psychoanalysts in Britain made an important contribution to the debate
at the time when capital punishment was finally abolished. It was pointed out
that given that suicide and murder are closely related intrapsychidy there
was no reason to believe that the threat of death would have any deterrent effect
upon a would-be murderer, but could wen be an encouragement.
9. Bion (1961) has described how groups that form themselves to perform
a task, say a committee, have their work undermined by what he termed
'basic assumption groups' which function in a primitive way. For instance,
l a d e n become iddised and are believed to be all-knowing, this pro- strip
ping the other group members of their own critical faculties (he termed this
'the dependency group'). Alternatively, the group may become possessed by a
'fight-flight' basic assumption. Here group members become excessively
pohrised, believing themselves to be the possessors of d l that is good and true
whilst 'our-groups' have projected into them all that is bad. He makes the
point that the groups, when under sway of these primitive procasa, function
as if their rairon d ' h was constituted by the basic assumption. For example.
a commirtce meeting to develop the work of a hospid (the work group) may
start to function as if its raison d'irrc was to gather to hear the words of its
leader, or to arm themselves against some enemy. The larger the group the
more these processes are intensified. They easily reach levels of delusional
belief. Segd maka the point that one of the difficulties faced by political
groupings derives from the problem that such organisations appear to aim to
foster such 'basic assumption mentality' as part of their prima7 truk. Beliefi
in the inherent goodness and democratic spirit of the 'free world', 'us', provides
justification for unleashing terrible destruction on 'them' who are 'despotic' and
'evil'. Meanwhile the 'free war' continues to support tyrannies throughout the
world.
10. Of course the Soviet system is blamed for its current economic collapse
(it has nothing to do with the collapse of the prices of their principal exports,
the economic crisis in the far east and certainly nothing to do with the escala-
tion of interest rates on Russian loans - from 20-200 per cent! - see Lutnvark,
1998).
11. For a discussion of the way in which a similar perverse ideology was
used to justify the destruction of the 'welfare consensus' in Britain, see Bell
(1997).
12. This quotation is from Hegel (1812) and was cited by Engels in Anti-
Diihring. The full quotation is as follows: 'Hegel was the first to state the
relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him freedom is the
recognition of necessity, 'Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not under-
stoodn.'
Art and Literature
'Primal Grief' and 'Petrified Rage'
An Exploration of Rilke's Duino Elegies
Ronald Britton
In her seminal paper A ' Psychoanalytic Approach t o Aesthetics'

(1952) Segal quotes Rilke's lines 'Beauty is nothing but the beginning
of terror, which we are still just able t o bear' (Rainer Maria Rilke,
1st Elegy 1.415). She put forward the idea that a satisfactory work of
art is achieved by a realisation and sublimation of the depressive
position and suggested that 'to realise and symbolically express
depression the artist must acknowledge the death instinct, both in its
aggressive and self-destructive aspects, and accept the reality of
death for the object and the self' (1952, p, 203). Segal links the
ability t o use symbols t o the working through of the depressive posi-
tion (1957) and to the artist's creation of symbolic forms: 'ugliness
- destruction - is the expression of the death instinct; beauty ... is
that of the life instinct. The achievement of the artist is in giving the
fullest expression to the conflict and union between these two'
(1952, p. 203). I hope to show in this paper that nothing could
exemplify this better than Rilke's struggles to write the Duino
Elegies.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, nineteen years later
than Freud; both were German speaking citizens of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, but Rilke unlike Freud was Roman Catholic. I
have elsewhere (Britton, 1998) discussed Wordsworth's theory of the
relationship of infantile experience to poetic sensibility. Rilke like
Wordsworth sought understanding of himself and his poetry in his
childhood but his subjective account of his early experience and its
psychic sequelae could not be more different. Wordsworth described
himself as the blessed babe, because at the breast he gathered passion
from his mother's eye; Rilke came to view himself as the unblessed
babe annihilated by his mother's unseeing eyes.
We can contrast Wordsworth's well known epiphany on the bond
between childhood and adult life, with Rilke's reflection on a similar
theme. First Wordsworth:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So be it now I am a Man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is Father of the Man
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, 1994, p. 122)
N o w Rilke, on seeing n o t a rainbow but the exposed remnant of a

demolished house:
And from these walls, once blue, green, and yellow, ... the air of these
lives issued ... The sweet smell of neglected infants lingered there, the
smell of frightened schoolchildren, and the stuffiness from the beds of
pubescent boys ... You would think I had stood looking at it for a long
time; but I swear I began to run as soon as I recognised this wall. For
that's what is horrible - that I did recognise it. I recognise everything
here, and that's why it passes right into me: it is at home inside me.
(Rilke, 1910, pp. 47-8)
Both poets did have something in common that is crucial t o their lives,
and this they shared with Freud: a belief that what they discover
within themselves is of universal significance, that in fundamentals all
men are the same, transcending culture and period, and that internal
reality is as significant as t h e external world and has its o w n validity.
The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor;

... the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him,
rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly com-
panion ... In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and
manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of
mind and things violently destroyed. (Wordsworth, 1988, p. 292)
In our own century the search for poetic truth has been couched in the
language of reality. Since the ultimate arbiter of our day has been
external reality not eternal truth, s o such twentieth century poets as
Louis Macneice, w h o thought that poetry was discovery just as much
as science, claimed that it was in the business of internal reality testing.
'I would suggest', h e wrote, 'that the poet's business is realism, if it is
admitted that the reality which h e is trying to represent is further
removed than the novelist's is from the reality of the scientist o r the
1. 'Primal Grief' and 'Petrified Rage'
photographer or of any one who is engaged in recording facts which
do not include himself and are not modified by his own emotional
reaction to them. I do not think we can say that the poet's reality is
therefore less real than the scientist's - unless we are prepared to say
that hunger is less real than bread' (Louis Macneice, 1941, p. 20).
Where does the poet find his powers we might ask and what are his
sources? I think Rilke tries to answer this in the Duino Elegies and the
Sonnets to Orpheus just as Wordsworth using himself as subject sought
to answer this in the Prelude, particularly in his passage on 'the infant
babe'. In this passage, in which he equates 'poetic sensibility' with
'infant sensibility', Wordsworth anticipates Klein's discoveries and
conceptions of more than a century later, discoveries wrested from her
work with children and artists. She thought that an essential charac-
teristic of the 'creative artist' lies in his special access to early infantile
phantasy '[if] symbol formation in infantile mental life is particularly
rich it contributes to the development of talent or even of genius'
(1963, p. 299). Klein thought that 'Symbolism is the foundation of all
sublimation, and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equa-
tion that things, activities and interests become the subject of libidinal
phantasies' (Klein, 1930, p. 220). Through the symbol we renew our
relationship with the lost primary object from which we seek satisfac-
tion; we are as Wordsworth put it 'creator and receiver both'. Segal,
specifically in the work already cited, substantially deepened our
understanding of the processes that underlie artistic creativity. The
Artist, she showed, uses his creative work to repair and restore his
internal objects which have been damaged, lost or annihilated in phan-
tasy. This is central to my understanding of the Elegies. Rilke attempts
to validate his own self and repair his inner objects through his art. It
was this that gave him the conviction that he had to complete them in
order to continue living.
Freud gave primacy to the 'pleasure principle' but then was con-
fronted with the problem of the common occurrence of painful and
terrifying events in dreams. Wordsworth, who similarly gave primacy
to pleasure, reflected on the same question with regard to the content
of poetry In his preface to the lyrical ballads he offers this answer:
However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowl-
...
edge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure what then
does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as
acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite corn-
plexity of pain and pleasure. (Wordsworth, 1850, p. 291)
The satisfaction imparted to the poet is of gaining or regaining knowl-

edge and of encompassing even unpleasant facts. A similar twentieth
century answer to the question of why does tragedy satisfy audiences
came from Louis Macneice:
The defeat of the hero in the play is their defeat because he is their hero
but the whole is their triumph because it is their play. (Macneice, 1941,
p. 107)
This brings to my mind another psychoanalyst whose work underlies

this paper: Wilfred Bion. He suggested that we offer ourselves as con-
tainers for experience that we transform from raw sensation into
thoughts; we think in order to deal with thoughts. This has particular
resonance with Rilke's conclusions about the Duino Elegies. He wrote
in a letter:
...
these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed
in a most fervent sense.
He continued:
The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual con-
versions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations
and excitation of our own nature. (Letters of Rilke, Nov. 13 1925, J.B.
Creenc & M.D. Herter Norton, p. 374)
The ten poems known as the Duino Elegies take their name from the
castle in Austria in which he was staying when he began them in
January 1912. It took him ten years to complete them. In contrast to
this his 'Sonnets to Orpheus' which followed immediately were
written very quickly and completed within a month. Together the
Elegies and the Sonnets constitute Rilke's own way of trying to address
the same agenda as Wordsworth did in the Prelude, to give an account
of 'Man, Nature and Society' through self examination. Both poets
approach it through memory and imagination using that latter word,
as did Coleridge, to mean what Klein later meant by phantasy.
Rilke wrote:
...poems are not, as people think, simply emotions ... they are experi-
ences. (Rilke, 1910, p. 19)
To write poems, he continued,
You must have memories ... And yet it is not enough to have memories.
You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have
the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories them-
1. 'Primal Grief'and 'Petrified Rage'
selves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very
blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be dis-
tinguished from ourselves - only then can it happen that in some very
rare hour the first word of a poem arises. (Rilke, 1910, p. 20)
Both Wordsworth and Rilke accept the necessity of that return t o their
origins to find themselves but their rediscoveries are vastly different,
as we see when Rilke describes the return of his childhood:
And now this illness again, which has always affected me so strangely ...
This illness doesn't have any particular characteristics; it takes on the
characteristics of the people it attacks ... it pulls out their deepest
danger, which seemed passed, and places it before them again ...All the
lost fears are here again ... I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it
has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and
that growing older has served no purpose at all. (Rilke, 1910, pp. 62-4)
If we can think of Wordsworth as anticipating certain themes of

Klein's account of the depressive position, then Rilke does the same
for her later work on schizoid states (Klein, 1946). His work provides
vivid illustrations of the states of mind described by Klein and also by
Rosenfeld in his descriptions of psychotic states (Rosenfeld, 1965).
The extract I quoted above is from Rilke's novel The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge:
... here and there on my blanket, lost feelings out of my childhood lie
and are like new. The fear that a small woollen thread sticking out of the
blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this
little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and
heavier; the fear that the bread crumb which just dropped off my bed
may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor and the sickening
...
worry that when it does, everything will be broken, for ever the fear
that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more
room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on grey granite; the
fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door
and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell
everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything,
because everything is unsayable. (Rilke, 1910, pp. 63-4)
In describing Rilke as the poet of the paranoid-schizoid position I am

not describing the poet as writing whilst in the paranoid-schizoid posi-
tion. Indeed in order to be able to write the poetry he had to be in the
depressive position. I would suggest that the act of composing is one
meurn of moving from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position
at least in the context of the written work and that this is unusually
clear in Rilke's case.
The two poets give very different accounts of infancy but I think
they are stories of different infants rather than that they require dif-
ferent theories of infancy. Wordsworth's account of the 'Infant Babe'
in the Prelude is the story of an infant at the breast fortunate enough
to 'gather passion from his mother's eye', and who thereby has awak-
ened in him 'like a breeze' the strength to invest the outside world
with beauty and goodness which in turn he reintrojects. Rilke on the
other hand wrote of his mother 'From her to me no warm breeze ever
blew'. Wordsworth's account corresponds to one of Klein's descrip-
tions of infancy, one whcre things are favourable:
The 'good breast' that feeds and initiates the love relation to the mother
is the representative of the life instinct and is felt also as the first mani-
festation of creativeness. (Klein, 1957, p. 201)
The story Rilke tells corresponds to Klein's description of the infantile

situation where things are not favourable. In this situation she
describes the lack of a good object resulting 'in a very deep split
between an idealiscd and an extremely bad one' (Klein, 1957, p. 192).
'I also found', she said, 'that idealisation derives from the innate
feeling that an extremely good breast exists, a feeling which leads to
the longing for a good object and for the capacity to love it'. In the
original typescript of 'Envy and Gratitude' she wrote the following
footnote, which was not included in the published paper. The footnote
has a particular relevance for Rilke's poem.
Babies who constantly need attention and cannot be happily on their

own for any length of time are, as I suggested, insecure because their
good object is not sufficiently established. This can be observed in any
child who clings excessively to his mother. He most of all wants his anx-
iety and ultimately his destructive impulses which endanger his internal
and external world allayed by the mother's presence.
Rilke wrote in the Third Elegy of just such a situation whcre the
mother's presence was needed to keep inner terrors at bay.
Mother, you made him small, it was you who started him;
in your sight he was new, over his new eyes you arched
the friendly world and warded off the world that was alien.
Ah, where are the years when you shielded him just by placing
your slender form between him and the surging abyss?
How much you hid from him then. The room that filled with suspicion
at night: you made it harmless; and out of the refuge of your heart
you mixed a more human space in with his night space.
(The Selected Poetry of Ruiner Maria Rilke, ed. S. Mitchell, p. 163)
This passage is from the Third of the Duino Elegies which he began in
January 1912 and completed eighteen months later. It was begun at a
moment when he was contemplating entering analysis with a psychia-
trist Baron Emil von Gebsattel. The Elegies appeared to be an
alternative to analysis. His wife was in analysis with Gebsattel '... with
her', Rilke commented, 'it is a different matter, her work has never
helped her, while mine, in a certain sense, was from the beginning a
kind of self treatment' (Letters of R.h4. Rilke, p. 45). Somewhere
between the 20th and the 24th of January 1912 he decided not to
begin analysis and wrote to Lou Andreas Salomt, 'I know now that
analysis would have sense for me only if I were really serious about ...
not writing any more' (ibid., p. 49).
That is not really the end of the story of Rilke and analysis but I
want to return to the picture of childhood in the Third Elegy. In this
poem, unlike the mother of Wordsworth's infant babe, the mother is
not the source of all the goodness in the world, but only a soothing
presence shielding him from terrors beyond the pale, and horrors
within. By splitting she was kept as a good but limited external pres-
ence, divorced from the alien terrors of outer space and unconnected
with the seductive demons of the inner world.
he seemed protected ... But inside: who could ward off,
who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?
... dreaming ...
... he was caught up
and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event
already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling
bestial shapes. How he submitted -. Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, ...
... Left it, went through
his own roots and out, into more ancient blood, to ravines
where Horror lay, still glutted with his fathers. And every
Terror knew him, winked at him like an accomplice.
Yes, Atrocity smiled ... Seldom
had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help
loving what smiled at him. Even before he knew you,
he had loved it, for already while you carried him inside you, it
was dissolved in the water that makes the embryo weightless.
(ibid, p. 165)
Rilke in his own terms discovers his dependence on external love to
mask and deny the awful truth of his internal world. Later therefore
he feels compelled to renounce the love he thinks compels him to live
in a world in which he cannot be himself. He epitomises Winnicott's
description of the true and false self (Winnicott, 1960) and Rilke's
exploration of this rupture between a relationship to the self and a
relationship to the object world adds considerably to our under-
standing of this particular pathological organisation (Steiner, 1987) of
the personality.
Rilke's first account of the beginning of a pilgrimage to find himself
is in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which was orig-
inally entitled The journal of my other Self. It concludes with his
version of I... the Prodigal Son ... the legend of a man who did not
want to be loved' (Rilke, 1910, p. 251).
Before pursuing this further, and the breakdown both in his writing
and his mental health which followed the completion of this novel, I
want to give a few biographical facts. He was born in Prague in 1875
of German speaking, Roman Catholic parents. His father was an Army
officer who became a railway clerk, and his mother was a devoutly
religious woman. The year before he was born his mother had lost a
baby girl and she named him RenC Maria dressed him in feminine
clothes and in their games called him mein kleines Fraulein (little
miss). His schooling must have abruptly changed things particularly
since he went to a harsh military academy at his father's instigation.
After schooldays he drifted through philosophy, history, literature, art,
in Prague, Munich, and Berlin. H e changed his first name to Rainer
after meeting Lou Andreas-SalomC when he was twenty-two and she
thirty-six. In his letters to his mother however he continued to sign
himself RenC. He and Lou Andreas SalomC became lovers and made
two trips to her native country, Russia, in 1899 and 1900. She was cru-
cial to Rilke's poetic development and she is also of particular interest
to us as she became a pupil of Freud and a psycho-analyst in the latter
half of her life. The first half did not lack for intellectual interest either
as she began her career, in Freud's phrase, as the great 'comprehending
woman' of intellectuals at an early age; first with Paul Rde, a Jewish
positivist-philosopher and then with Nietzsche when she was twenty-
one. Though Rilke and she parted as lovers, and he married Clara
Westhoff in 1901, Lou remained to the end of his life the one person
whom he believed would always understand him. He died of
leukaemia in 1926. His first important book The Book of the Hours
had the dedication 'laid in the hands of Lou', and his phantasied auto-
biographical novel began its life as a series of letters written to her. In
the emotional crisis which followed its completion he turned to her
again in a letter:
1 deeply need to know what impression this book made on you ... no
one but you, dear Lou, can distinguish and indicate whether and how
much he resembles me. Whether he ... goes under in it, in a sense to
spare me the going under ...
H e goes on to say that what is left of his everyday self is completely

arid:
... the other fellow the one who went under, has somehow used me up
... he appropriated everything with the intensity of his despair; scarcely
does a thing seem new to me before I discover the break in it, the rough
place where he tore himself off. (Letters, Dec. 28, 1911, pp. 32-3)
As I said earlier the beginning of his search for himself is recounted in

the novel in the allegory of The Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son leaves
because he has t o escape from love because love falsifies him, or to be
more precise, a loving attachment leads him to falsify himself by
becoming what all the others want to believe that he is.
My God, how much there was to leave behind and forget ... The dogs,
in whom the expectation had been growing all day long, ... drove you
... into the one they recognised. And the house did the rest. Once you
walked into its full smell, most matters were already decided. A few
details might still be changed; but on the whole you were already the
person they thought you were ... whom they had long ago fashioned ...
out of his small past and their desires. (Rilke, 1910, p. 252-3)
And so Rilke as Prodigal son purges himself painfully of love until 'He
didn't love anything, unless it could be said that he loved existing'. He
returns and is taken aback by the love which greets him and terrifies
him. He reconciles himself to it by realising that it had nothing t o d o
with him ... it was obvious how little they could have him in mind.
'How could they know who he was? He was now terribly difficult to
love.' (ibid., p. 260)
This was the point in his writing and in his life that led him to turn
once again to Lou Andreas-SalomC and simultaneously to begin the
Duino Elegies. There are ten of them written intermittently over ten
years with protracted intervals of stasis, frequent despair and great dif-
ficulty. And yet on reading and re-reading them, when I understood
the last of them, I realised that what he says in the final Elegies is
implicit in the first one and yet this implicit meaning can only be prop-
erly understood in the light of the final elegies. H e says something to
this effect himself, in his letters. The Elegies were written as a quest
but it was a quest with a difference, and in this respect it was very like
an analysis. It was a search for something already present but not yet
discovered, like a journey of exploration to a country already lived in.
Just as the first three Elegies are a prospectus for the next ten years
of his emotional life, so his novel The Notebooks of Malte L a u d s
Btigge, which he completed in 1910, serves as a prospectus for the
whole of the Elegies. In it he wrote:
...he decided to retrieve the most important of the experiences which
he had been unable to accomplish before, those that had merely been
waited through. Above all, he thought of his childhood, and the more
calmly he recalled it, the more unfinished it seemed; all its memories
had the vagueness of premonitions and the fact that they were past
made them almost arise as future. To take all this past upon himself once
more, and this time really, was the reason why, from the midst of his
estrangement he returned home. (Rilke, 1910, p. 258-9)
The Duino Elegies were written in spasms, in groups which do not

correspond to their eventual numbers in the final arrangement of the
Elegies. The first group to be written in the winter of 1912/1913 con-
sisted of what we know as the Ist, Znd, 3rd, and 6th Elegies. The 4th
was written in bleak isolation in 1915. Seven years later the 7th, 8th,
9th, and 10th were completed in a very short space of time in 1922.
The last to be written, which is numbered the Sth, was a celebration
of completing the intense, difficult, 10th Elegy.
I think the actual time of the composition of the Elegies is impor-
tant in understanding them because of Rilke's way of working. They
are all spontaneous effusions written after intense periods of what he
called 'Ausgefiihlt', his own invented word meaning feeling through
analogous to working through. It is possible to follow this process
thanks to his copious letters which are a commentary on his work as
well as his life. I want to select themes from the Elegies, taking them
in the order they were written since they represent an interesting psy-
chic development which, I believe, resembles the possible progress in
analysis of a similarly disturbed, unhappy, person.
He begins by making clear that there is no fulfilment of deepest
expectation in this world and the recurring belief that something
might prove to be it, only generates desire for the unattainable. The
ideal object of desire and fulfilment precedes life; it does not have its
origins in experience and is never to be found in experience.
I have been living away from myself as though always standing at a tele-
scope, ascribing to each woman who came a bliss that was certainly
never to be found in any of them. (Letters of R.M. Rike, 21 Oct. 1913,
p. 96)
I . 'Primal Grief' and 'Pettified Rage'
He cannot imagine lovers who can d o more than deceive each other
into believing that they have found it. He cannot therefore incorpo-
rate into his thinking a prototypical ideal primal couple; he cannot
conceive of a couple who represent a real union of two valid sepa-
rately existing beings except in the negative form of that which can
never be. His postscript Elegy is numbered 5 but was actually written
in celebration at the completion of his task; it is in high spirits because
he had resolved so much in the tenth Elegy. It describes a real, much
admired, three generation family of acrobats, who complete their
aerial gravity-defying endeavours by the painful procedure of landing
with their feet on the ground. Rilke's final verbal flourish was to add
as an ironic contrast to this picture of skilful realism, a fanciful day
dream of imaginary lovers in an imaginary world, mastering such
manoeuvres, finally coming down to earth successfully, and then
being thrown the 'final, forever saved up, coins of happiness' by 'the
innumerable soundless dead', that is by those who had died waiting
for any couple to achieve successfully a non-catastrophic ascent and
descent.
That however was Rilke in 1922; in 1912 there were no high
spirits; in the second Elegy he writes of love as incompatible with
maintaining an identity because when we love we disappear into the
elusive object that is itself insubstantial.
But we when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we

breathe ourselves out and away; ... Though some one may tell us:
Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room the whole springtime
is filled with you ... what does it matter? he can't contain us,
we vanish inside him and around him ...
what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish
of hot food. (Selected Poetry of R.M.Rilke, p. 157)
The sixth written just after the third he called the 'Hero Elegy'. In it
Rilke claims his position as the hero of his own saga. But it is very dif-
ferent from the way Freud and Wordsworth cast themselves as heroes
in their own myths. For Freud A ' man who has been the indisputable
favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror'
(Jones, p. 6 vol. 1). Wordsworth when ill at ease reminded himself
'Why should I grieve? I was a chosen Son!' Rilke in contrast can only
protest that at least he chose himself by triumphing over all the other
spermatozoa that might have taken over his mother's womb.
Wasn't he a hero inside you, mother? didn't

his imperious choosing already begin there, in you?
Thousands seethed in your womb wanting to be him,
but look: he grasped and excluded - chose and prevailed.
(ibid., pp. 183-4)
Significantly the hero Rilke has in mind in this Elegy is Samson, and the
counterpart to the destruction by the blinded Samson of the house of
the Philistines is our hero's birth 'when he bursts from his [mother's]
body into the narrower world, where again he chose and prevailed'
(ibid., p. 184). He implies in this passage, as in his earlier novel, that his
assertion of his own identity is fatal for his objects. If he is not shaped
by their desires they are in danger from his omnipotence. His self-asser-
tion becomes their destruction. He takes Samson to be himself as the
hero, and blindness the method chosen of subjugating himself. In other
words he is blinded by his parental captors and tempted to pull down
their house, destroying them and himself in the process.
Following this outburst of poetry there is a long silence in the
Elegies followed by the isolated production of the bitterest of them all,
written in November 1915, now numbered the fourth and known as
the 'Marionette Elegy'. This emerged in a period of despair.
For I no longer doubt that I am sick, and my sickness has gained a lot of
ground and is also lodged in that which heretofore I called my work so
that for the present there is no refuge there.
This is from a letter to Lou of June 8th 1914; in it he accuses himself

of destructiveness for which in the past he has always blamed others
and he makes clear that he can no longer entertain a sense of persecu-
tion. Two weeks later there is another letter containing a poem, posted
with the ink hardly dry, called 'Turning Point' and it represents just
that: this turning he wrote 'must come if I am to live'. The necessary
turning is from taking pleasure in an omnipotent control achieved by
gazing at things, to learning to love that which he has taken in and
transformed.
Long he was victorious in gazing.
Stars were thrown to their knees
by the grasp of his eyes ...
He gazed at Towers so that they were afraid
building them up again all in one stroke.
(fromAn unofficial Rilke, M. Hamburger, 1981, p. 46, my trans.)
In this poem he finds himself guilty because he realises the world
wants to be loved, not just gazed at. Now he tells himself:
Work of sight is done,
now do heart-work
on the pictures captive inside you ...
Behold, inner man, your inner maiden,
her, won from
a thousand natures, ...
till now only won,
never yet loved.
(ibid., p. 48)
In this poem he acknowledges that he must learn to love those internal

objects established by the possessive but yet unloving use of his eyes.
He must d o 'Hen-Werk' a neologism with elements of both hard work
and love. To understand this term it helps to remind ourselves of his
notion that there were memories of childhood that had not been expe-
rienced but only 'waited through' which now had to be retrieved and
lived through, but 'this time really'. Judging from what he wrote in
1915 the heart-work was painful and bitter involving the discovery of
considerable hate and grievance in his search for viable love. He wrote
to his friend and patron Princess Marie, in 1913, 'I am no lover at all,
it only takes hold of me from outside, perhaps because I do not love
my mother' (ibid., p. 16).
In October 1915 in the mid-point crisis of the Elegies, a month
before composing the bleak 4th Elegy of the Marionette, he wrote an
untitled and never published poem about his mother. When I came
across this it further encouraged an idea I had formed that Rilke had
felt profoundly unrecognised by his mother; that he thought he had
never come to life in her mind, in Bion's words that maternal con-
tainment had failed for Rilke. In compensation for the failure of
maternal introjection I thought he had developed a hypertrophied use
of self-projection into his love-objects which led him to feel that he
disappeared into people the moment he desired them '... we vanish
inside him and around him ... what is ours floats into the air, like
steam from a dish of hot food' (2nd Elegy).
In this untitled and unpublished poem he describes how 'meine
Mutter reipt mich ein' translated as 'my mother tears me down', the
full sense of reifit is best conveyed by realising that this word is used in
German for the demolition of buildings.
Oh, misery, my mother tears me down.

Stone upon stone I'd laid, towards a self
and stood like a small house, with day's expanse around it,
Now comes my mother, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by coming and by looking.
That someone builds she does not see.
Right through my wall of stones she walks for me.
Oh, misery, my mother tears me down.
Birds overhead more lightly fill my space.

Strange dogs can sense it ...
Only my mother docs not know
my oh how slowly incrcmented face.
(ibid., p. 65)
The fourth Elegy that shortly followed this poem is the most
despairing. It has a defiant bitter stoic assertion in it and rejection of a
compromising half life. Better a puppet show than a sham half-filled
human drama. He claims 'I'll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire,
the face that is nothing but appearance' ... 'Here I'm waiting ... even
if the lights go out; even if someone tells me "that's all" even if empti-
ness I floats towards me in a grey draft from the stage; / even if not
one of my silent ancestors I stays seated with me, not one woman, not
I the boy ... / I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch' (the selected
Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell, p. 169). In our own
day Beckett in his writing has shown this same loyalty t o a seemingly
empty world by valuing the truth of its representation. 'Perhaps they
have carried me t o the threshold of my story', wrote Beckett in 'The
Unnameable':
... before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me,
if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know,
I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't
go on, I'll go on. (Beckett, 1979, p. 382)
Then comes Rilke's point: that by acknowledging the presence of nul-

lity in life we transform and integrate it, thus finding a place for winter
among the seasons of life. He asks the parents of his childhood '... am
I not right I to feel as if I must stay seated, must / wait ...
before the
puppet stage'.
'Am I not right?', he asks of his father whom he thought was unable
to like him 'You, to whom life tasted I so bitter after you took a sip of
mine, / the first, gritty infusion of my will'.
'Am I not right?', he asks the 'dear women' who cared for him but
in whose features there were blanks that changed into cosmic space
where they no longer were.
Then he asks again: I... am I not right I to feel that I must stay
gazing at the puppet stage' until '... an angel in order to balance this
1. 'Primal Grief' a n d 'Petrified Rage'
gaze has t o come and / make the stuffed skins startle t o life?' (ibid., p.
171).
Much has been written about his Angels in the Elegies but perhaps
it is best t o see what he says himself.
The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of

the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears
already consummated ... that being who vouches for the recognition in
the invisible of a higher order of reality. - Hence 'terrible' to us because
we, its lovers and transformers, do still cling to the visible. (13 Nov.
1925, Letters p. 373)
I think of this as a poetic personification of Plato's Forms o r a pre-

cursor of Bion's pre-conceptions. In his letters Rilke is explicit about
his use of theological figures for psychological entities a n d says much
the same as Freud who said that if G o d is a projection of the uncon-
scious then metaphysics becomes metapyschology (Freud, 1901, p.
259). Rilke also sees fear of death as a projection and he seems t o
anticipate Melanie Klein's theory that the fear of external annihilation
arises from the projection of the Todestriebe, the death-urge. H e
wrote:
And so you see, it was the same with death ... it too was pushed out;
death, which is probably so near us that we cannot at all determine the
distance between it and the life-centre within us without it becoming
something external, daily held further from us, lurking somewhere in
the void in order to attack. (8 Nov. 1915, Letters, p. 148)
God and death were now outside, were the other, oneself was now our
everyday life which at the cost of this elimination seemed to become
human, friendly, possible, ... Now this might still have made a kind of
sense had we been able to keep God and death at a distance as mere
ideas in the realm of the mind; but nature knew nothing of this removal.
(ibid., p. 148-9)
This then makes sense of the strange lines in the Marionette Elegy:
Angel and puppet: a real play, finally

Then what we separate by our very presence
can come together. And only then, the whole
cycle of transformations will arise.
out of our own life-seasons.
(Selected Poetry, p. 171)
In other words we achieve everyday comfortable but unreal selves by
denial and projection. Out of our psychic aspiration we conceive of
Angels as pure spirits unencumbered with bodies and human limita-
tions. Out of our wish for an existence free of psychic life and its
ineradicable accompaniments of pain and longing we conceive of our-
selves as puppets. Thus by allowing our denuded daily selves to exist
in our physical bodies in a state of complacent, compromise-formed
half-life, we prevent the meeting of our desire for mental life with our
longing to be free of it. We prevent the Angel and the puppet from
coming together. In this Elegy Rilke claims that even the most dis-
turbed, effulgent, body-denying psychic life or the puppetry of a
mindless life is preferable to the half-way house of a domesticated,
half-minded, self-dramatised existence which pretends to be real and
complete.
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretence
is all that we accomplish here, where nothing
is allowed to be itself.
(ibid., p. 171)
So he has resolved that he must look within even if it means to find
emptiness or deadliness because to identify it and to find a home for
it is a way of transforming and including it. This I take to be what he
had in mind in his own retrospective account of the composition of
the Elegies:
Two inmost experiences were decisive for their production: the resolve
that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open toward death,
and, on the other side the spiritual need to situate the transformations
of love in this wider whole differently than was possible in the narrower
orbit of life (which simply shut out death as the other). (22 Dec. 1923,
Letters, p. 330)
This again was a new prospectus, but it was years before he could fulfil
it. The final clutch of the Elegies did not emerge until February 1922
in a burst of productivity that also engendered the 'Sonnets to
Orpheus'. He had isolated himself in a tower in Muzot, Switzerland,
even forgoing the company of dogs for fear that attachment would
dilute the purity of his isolation and the winter experience he needed
to reach the remainder of the Elegies. Finally in a celebratory letter to
Lou he described 'laying aside' his pen after completing the tenth,
'Now I know myself again. It really had been like a mutilation of my
heart that the Elegies were not-here' (ibid.., p. 292).
These last elegies 7, 8, 9 and 10, are distinct but they run together.
I. 'Primal Grief' and 'Petrified Rage'
He reiterates the idea that it is our function to transform the visible
external world into the invisible internal world but he does so now
optimistically since he sees it as creative and reparative. H e adds con-
siderably to it by declaring that 'everything here apparently needs us,
...
this fleeting world in order to register it to experience it, and now
a new idea to name it ... Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window -at most column,
tower ... but to say them you must understand / to say them more
intensely than the Things themselves / ever dreamed of existing' (9th
Elegy, Selected Poetry, p. 199-200). We should give new life t o things
by naming them so that they have life beyond their own material, tran-
sient, existence. He makes it clear that experiences and feelings are
among the things that need a name. Angels he begins to see can deal
with glorious emotion but not with things. There is another area of
experience of which, he decides, angels know nothing t o which he
now gives great value, and that is grief.
... How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year - not only a season
in time - but a place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
(ibid., p. 205)
This is to be the conclusion and resolution in the tenth Elegy. In an

amazing allegory the 'Laments' take the place of the Angel as author-
itative and final guide. The Laments are female figures whose
forefathers had mines in 'the mountains of primal grief'. At the foot
of the mountains of primal grief is the fountainhead of joy.
... sometimes even
among men you can find a polished nugget of primal grief
or a chunk of petrified rage from the slag of an ancient volcano.
(Rilke, 1987, p. 207)
It is his own version I think of the depressive position, and what he has
reached is an ability to value his grief because in it he values what is
lost and what he has never had.
The latter is crucial since what he seems to have lacked is someone
to do for him precisely what he concludes he needs to d o for the
world: to name things; to register what exists; to transform experience
from visible to invisible form, to mourn what has gone and to distin-
guish what is living from what is dead. I have suggested that it is this
that his mother had been unable to do for him, perhaps in particular
t o bury her dead little girl and bring to life her little boy. The moment
Rilke reached this point in the Elegies he wrote almost automatically
and at great speed the Sonnets t o Orpheus. They are he wrote 'of the
same birth as the Elegies' and sprang up 'in connection with a girl who
had died young'. This, he said, moved them closer to that realm we
share with the dead and those to come:
We of the here and now ... are incessantly flowing over and over to
those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come
after us. (13th Nov. 1925, Letters, p. 373)
This prompts the thought that having completed the Elegies Rilke
could at last bury the sister who died before he was born and with
whom he had always been confused. This was not only because his
mother had failed to mourn her but also because the phantasied iden-
tity with the dead baby sister had provided him with a location for a
part of himself that wanted death, that wanted to live in the perpetual
womb of the unborn.
Rilke's message in the sonnets is twofold. One is that we should be
glad Euridyce is in the underworld giving us a relationship with the
dead and a season, winter, in which to renew it. The second message
is that Orpheus, the voice that transforms even the experience of death
into song, is alive whenever there is poetry. He anticipates this theme
in the first Elegy when he evokes the legend that the painful crying at
the death of Linus was the birth of music.
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness ...
The Void felt for the first time ...
(1st Elegy, Selected Poetry, p. 155)
In the sonnets Rilke celebrates his new found voice and the position it
gives him as Orpheus. So by articulating for the dead, and for the
unrealised, he has a legitimate place and can contain at last his own
deficits by naming them.
Wordsworth's 'Infant babe' was a fortunate personality whose
expectation of finding a loving and understanding object was realised
in his first encounters with his mother, who was then its incarnation
and embodiment, providing him with a belief in a world that will
always contain such objects. For other infants such as Rilke's infant
self the pre-conception of a loving and understanding object has only
met with a negative realisation and can only be preserved therefore in
I. 'Primal Grief' and 'Petrified Rage8
the idea of an ever to be unmet object, a pure spirit, Rilke's omni-
scient, but disembodied Angel.
I think that in such personalities there is great value in truthfully
recognising what is not and on the acceptance of nullity. Rilke him-
self wrote 'Sei - und wisse zugleich des Nicht-Seins Bedingung',
which could be translated as 'Be - and at the same time know the
state of Not-Being', in The Sonnets To Otpheus 11, 13. The experi-
ence of an inner void, so dreaded by some individuals who like Rilke
are prey to it, is derived from contacting a potential space within the
self that was never occupied, an innate hope never realised, an
imageless expectation never given shape. By conceiving of such
emptiness, of 'Nicht-Sein Bedingung8, as an experience of non-fulfil-
ment, a sense of being and knowing is re-established. If one used
Bion's terminology a 'realisation in 0' (i.e. of being) is coexistent
with a 'realisation in K' (i.e. of awareness) of non-existence. Rilke
said that he began to write in French after the Elegies because there
was nothing in his own language that adequately captured the
meaning of the French word 'absence'. How much he valued the idea
of space being kept empty for something that would never materi-
alise is best conveyed in one of the sonnets to Orpheus. It is about
the Unicorn the philosopher's paradigm of that which is known
though it has never been seen.
'Oh this is the animal that never was'
'It had not been. But for them it appeared
in all its purity. They left space enough
And in the space hollowed out by their love
it stood up all at once and didn't need
existence. They nourished it, not with grain
but with the mere possibility of being ...
(Selected Poetry, p. 241)
I would like to add as a postscript to this paper what I think was an

extraordinarily prescient passage by Freud. A German colleague told
me when I was discussing my ideas about the Elegies that Rilke was
believed to be the anonymous poet referred to by Freud in his essay
'On Transience' (Gekle, 1986, p. 68). I will quote a few sentences from
Freud's paper which he wrote in 1915 shortly after he completed
Mourning and Melancholia. It refers to a walking holiday in August
1913 in the Dolomites which would have been a few months after
Rilke had written the first group of the Elegies, and before the
'Turning point' referred to in my paper. I presume the 'taciturn friend'
was Lou Andreas-SalomC with her friend the 'already famous poet',
Rilke.
Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside
in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous
poet. The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy
in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to
extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human
beauty ... I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things
... But I did dispute the pessimistic poet's view that the transience of
what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth ... As regards the beauty
of nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year,
so that in relation to the length of our lives it can be regarded as eternal
... What spoilt their enjoyment ... must have been a revolt in their
minds against mourning ... I believe that those who think thus, and
seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was pre-
cious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for
what is lost. Mourning as we know, however painful it may be, comes
to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been
lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free ...
(Freud, 1916, p. 303-7)
This appeared to be the case for Rilke. His mourning for objects lost
and hopes unrealised, 'of things silently gone out of mind and
things violently destroyed', appeared t o be achieved through the
composition of the Elegies. Segal suggests 'for the artist, the work
of art is his most complete and satisfactory way of allaying the guilt
and despair arising out of the depressive position and of restoring
his destroyed objects' (Segal, 1952, p. 198), and she also comments
that 'in a great work of art the degree of the denial of the death
instinct is less than in any other human activity' (ibid., p. 204).
Rilke's Elegies certainly illustrate this and it seems that until fully
expressed in his poetry he remained in its grip. The renunciation, or
relinquishment of the dead object seems t o require this full
acknowledgement of the desire to be at one with the dead: 'the
resolve that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open
toward death' (Rilke, 1969, p. 330). As Freud said of mourning
'When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has
consumed itself, and our libido is once more free ...'
Such appears t o have been the case for Rilke. After he finally com-
pleted the Elegies, nine years after his walk with Freud, he had an
enormous surge of poetic energy. In addition t o the Sonnets and a
number of other poems in German he wrote some four hundred
poems in French in the four years that remained before his death, from
leukaemia, in December 1926.
To conclude I return to the quotation used by Segal in her paper
'Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror'. Here are Rilke's own
retrospective comments on that line from a letter written in 1923. I
think they summarise this paper. He commented:
...
... isn't life itself dreadful? as soon as we accept life's most terrifying
...
dreadfulness then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and
.
at this cost will be ours. Whoever does not ... sometime or other .. give
his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life,
can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of
our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judge-
ment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the
identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine
head, indeed this one single face, ... this is the true significance and pur-
pose of the Elegies and the Sonnets ... (Rilke, Selected Poetry, p. 317)
Death Daydreaming
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary first appeared in instalments in the Revue de Paris.

On its publication, in 1856, it rapidly became apparent that Flaubert
and his publishers were to be prosecuted for an assault on morals and
religion; the publishers immediately decided to suppress one particular
scene that they felt would produce a scandal. Flaubert was furious, of
course. The scene was the famous 'cab' one, where Emma Bovary and
her second lover, Leon, make love all afternoon in a closed horse-
drawn carriage that is driven continuously, curtains drawn, through
the city of Rouen, in front of the bewildered eyes of the bourgeois. In
his famous defence, Flaubert's lawyer based his case on the assumption
that nobody could be inspired to commit adultery by such a tragic and
horrifying story of a woman who loses her mind and commits suicide
in such a gruesome way. He also quoted, in full, the whole of the cen-
sored 'cab' scene, showing that it contains no explicit sexuality at all.
In fact all that the readers, just like the bourgeois of Rouen, are
allowed to see is the crazy coach apparently possessed by a 'frenzy of
locomotion'. To support his view, Flaubert's lawyer quoted several
sexually explicit lines by famous, well loved authors, which had
escaped censorship at that time.
So why was this scene so scandalous? It could be argued that non-
explicit sex in literature might be 'sexier' than something more
explicit, which may well be true. Also, the fact that neither the audi-
ence of Rouen bourgeois nor the driver of the carriage can guess what
is taking place inside the cab makes it more tantalising. But I would
like to argue that it is the combination of the 'scandalous' and ruth-
lessly exhibitionistic sexuality, with the gruesome horror of the
psychological process that is taking place in Emma (subtly but most
definitely implied in the writing of this scene) which proves emotion-
ally unbearable and thus shocking. What is revealed is not an immoral
woman, but a mad woman driven to self destruction.
Flaubert's great masterpiece, from the perspective that I offer, cen-
tres on the misuse of imagination; his central character, Emma Bovary,
2. Death by Daydreaming
uses compulsive daydreaming as a (lethal) drug to 'cure' empty,
depressed states of mind. In his exploration of the restrictive, impov-
erishing quality of Emma's inner world, Flaubert offers a clear
differentiation between the creative use of imagination which enriches
life and its perversion into addictive daydreaming used to replace
awareness of life, and so destroy real meaning.
This theme has been explored by Segal in her remarkable paper
'Delusion and Artistic Creativity' (Segal, 1981) where she discusses
William Golding's novel 'The Spire'. She views Golding's work from
the perspective of the perversion of a creative idea (the building of a
cathedral) into a destructive delusion. She states: 'But, as in every
work of art, the novel contains also the story of its own creation and
it expresses the conflicts and doubts as to the author's own creativity.
The agonising question that the artist poses himself is, "Is my work a
creation or a delusion?".'
In Madame Bovary the heroine's wish-fulfilling fantasies dominate
her mental life to such an extent that she begins to lead a double life
long before the start of her adulterous adventures. She imagines her-
self as the heroine in a romance, but her daydreams have such a force
that she feels compelled to act them out, make them real, whilst ordi-
nary everyday life, including the life that is her own, is despised. She
feels herself to be misplaced, from another, better life that should have
been hers by right, into the dull ordinary life of a bourgeois woman.
This typical 'family romance' is, as Freud described, (Freud, 1909) a
defence against awareness of the ordinary limitations of life and one's
position in it. What Flaubert illustrates, with tremendous psycholog-
ical insight, in his study of his heroine, is that because the 'text' of the
romance in her mind is so repetitive and impoverished, so lifeless, it
needs to be compulsively enacted in external reality. Emma has a very
fixed picture of a perfect 'herself' in perfect surroundings with a per-
fect Prince Charming; she doesn't use her imagination to explore new
landscapes in her mind, but instead is addicted to a rigidly constructed
scenario. She encloses herself in this very idealised, restricted space,
which has so little vitality and movement that it strikes one not as a
picture of a particular kind of life, but as a stage set where actors per-
form the same play again and again. Emma's sole, all-consuming
endeavour is to try to breathe life into this two-dimensional world. She
is constantly buying accessories for her character, which function as
stage props. It is this crazed addiction to acquiring material belongings
to prop up her fantasied version of herself, which is the cause of her
ultimate downfall, not her infidelity.
Lhereux, the merchant, functions in the narrative as a seductive
devil who offers her all she needs to sustain her illusion but, through
lending her absurd amounts of money that she could never repay,
turns her into a hostage. She buys clothes that remind her of romantic
pictures of medieval ladies, but also furniture, and especially beautiful
materials for her bedroom. These exotic, luxurious acquisitions exist
for the purpose of covering up, curtaining off reality (inner and outer);
she buys ivory boxes, and even a gothic prie-Dieu, even though
nobody else is ever going to see these objects (except her husband who
would not notice). This is not simply a young woman's vanity, a wish
for clothes that would make her attractive. She constructs, first in her
daydreams and then in her bedroom, a concrete background to give
palpable reality t o the picture-book image in her mind. Her lovers are
not real men: they are actors who she, as director, chooses for the male
lead part; they have to look right, but they are also essentially inter-
changeable.
When Emma leaves her convent school, finding herself back in her
father's farm, with no prospects for the future, she thinks 'I will never
FEEL anything again'. It doesn't matter what she does, who she is
relating to - all that matters is that she wants t o feel particular emo-
tions intensely, like the heroines in novels supposedly feel or, rather,
like the excitement she experiences when reading those romantic
novels. Flaubert describes her involvement in her daydream world as
being like an addiction to a powerful drug. Like a drug addict, she
needs more and more of her drug in order to produce the desired
effect and becomes ever more ruthless in her determination to
achieve it, regardless of cost to herself and others. Again, as is prob-
ably the case in many addictions, she believes that the state that she
seeks is one that she has been robbed of and which she desperately
needs.
Emma is a voracious reader of romances. But, like Don Quixote,
she is a bad reader; her inability t o use her imagination means that she
cannot learn anything new. Instead, she plunders the texts of the
novels using them again as 'props' for her personal stage: 'She loved
the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew
here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal
advantage from things; and she rejected as useless everything that
promised no immediate gratification - for her temperament was more
sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions,
not scenery' (p. 34). 'Later, reading Walter Scott, she became infatu-
ated by everything historical and dreamed about oaken chests and
guardrooms and troubadours'. (p. 35) She reads Balzac and George
Sand, but for the same purpose: to pick out dresses, pieces of furni-
ture, intense emotional states that she might be able to reproduce: she
is a scavenger. 'I've read everything!' she says, in despair.
Emma marries Charles Bovary not out of love for him but in the belief
that having acquired the state of marriage, love would quickly follow,
and is of course disappointed.
But since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her
hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma
tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words 'bliss', 'pas-
sion', and 'rapture' - words that had seemed so beautiful in her books.
(P. 32)
Soon after the marriage, she feels trapped in utter discontent. To

escape this emptiness, she falls in love with Leon, a notary's clerk; they
have a purely platonic affair, which ends when Leon leaves for Paris to
study law; Emma feels disillusioned by this loss. Then she meets
Rodolphe, who has just bought a castle in the neighbourhood. He
decides on the spot that he will have her; they meet in the town's agri-
cultural show, and flirt quite openly. Six weeks later Rodolphe comes
back, notices Madame's pallor, and suggests to her husband that he
could take her riding to improve her health. This is the dialogue that
follows his departure:
'Why don't you accept Monsieur Boulanger's suggestions?He's been so

gracious'.
She pouted, made one excuse after another, and finally said that 'It
might look strange'.
'A lot I care about that!' said Charles, turning on his heel. 'Health comes
first! You're wrong!'
'But how do you expect me to ride a horse if I have no riding habit?'
'You must order one', he replied.
It was the riding habit that decided her. (p. 148)
In this important scene Flaubert makes it clear that Emma is seduced

by the whole mis-en-scene that the idea of the love affair implies. She
finally decides to embark on a course that will change her life, because
she likes the idea of herself in a riding habit. In French, this is more
striking, because the riding habit is an 'amazone': The phrase
'L'amazone la dccida' carries with it a clear implication that putting on
the outfit gives her a mythical (amazon) identity.' In this love scenario
it is clearly not Rodolphe as himself that matters, but the role he plays
and in this he can substitute for Leon with complete ease. For Emma
the only thing that matters is the part she will play, transformed by her
new clothes.
I will quote a few passages of the seduction scene:
It was early October. There was a mist over the countryside. Wisps of
vapour lay along the horizon, following the contours of the hills, and
elsewhere they were drifting and rising and evaporating. Now and then
as the clouds shifted, a ray of sun would light up the roofs of Yonville in
the distance, with its riverside gardens, its yards and its church steeple.
Emma half closed her eyes trying to pick out her house, and never had
the wretched village she lived in looked so very small. From the height
on which they were standing the whole valley was like an immense pale
lake, dissolving into thin air: clumps of trees stood out here and there
like dark rocks, and the tall lines of poplars piercing the fog were, like
its leafy banks, swaying in the wind. (p. 149)
Flaubert is looking at Emma from the outside, and yet simultaneously

seeing this scene as she would see it, although she herself would lack
the words to describe it. As Auerbach puts it in his excellent book
Mimesis: (he is discussing a different scene)
The situation, then, is not presented simply as a picture, but wc are first
given Emma and then the situation through her. It is not, however, a
matter - as it is in many first-person novels and other later works of a
similar type - of a simple representation of the content of Emma's con-
sciousness, of what she feels as she feels it. Though the light which
illuminates the picture proceeds from her, she is yet herself part of the
...
picture, she is situated within it Emma sees and feels, but she would
not be able to sum it all up in this way ... Flaubert does nothing but
bestow the power of mature expression upon the material which she
affords, in its complete subjectivity. (p. 484)
Emma has a transparent blue veil, which makes her look beautifully
blue too, as if immersed in water; the whole scene is coloured by
Emma's idea of romantic beauty: mists, blue lakes etc. She has always
associated this colour with romance, and Flaubert paints the scene
through her eyes; Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot, tells us that
Flaubert, when writing Madame Bovary, used to look at the country-
side through pieces of coloured glass. Nabokov, in his essay on Mme
Bovary, points out that the colour used to evoke the romantic mists in
Emma's mind, blue, appears again as the colour of the jar that contains
the arsenic she will use to kill herself. Flaubert's use of imagery is
clearly quite deliberate: in the beginning of the novel, when Emma's
mother dies, she feels very melancholy; the nuns in her convent, and
her father, think she doesn't look well; Emma looks in the mirror and
feels 'very pleased with herself for having reached so soon in her life
that rare ideal of pale existence that mediocre hearts never attain' (p.
36). Throughout the novel, the colour of romantic beauty is the same
as the colour of death. Death is transformed into narcissistic self love
and beauty, a manic, destructive process that, inevitably, leads back t o
death.
I will quote, from a few paragraphs further on:
The broadcloth of her riding habit clung to the velvet of his coat. She
leaned back her head, her white throat swelled in a sigh, and, her resis-
tance gone, weeping, hiding her face, with a long shudder she gave
herself to him.
Evening shadows were falling, and the level rays of the sun streamed
through the branches and dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all about
her, among the leaves on the ground, were shimmering patches of light,
as though hummingbirds flying by had scattered their feathers. All was
silent; a soft sweerness seemed to be seeping from the trees; she felt her
heart beating again, and her blood flowing in her flesh like a river of
milk. Then from far off., bevond
, the woods in distant hills. she heard a
-
vague, long, drawn-out cry a sound that lingered; and she listened
silently as it mingled like a strain of music with the last vibrations of her
quivering nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending a
broken bridle with his penknife. (p. 152)
Everything looks beautiful, just as Emma needs it t o be. Flaubert here

occupies both subjective (i.e. viewing his character, Emma, from the
'inside') and objective positions. H e identifies with Emma's romantic
view yet, simultaneously, from a more objective perspective he is able
t o show the idealised quality of the daydream - as he puts it, she is s o
beautifully bluish that milk flows in her veins rather than blood. But
then that cry breaks through the romantic illusion, a presage of the
horror t o come.
When she gets home and looks in the mirror she sees
... her whole being transfigured by some subtle emanation. 'I have a
lover! I have a lover!' At last she was going to know the joys of love, the
fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvel-
lous realm where all would be passion, ecstasy, rapture. [Note here the
future tense: it is in the nature of this sort of daydream that it can never
be realiscd. It instead acts as a permanent lure in the mind away from
the present towards an imagined future state in which the daydream is
fulfilled.] She was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the
glittering heights of passion; everyday life had receded, and lay far
below, in the shadows between those peaks.
When she re-lives the scene with Rodolphe turning herself from the
imagined future to the immediate past, she reconstructs the scene
making it entirely narcissistic; in fact Rodolphe's name isn't even men-
tioned.
Flaubert refers here to Emma's obsession with the heroines of the
romantic novels she has read, all adulterous women 'singing in her
memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her'. 'Now she saw herself
as one of those amourewes whom she had so envied; she was
becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long
dream of her youth was coming true.' This I think rather neatly makes
the point. For Emma's wishes to come true she has 'in reality' to
become a fictional character.
Flaubert here describes Emma as being full of 'a delicious sense of
vengeance'; I think it is a revenge against the world which inevitably
stands in the way of her making her daydreams realities. As she lives
more and more in her fictional daydream, all those close to her are
treated with contempt. Their ultimate crime is that they are not the
figures of her daydream. This attack on her 'good objects', leads to
their being felt as vengeful and so they are further hated and feared.
In other words, there is a vicious circle of ever-increasing inner perse-
cution and ever more desperate attempts to evade it. The cry in the
forest is a premonition of the appalling persecution to come (as it will
in the inescapable image of the terrifying, diseased blind beggar).
Throughout the writing of the love scenes Flaubert uses threatening
imagery. Massive rocks in the blue lake (in the seduction scene) I take
as representing threatening patches of darkness, depression, which
pierce the daydream. Their very solidity is in marked contrast to the
bluish ethereal mists of Emma's illusory world.
At night, hidden in the dark garden with Rodolphe, Emma remem-
bers that she has forgotten Leon: 'She scarcely thought of him now'.
Then,
The stars glittered through the branches of the jasmine. Behind them
they heard the flowing of the river, and now and then the crackle of dry
reeds on the bank. Here and there in the darkness loomed patches of
deeper shadow; and sometimes these would suddenly seem to shudder,
rear up and then curve downward, like huge black waves threatening to
engulf them. (p. 159)
'In the darkness loomed patches of deeper shadow': the shadow of the
forgotten, now unloved, object, haunts her; the 'huge black waves' of
depression loom in the periphery of her mind.
Returning to the narrative. As Rodolphe starts distancing himself
from her, Emma, feeling unhappy, tries to re-connect to the world and
to those she had looked down on, who had become, from the heights
of her excitement, the mere inhabitants of 'the wretched village'; in
this mood, she feels fleetingly moved by a letter from her father, in
which he says he has planted a tree for his little granddaughter, Berthe.
Emma has not been able to love Berthe. Previously we have heard how
in a gesture of impatience, she pushed Berthe away and when she falls
and cuts herself, Emma felt not tenderness but only revulsion.
Now Emma thinks for a moment about her father's affectionate
letter:
She sat for a few minutes with the sheet of coarse paper in her hand.
The letter was thick with spelling mistakes, and Emma brooded on the
affectionate thought that cackled through them like a hen half hidden in
a thorn hedge. [Note the 'half-hidden' cruelty of the imagery.]
She makes an attempt at loving her daughter, and fails; then decides to
improve her husband, so that she might be able to love him. The
apothecary, M Homais, comes to her rescue with a brilliant idea: to
make Charles famous through performing a miraculous cure on the
club foot of the stable boy, Hippolyte.
Medical cure (or rather, disastrous attempts at cure) is an important

theme in the book, which I think stands as a metaphor for the failure
of Emma's daydream world to cure her of her terrible persecuting
depression. At this point in the story, the deeply disappointed Emma
decides to 'cure' Charles of his unattractiveness by trying to make him
into a hero. He will transform Hippolyte's deformed foot into a
normal one and so achieve fame for himself through his 'miraculous'
operation - which nearly kills his patient.
Homais the apothecary, with Emma's help, convinces Bovary that
he should operate on Hippolyte's club foot. Homais, who dreams of
scientific fame, aims to achieve it through writing articles for the news-
paper on this extraordinary event in Yonville. The club foot is in fact,
though clearly imperfect, quite serviceable, as Flaubert says, having
'acquired moral qualities of patience and energy'. But Hippolyte is
finally shamed into submitting to the operation. Here three of the
characters conspire to corrupt imperfect but satisfactory reality, for
purely narcissistic motives.
The treatment consists in cutting a tendon, and then fixing the leg
into 'a sort of box weighing about eight pounds - a complicated mass
of iron, wood, tin, leather, screws and nuts' (p. 165). This accumula-
tion of details is important, because the characters in their different
ways all believe that the greater the accumulation of various sub-
stances, the more sophisticated, richer and successful the product and
thus the more reality will approximate to the daydream. Homais, in
constantly enumerating labels, formulae, Latin phrases, chemical sub-
stances, mirrors Emma buying more and more props for her
mis-en-scene, transforming herself into a heroine. This metaphor for
the unrealisable daydream is even present in the first chapter, in the
description of Charles Bovary's schoolboy cap, composed of a multi-
tude of different materials and shapes - in Tanner's perceptive
description it is 'unvisualisable'.
Hippolyte's operation has a disastrous result: a few days later
Charles is called, because the 'strephopode' 'was writhing in frightful
convulsions, so severe that the apparatus locked around his leg was
beating against the wall, threatening to demolish it' (p. 168). Charles
and M Homais open the box and 'a terrible sight met their eyes. The
foot was completely formless, so immensely swollen that the skin
seemed ready t o burst; and the entire surface was covered with black
and blue spots caused by the much-vaunted apparatus'. But as soon as
the swelling diminishes, in a denial of the unbearable reality that their
'cure' has brought catastrophic consequences, they attempt it yet
again, this time locking the foot in the absurd contraption even more
tightly than before. Finally when Hippolyte is nearly dying they open
it again: 'A livid tumescence now extended up the leg, and a dark
liquid was oozing from a number of blood blisters'. Hippolyte has gan-
grene and is deteriorating rapidly, suffering atrocious pain and in a
constant state of terror; finally a doctor is called who amputates his
leg.
The parallels are clear: the 'cure' for Hippolyte's club foot is not
really in the service of helping him but only serves as a daydream that
has nothing to do with him. This fearful attack upon him is also an
attack on those 'moral qualities of patience and energy' - in other
words his capacity to accept even distressing realities and make them
as serviceable as he can.' Emma's 'cure by daydreams' has similarly dis-
astrous consequences for herself and ends ultimately in her suicide.
Hippolyte's amputation, the loss of an imperfect but useful and real
part of himself, parallels Emma's 'amputation' of her awareness of the
reality of her self and the life she is leading. Even her own child, psy-
chologically a part of herself, can only be experienced as ugly and
contemptible, easily abandoned ('amputated') so that she can pursue
her daydream romance with Rodolphe, a further desperate attempt to
get away from her persecuted inner state.
In his excellent book Adultery in the Novel, Tony Tanner, in a
chapter entitled 'The Fog in Emma's head' explores the question of ill-
ness and cure in the novel; he quotes the story of La Guerine
recounted to Emma earlier in the novel. La Guerine, the daughter of
p6re Guerin suffered from 'a kind of fog in her head' ('une manike de
2 . Death by Daydreaming
brouillard dans sa tEte'); the poor girl looked like 'a funereal cloth',
and when the illness attacked her, she would lie down next to the sea
and cry. It was marriage, so Emma is told, that cured the girl of her ill-
ness. Emma, on the other hand, began to feel this 'fog in her head'
only when she got married. Tanner points out that the name Guerin
derives from the verb 'guirir', t o cure, and links this with the whole
theme of cure in the novel. The physical illnesses in the novel -
Hippolyte's club foot (and, worse, the trauma inflicted on it by the
'cure'), the blind beggar's pestilent eyes and Emma's death by poi-
soning, are all described in minute, gruesome detail.'
The terrible state of Hippolyte's leg functions as a metaphor for the
terrible damage that Emma is inflicting on her own mind. Emma is
constantly murdering awareness of 'everyday life' whilst trying to
blow life into unreality. The more frantically she invests in unreality,
the more threatening internal reality becomes as it brings awareness of
the deterioration of her own character. The more she feels threatened
by her own psychic reality (attacks on reality are, from a psychoana-
lytic perspective, always accompanied by attacks on internal objects
which are then felt to be damaged and threatening), the more desper-
ately she needs to cover everything up. This 'covering up' is
represented symbolically in the novel by her acquisition of expensive
material adornments and of course by her invention of ever more elab-
orate, detailed and richer mis-en-scenes. External reality appears to
Emma as increasingly ugly and threatening. I would understand this as
the projection of her awareness of her own deteriorating inner state
onto the external world.
I will now return to the famous cab scene between Emma and Leon
but need first to briefly summarise the narrative that takes us up t o this
point. Emma, having given up on Charles after his 'failure' to become
a famous surgeon, decides to run away with Rodolphe. But he subse-
quently abandons her, and this precipitates Emma into a long illness.
Homais then suggests that, as part of her programme of recovery,
Charles take her to the opera in Rouen. At the opera, Emma is sud-
denly taken over by a daydream of running away with Lagardy, the
famous tenor; but in the interval she meets Leon, her first love, and
what had appeared to her as a wonderful opera is suddenly viewed as
entirely boring. At the interval Charles decides t o depart for Yonville
but Emma stays in Rouen, on the pretext that she wants to see the
second half of the show. She arranges to meet Leon the next morning
in the cathedral. Emma, however, at first repents and writes a letter of
goodbye to Leon, which she intends to give him when they meet. But
ISychoanalysis and Culture
in the cathedral, she is suddenly overwhelmed by a religious frenzy,
whilst the desperate Lcon waits for her to make up her mind.
Meanwhile, the verger of the cathedral pesters them with information
and picture books.
A quick look at Leon's state of mind is revealing of Flaubert's inten-
tion:
Leon fled [from the verger], for it seemed to him that his love, after
being reduced to stonelike immobility in the church for nearly two
hours, was now going to vanish in smoke up that truncated pipe, that
elongated cage, that fretwork chimney, or what you will, that perches so
precariously and grotesquely atop the cathedral like the wild invention
of a crazy metal worker.
In French this is 'comme la tentative extravagante de quelque chau-

dronnier fantariste', literally 'like the extravagant attempt of a fantasist
metal worker', a daydreamer who wants to create something beautiful,
but instead can only build something grotesque and precarious, its
construction following not material principles but psychological ones.
The word 'extravagant' is of course one that absolutely describes
Emma's acquisitive habits, and Leon will soon be shocked by such
extravagance. The metaphor of daydream-smoke (which recalls the
blue mist in the seduction scene), disappearing into something
grotesque is further developed in the subsequent scene and the story
will end with Emma herself disappearing grotesquely into death.
I will now quote from the cab scene:
'An urchin was playing in the square:
'Go get me a cab!'
The youngster vanished like a shot up the Rue des Quatre-Vents, and
for a few minutes they were left alone, face to face and a little con-
strained.
'Oh, Leon, really - I don't know whether I should ... !'
She simpered. Then, in a serious tone:
'It's very improper, you know.'
'What's improper about it?' retorted the clerk. 'Everybody does it in
Paris!'
It was an irresistible and clinching argument.
But there was no sign of a cab. Leon was terrified lest she retreat into
the church. Finally the cab appeared.
'Drive past the north door, at least!' cried the verger, from the
entrance. 'Take a look at the Resurrection, the Last Judgement, Paradise,
King David, and the souls of the damned in the flames of hell!'
'Where does Monsieur wish to go?' asked the driver.
'Anywhere!' said Leon, pushing Emma into the carriage.
And the lumbering contraption rolled away.
It went down the Ruc Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the
Quai Napoleon and the Pont Neuf, and stopped in front of the statue of
Pierre Corneille.
'Keep going!' called a voice from within.
It started off again, and gathering speed on the downgrade beyond
the Carrefour Lafayette it came galloping up to the railway station.
'No! Straight on!' cried the same voice.
Rattling out through the station gates, the cab soon turned into the
Boulevard, where it proceeded at a gentle trot between the double row
of tall elms. The coachman wiped his brow, stowed his leather hat
between his legs, and veered the cab off beyond the side lanes to the
grass strip along the river front.
It continued along the river on the cobbled towing path for a long
time in the direction of Oyssel, leaving the islands behind.
But suddenly it rushed off through Quatre-Mares, Sotteville, the
Crande-Chaude, the Rue d'Elboeuf, and made its third stop - this time
at the Jardin des Plantes.
'Drive on!' cried the voice, more furiously.
And abruptly starting off again it went through Saint-Sever, along the
Quai des Curandiers and the Quai aux Meules, recrossed the bridge,
crossed the Place du Champ-de-Mars and continued on behind the
garden of the hospital, where old men in black jackets were strolling in
the sun on a terrace green with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil,
along the Boulevard Cauchoise, and traversed Mont-Riboudet as far as
the hill at Deville.
There it turned back; and from then on it wandered at random,
without apparent goal. It was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont-
Cargan, at Rouge-Mare and the Place du Gaillarbois; in the Rue
Maladerie, the Rue Dinanderie, and in front of one church after another
- Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise; in front of
the customs house, at the Basse Vieille Tour, at Trois Pipes, and at the
Cimiti5re Monumental. From his seat the coachman now and again cast
a desperate glance at a cafe. He couldn't conceive what a frenzy of loco-
motion was making these people persist in refusing to stop. He tried a
few times, only to hear immediate angry exclamations from behind. So
he lashed the more furiously at his two sweating nags, and paid no
attention whatever to bumps in the road; he hooked into things right
and left; he was past caring - demoralised, and almost weeping from
thirst, fatigue and despair.
Along the river front amidst the trucks and the barrels, along the
streets from the shelter of the guard posts, the bourgeois stared wide-
eyed at this spectacle unheard of in the provinces - a carriage with
drawn shades that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than
a tomb and tossing like a ship.
At a certain moment in the early afternoon, when the sun was blazing
down most fiercely on the old silver-platedlamps, a bare hand appeared
from under the little yellow cloth curtains and threw out some torn
scraps of paper. The wind caught them and scattered them, and they
alighted at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of flowering red
clover,
Then, about six o'clock, the carriage stopped in a side street near the
Place Beauvoisine. A woman alighted from it and walked off, her veil
down, without turning her head.' (pp. 231-2)
I will focus on certain details of this description which I believe amply

support my interpretation of this pivotal scene, and thus of my reading
of the novel. The cab is a box, that is described exactly in the same
way, even using the same words used by Flaubert t o describe the med-
ical contraption applied t o Hippolyte's foot; it is also a particular sort
of (very heavy) box; both boxes are described as 'machines', they are
both 'moteurs mechaniques'; the cab, like the box, is also 'a compli-
cated mass of iron, wood, tin, leather, screws and nuts'. Both boxes
though on the surface so different are described in similar ways, I
believe, to draw attention to the similar functions they serve. The med-
ical contraption is to cure the deformed leg and make it into
something that it can never be; the coach is to provide an enclosure
for a desperate attempt by Emma to 'cure' herself of her sane aware-
ness of a reality that cannot be borne. Both these attempts at cure
result, in reality, in terrible destruction. The theme of enclosure in a
moving box is continued by Emma travelling to and from Rouen to
visit Leon. The coach, I'Hirondelle, is constantly plagued by the blind
beggar with his disgusting, wounded, festering eyes. He terrifies Emma
by thrusting his pestilent head into the carriage, this echoing
Hippolyte's gangrenous leg being locked in his box. In this dreadful
moment, Emma imprisoned in the box, is forced to see the diseased
man who, psychically, assaults her by placing the horrible illness inside
her box and thus, so to speak, inside her mind. The box that was to
have been her retreat from an intolerable reality has become the
vehicle of her imprisonment in a persecuted state that she cannot
escape, and this is of course her tragedy.
In the cab scene, Flaubert conveys Emma's tragic state in a way that
is subtle but very effective, and which is unfortunately not entirely
translatable; in French, 'le fiacre', the cab, which is masculine, turns
halfway through the scene into 'the heavy machine' (like Hippolyte's
box) or 'the vehicle', la voiture, which are both feminine. This allows
Flaubert to start all the paragraphs that describe the cab's mad rush
everywhere in the town, with the careful enumeration of all the par-
ticular places, with the work 'Elle' i.e. 'she'. In English, of course,
these sentences start with the word 'it'. So, in French these paragraphs
can be simultaneously read as referring" to the cab and to Emma. This
strange crazy machine and Emma are merged into one. When the
coachman is past caring, pays no attention to bumps in the road,
hooking into things right and left etc., we have, by implication, a pic-
ture of Emma's mental state as she careers towards total
self-destruction. During her affair with Leon she deteriorates in a way
that is frightening to him; she becomes by turns careless, more extrav-
agant, crazier, and, occasionally, terrified. The reader, like the
bourgeois watching the crazy behaviour of the cab, sees Emma locked
up 'in a carriage with drawn shades that kept appearing and reap-
pearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship'. Hippolyte's
box was sealed tighter the second time round, and becomes the tomb
for his putrefying, eventually dead, leg.
Flaubert uses metaphors relating to ships and voyages to describe
Emma's romantic daydreams and of course this carries with it 'oortents-~
of a shipwreck. ' ~ h ; liked the sea only for its temoests.' In the first
seducridn scene: 'the whole valley was like an i k e n s e pale lake
[where] clumps of trees stood out ... like dark rocks'; in the love-
making scenes in the garden: 'Here and there in the darkness loomed
~ a t c h e of
s d e e ~ e shadow:
r and sometimes these would suddenlv, seem
;o shudder, reir up and then curve downward, like huge black waves
threatening to engulf them'.
The chapter ends with the carriage finally stopping five hours later,
'a woman alighted from it and walked off, her veil down, without
turning her had', just like the carriage with the drawn curtains, going
on and on without stopping. This is a masterly scene, where Flaubert
communicates very powerfully Emma's frantic process of moving on and
on. unable to stoo. towards selfdestruction, whilst t ~ "n toe hold onto
I
anaid= of a beauk that is dissolvine" in front of her.

This drawing o i curtains and veils, as well as a profusion of soft fur-
nishing materials - luxurious, exotic and ephemeral, always used to
(superficially) cover and hide - occupy an important place throughout
the novel. Emma compulsively buys curtains, rugs, expensive mate-
rials, exotic screens. Finally, desperate about the rottenness of
everything in her life, and facing total financial ruin, at the very
moment when she discovers that Lhereux the money lender is sadisti-
cally enjoying destroying her life completely, she buys, insanely, from
him some pieces of lace which he wraps for her in blue tissue paper.
Covers, veils, curtains all function to represent, symbolically, the
use of daydreams to conceal a painful reality. The thinness of the trans-
parent lace or blue veil point to the impending collapse of the capacity
to cover things up anymore. The intrusion of the pestilent head of the
beggar symbolises this collapse, the eruption into awareness of a
reality that cannot be faced.
This character who represents madness and death is particularly
repulsive because his illness has resulted in his having no eyelids - his
blind eyes have no curtains. The sightless eyes are therefore an unbear-
able sight and symbolise Emma's state when she ceases to be able to
draw the curtains over internal and external reality. Emma is terrified
of the beggar and feels he is accusing her. He is thus a complex figure
in her psychic reality representing at one and the same time her wish
to be blind to reality, and what that reality is like once the covers are
removed and cannot be replaced - namely an internal world full of
damaged objects that persecute her with accusations. His blind eyes,
like those of Tiresias, are also seers of a deeper reality and the voice of
a horrifying destiny. Emma's suicide can be viewed as her last attempt
to get away from a reality that she cannot endure which, at the
moment of her death, she is forced to see and hear. It is a brilliantly
described, and almost unbearably horrible example of a breakdown
caused by the sudden failure of all defences against the awareness of
an internal world in a catastrophic state, populated by horribly dam-
aged objects. It is also an example of the primacy of internal reality -
she has manically denied her attacks on her objects and on her real
self; but when this breaks through, internal reality is infinitely worse
than external reality.
What is unbearable for Emma are the horrors in her mind.
To conclude: Daydreaming, fantasising, experimenting with dif-
ferent versions of reality in one's mind is part of normal functioning;
it has both a 'research' function and a defensive, escapist one. We
need both to survive. Longing for a more ideal world, a wish for a
more perfect union with one's love object, in fact a search for the par-
adise lost of infant love, is, I think, an essential aspect of human
nature. But pathological daydreaming, which takes over the mind,
replaces life with something which is purely self-constructed - an
activity which far from being life promoting has deadly consequences.
Flaubert in his novel shows convincingly how the misuse of imagina-
tion can lead not just to the impoverishing of mental life, but to an
active corruption and perversion of internal relations with self and
others - he shows in a most powerful way how death can be caused
by daydreaming.
I will finish by quoting a few lines from two letters Flaubert wrote
to his lover Louise Colet, during the (very long) time he was struggling
with the writing of Madame Bovary (see F. Steegmuller, p. 166):
The reader will be unaware, I hope, of all the psychological working
concealed beneath the form, but he will feel their effect.
A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry -
unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous. Such, at least, is my
ambition ... Nor does it seem to me impossible to give psychological
analysis the swiftness, clarity and impetus of a purely dramatic narrative.
This has never been attempted, and it would be beautiful. Have I suc-
ceeded a little in this? I have no idea.
I think we can say that in writing his masterpiece, Madame Bovary,

he has succeeded beautifully.
Notes
1. Emma acquires various identities by projecting herself into such fantasy
characters. Here, by placing herself in the clothing of such a fantasy figure, she
becomes it - i.e. through projective identification (Klein, 1956).
2. This quality of accepting a serviceable though imperfect reality and the
moral strength associated with this calls to mind the mental constellation that
constitutes Klein's depressive position.
3. Flaubert's father was a famous surgeon, and Flaubert used to spy on him
dissecting cadavers in the hospital where he worked.
3
The Singing Detective
A Place in the Mind
David Bell
Segal has pointed out on many occasions that real originality comes
about almost as a by-product of a compelling inner need. It emerges
from that need, cannot be imposed upon it. This is clearly exempli-
fied in the work of Dennis Potter who, in order to realise his central
artistic intentions, broke the mould of television drama. In works
such as Pennies from Heaven and Blue Remembered Hills, he com-
bined different dramatic conventions, breaking down the barriers
between inner and outer reality - not to obscure the distinction
between them - but instead to embark on a deep exploration of their
relationship.
Potter is preoccupied with fundamental problems of the inner
world but in The Singing Detective,' his masterpiece, he makes this
concern quite explicit. The central character, Marlow, exists in the
narrative in two different identities: he is both a patient in a hospital
bed and a figure of this man's internal world. The structure of the
work is non-linear, weaving back and forth between different 'reali-
ties' (memory, fantasy and external reality). These different narrative
threads reach an ever-increasing coherence as the drama develops over
the six episodes. In this way the form of the drama continually illumi-
nates the content.
As elsewhere in Potter's work, there is a central concern with the
struggle between creativity and destructiveness, and he shows an
unflinching capacity to lay bare for us the most unpleasant aspects of
human character and also to show their source.' He describes an
omnipotent character structure built up to deal with unbearable psy-
chic pain, vulnerability and shame. However, as is so often the case,
this structure becomes detached from its origins and acquires an ide-
alised life of its own within the personality.
The Singing Detective is also unusual in that although it is a 'quality
drama' it was by no means minority viewing and it shot to the top of
the television ratings. This enormous popularity resulted, I believe,
3. The Singing Detective
from the capacity of the author to address universal features of the
human condition in a way that is accessible and which I aim to discuss
in this paper.
Synopsis
Because the narrative structure is non-linear and multi-layered, it is
difficult to provide a synopsis without doing considerable disservice
to the subtlety of the work. In fact, in attempting to provide such a
synopsis, one is confronted with the same difficulty one encounters
when attempting to summarise an entire psychoanalytic treatment:
everything is connected to everything else, the same story is told over
and over again, but each time in a different way and in a different
context. The drama unfolds over six episodes and in each episode
similar elements appear. As the narrative progresses disparate frag-
ments become clearer and the relationship between them more
coherent.
There are three distinct threads to the narrative, each of which rep-
resents a different aspect of reality: the current reality of the central
character, the historical reality of his memories and, lastly, the alter-
native reality of his imaginativelfantasy life.
Philip Marlow - not Raymond Chandler's detective hero, but a
miter of detective stories - a man in mid-life, lies in a hospital bed suf-
fering a devastating exacerbation of the illness psoriasis, which he has
endured since childhood. His illness is at its peak: his whole body is
covered in festering sores and the disease has so invaded his joints that
he is almost completely paralysed, experiencing excruciating pain
whenever he tries to move. The author makes it clear that Marlow's
physical state may be taken as a metaphor for his inner world. He is
facing a (mid-life) crisis that arises from his attempt to emerge from a
state of inner imprisonment and paralysis. In the text, Potter refers to
the hospital ward as 'a place in the mind'.' To emphasise the concur-
rent realities, Potter uses the dramatic device of having a fellow
patient, Reginald, read Marlow's novel The Singing Detective to him-
self throughout the six episodes.
The first narrative thread is current reality. We see the life of the
hospital ward as lived by Marlow. We observe his relationships with
the ward staff, fellow patients and, centrally, with his estranged wife,
Nicola. The hospital staff, except for the kind and voluptuous nurse
Mills, appear to be self-righteous and devoid of any human concern.
They are irritated and embarrassed by any real show of distress. His
relationship with Nicola is largely one of cynical one-upmanship,
which serves to keep at bay the warmth (and therefore vulnerability)
that occasionally breaks through. Despite himself Marlow develops an
intense and passionate attachment to Nurse Mills who, with compas-
sion, attends to his most basic needs.
From his bed, Marlow pours forth witty, biting invective, relishing
an apparent cynicism of life. During his stay two patients, his neigh-
bours, die, to be unceremoniously wheeled out of the ward by
vacant-looking porters. For much of the time, Marlow tries to appear
completely unmoved by the scenes of pathos, degradation and tragedy
which surround him. This is, however, only apparent. Ali, the
Pakistani man in the next bed understands the real nature of his banter
and they are clearly fond of each other. Marlow cries bitterly when Ali
dies.
When the pain (either mental or physical) becomes too much, or
the feelings of shame and vulnerability too intense, Marlow takes
refuge in his novel, The Singing Detective, which he is rewriting in his
head - as he says, desperately, at these moments 'The story the story'.
The second narrative thread deals with a different reality: Marlow's
memories of critical events of his childhood which have an important
bearing on his current state. It is at times not clear which are to be
taken as memories of actual events and which constitute fantastic dis-
tortions of these events viewed from the perspective of a delirious state
of mind.
As a young boy, Marlow suffered a psychological catastrophe which
has had enduring effects on his character. He remembers his parents as
very unhappily married and recalls scenes of emptiness and bickering
with the paternal grandparents, with whom they lived. Young Philip's
father appears mainly as a weak man, unable to save the family
(though towards the end of the narrative this memory of his father
undergoes an important transformation to which I will return).' His
father's fine singing voice, much loved by all at the local club, how-
ever, evokes his son's admiration and love. But his father's strength
and confidence on the stage do not carry over into his life.
Philip's mother is unfaithful to his father and he witnesses her adul-
terous lovemaking from his position high up in a tree in the woods.
Her lover, Raymond Binney, is a musician in the trio in which his
mother plays and his father sings. The young boy is devastated by this
betrayal and shows his disturbance by shitting on the teacher's desk.
His tyrannical teacher is more than willing to accept that it was not
Philip, her star pupil, who committed this desecration and believes
him when he pins the blame on the class fool Mark Binney, the son of
his mother's lover. We later learn, in one of the most painful scenes in
the whole work, that Mark Binney ended up as a chronic psychiatric
patient.
Philip's parents split up. His world is devastated when his mother
moves away with him to the big city (London) depriving him of the
rural life, most especially the woods, that he has so loved.' O n the
train to London, he confronts his mother with his knowledge of her
infidelity, in front of some soldiers. He does so again, more angrily, in
a London Underground station. Interestingly, it is at this point that
Philip's mother notices the first signs of his illness (psoriasis). The red
scaly patch - functioning within the drama as a metaphor for the
mental disturbance that is to grow and dog his life - has made its first
appearance.
In the sequencing of the narrative this event is repeatedly linked
with gloomy and threatening images of trains, a terrifying scarecrow
in a devastated landscape and the sound of Philip's mother calling after
him as he runs away from her in the Underground station. We later
learn that these images are portents of the central catastrophe -
Philip's mother's suicide.
At the core of Marlow's character, then, is the problem of the pain
of unbearable, persecuting guilt which is always threatening him and
from which he is always trying to escape. There appears to be no one
in his world who might have helped him confront this pain, least of all
his loving but weak father.
The third thread from which the fabric of the drama is woven is
Marlow's imaginativelfantasy life. This falls into two distinct cate-
gories. Firstly, there are his imaginings, fantasies and deliria
concerning his current reality. Here fantasy and reality are not dis-
tinct. The viewer is led to believe, for example, that Nicola, Marlow's
wife, is cynically betraying him with her lover BinneylFinney,Qoth
sexually and by stealing his work, selling on the film rights for a huge
fee. It is only later that we learn that this is a fantastic distortion of
reality.
In the second category, there is a quite different type of fantasy
activity over which he exerts more control, his imaginativelcreative
work as a writer. There are moments, however, most particularly at
the final crisis (as I will describe below), when Marlow's control over
the products of his imagination breaks down; he then feels controlled
by them. From his hospital bed Marlow is rewriting, in his head, his
novel The Singing Detective. The story is a thriller in the classic mould
of the genre, featuring spies, prostitutes and the mysterious body of a
woman dragged from a river. This latter image is emphasised through
frequent repetition. The eponymous hero is glamorous and witty, and
sings in night-clubs. One soon senses that he will get to the bottom of
things and nail the traitor and cheap thug, Binney.
Our hero is pursued by mysterious raincoated figures who spy on
him and who, we learn, work for an intelligence organisation. They
aim to murder him so that the truth is not discovered. Marlow's iden-
tification with the glamorous detective hero, who exposes evil and
brings the criminally corrupt to justice, is never in doubt. The Singing
Detective combines elements of his real father with a wish-fulfilling
image of a strong father who will put the world to rights and with
whom he can identify. However we see that he also identifies himself
with the traitor and murderer. Binnev.
a
In the drama, actors play multi~licityof roles spanning the dif-
ferent 'realities', a device which emphasises the interweaving of
memory, fantasy and reality. Mother's lover (a childhood memory),
the spy in the detective story and the imagined lover of his wife are all
called Binney and are played by the same actor. There is another
Binney, Mark Binney, the child whom he framed in the classroom.
In his play Penniesjmm Heaven, Pocter uses songs to represent both a
longing for a bener world and an escape into a nostalgic sentimentality.
In The Singing Dereftrftrwlhowever, they serve a different hnction in that
they represent artistic achievement, as Potter put it, 'the angel in all of
us' (Fuller, 1993, p. 86). They serve to bind the narrative together, often
spanning the different realities. A character from memory strikes up a
song which is then taken up in the detective fantasy or in Marlow's imag-
ining~concerning his life on the ward.
As the narrative develoos Marlow's ohvsical condition imoroves as
he confronts the central is'sues of his hie. '
In the account which follows I will use 'Philip' to refer to marlo ow
as a young boy, 'Marlow' to refer to the central character on the ward,
and 'The Singing Detective' to refer to his alterego in the story that
exist both on the page (in its published version) and in his head (in the
re-write he is working on).
An Interior Journey
Marlow has embarked in this crisis of his illness on a journey of self-
discovery and as the story opens he uses a well-known metaphor for
this journey into his own inner world.
We see Binney, a raincoated spy, going down some steps into a
sleazy night-club and hear a voice over: 'And so the man went down
the hole like Alice. But there were no bunny rabbits down there. It
wasn't that sort of hole. It was a rat hole' (p. 2). We are later advised
that one thing you don't do down a rat hole is 'to underestimate the
rats in residence', 'they gnaw at your soft underbelly and do a lot of
damage to your nerves'(p. 2). As I will discuss below, I take this to
refer to the gnawing pains of a persecuting guilt.
It is a journey to confront cruelty, persecution and a shattered
internal world dominated by powerful destructive forces (there are a
number of allusions to Nazi-like figures). At the centre of this world
is the image of the woman's body pulled out of the river, clearly rep-
resenting the dead body of his mother after her suicide. The body at
one point has the face of Sonia, the prostitute; at another the face o f
an unknown woman. Although these images are related, they refer
to different realities - they offer a visual representation of transfer-
ence.
A sequence of images is repeated as the narrative progresses sug-
gesting an important psychological link between them: Philip the boy
high up in his tree observing the couple in intercourse; the breakdown
of the family; Philip's revelation to his mother, followed by the gloomy
images of the Underground platform; scenes alluding to his mother's
suicide.
This lays bare for us the central catastrophe of Marlow's life, the
loss of his mother by suicide and his feeling of responsibility for it.
When the young boy's omnipotence is confirmed and with it omnipo-
tent and persecuting guilt (those rats gnawing at his 'soft underbelly')
over the destruction of his family, his faith in a good world is
destroyed, represented in the drama by scenes of a devastated land-
scape, with only a scarecrow to be seen, glimpsed from the window of
a moving train. The scarecrow image is both terrifying and uncanny.
At one point it appears with the face of Hitler, icon of destruction, ges-
turing and mouthing words in a manner that is both grotesque and
obscene. In a much later sequence, the scarecrow is identified with the
sadistic schoolteacher who cruelly punished young Mark Binney for
Philip's crime.
Marlow has defended himself from these internal horrors by estab-
lishing an omnipotent character structure, and the narrative centres on
his struggle to emerge from this 'character armour' which he cannot
achieve without enduring the pain and giving it form.
The feelings of guilt, against which Marlow is defending himself
take their origin from an even earlier period of his life, before they
crystallise around his mother's suicide. Amidst a scene of bickering
and terrible unhappiness at home young Philip thinks:
'My fault. Me. It's me. It's all my doing. My fault. Mine ...' (p. 70)
He hurriedly muners a prayer:
'Our father who art in heaven, Hallow'd be thy name ...' (p. 70)
And the text continues:
'The boy's gabbled voice is quickly faded over by the face of the dis-
tressed man he is to become, in the hospital ward.' (p. 70)
Marlow is frozen in three moments now psychically contemporaneous
- his observation of his mother's intercourse, the betrayal on the train
and her suicide.
Marlow's Psychic Retreat

Potter describes the central contradiction of Marlow's character. He
has built up a system of defences which does protect him from the
unbearable pain, yet his inability to confront his own inner world has
become a crippling disease. It constitutes a kind of 'psychic retreat'
(Steiner, 1994)' into a cold, cynical world, portrayed in the published
version of Marlow's novel, an exemplar of the 'pulp' detective genre.
'The Singing Detective' occupies an underworld of spies, prosti-
tutes, pimps and traitors who have no concern for the suffering
around them and no conscience for the destructive activities in which
thcy are directly implicated. Theirs is the law of the jungle; kill or be
killed. Binncy the spy trades secrets to whoever offers him most, includ-
ing doing d d s with Nazis. In the search for the murderer of the woman
it is clear that Marlow (the author) is aiming his sights at Binney, the
cheap traitor. Marlow, referring to the world in which he is trapped,
conveys its emptiness:
'One thing about this place - it strips away all the unimportant stuff
- like skin, like work, love, loyalty and belief.' (p. 13)
All intense feeling is stifled. As 'The Singing Detective' puts it 'I can
think the thinking, I can sing the singing. But you won't catch me
feeling the feeling. No Sir.' The retreat offers Marlow refuge from the
pain of the 'depressive position' (Klein, 1940) yet chrough his identifica-
tion with the cold heartless figures of his inner world,8 which mock
all human vulnerability, he perpetuates the sources of his own unbcar-
able uilt and shame. As a result of this identification his view of the
d
worl is ftndamentally distorted (for example, in the way he misperceives
Nicola, his wife, as trying to trick him into vulnerability and dependency
in order to humiliate and exploit him). He appears to revel in witry and
cynical banter. This is really quite thin and provides him with a means
of evading the lid1 impact of the despair and humiliation that are never
far away.
'Ali, see the way it coils and drifts (nasty cackle) just like every human
hope.'
'I used to want the good opinion of honourable men and the
ungrudging love of beautiful women.'
He laughs ... then realises he meant it. (pp. 12-13)
Or, getting excitedly caught up in his own cynicism, he turns to Ali,
the Pakistani cardiac patient in the next bed, who has been told that
he must not get out of bed or strain himself in any way:
'What's the point (in life)? What are we waiting for? Why endure
one moment more than you have to? Go on, jump up and down! And
then hold a pillow over my face! Come on!' (p. 14)
The text continues:
He stops abruptly, like one suddenly recognising the true extremity of

his feelings and the depths of his bitterness and despair. (p. 14)
Like the hero of his story, Marlow expects corruption everywhere . . .

and finds it everywhere. This mental paralysis both derives from, and is
a cause of, his inability to make a firm distinction berween inner and
outer reality. He s e a the world from only one, very narrow, perspective:
divided berwccn cruel ryrannical figures and the helpless and con-
temptible victims who are at their mercy. The hatred and mockery of
human helplessness that underlies this way of thinking presents us, the
audience, with a cruel irony. His physical condition is almost a para-
digm of infantile helplessness - he can neither wash nor manage his own
toilet and, despite himself, he is falling in love with the nurse who attends
him. Through her maternal function she becomes, in Marlow's mind, his
lost beloved mother. He says:
'I seem to have regressed into the helpless and pathetic condition of
total dependency, of the kind normally associated with infancy.' (p. 27)
Sexuality in the Retreat

Mariow's retreat is marked by its perversity, and nowhere is this
clearer than in the representation of sexuality. Young Philip projects
-
onto his representation of the sexual couple mother and her lover -
all his feelings of hate and disgust.
When we first see Philip up his tree, prior to his witnessing the love-
making, he is clearly curious about nature and this curiosity arises
primarily from loving feelings. He examines a ladybird, replacing it
tenderly on a branch. However, after catching sight of his mother and
her lover walking through the grass, there is a sudden transformation
of the atmosphere, as the motive force for curiosity about nature and
the world changes in an instant from love to hatred. Squashing the
ladybird beneath his finger, he says:
'I cant abide things that creep and crawl and -They got to be got rid
of an, urn? I cant abide dirt. It'd get everybloodywhere, doan it?' (p.
113)
Below, two human creatures, mother and her lover, 'creep and
crawl' through the undergrowth. As Philip observes the rhythmic
movements of the couple, the scene moves to the now grown up
Marlow lying in his hospital bed watching, 'just as the boy watched',
his neighbour receiving cardiac massage, the same rhythmic move-
ments.
Young Philip, then, projects onto the couple all his feelings of hate,
disgust and murderousness which become the basis of his belief in the
equation of sexuality, betrayal, corruption and death, as witnessed
both in his novel and in his mind.
Dr Gibbon, his psychotherapist, clearly undersrands the importance
of Marlow's representation of sexual intercourse and, in their first
meeting, he draws Marlow's attention to his description in his novel:
... mouth sucking wet and slack at mouth, tongue chafing against
tongue, limb thrusting on limb skin rubbing a t skin. Faces contort and
stretch into a helpless leer, organs spurt out smelly stains and sticky
betrayals. This is the sweaty farce out of which we are brought into
being. We are implicated without choice in the slippery catastrophe of
the copulations that spatter us into existence. (p. 58)
The image of slack mouths calls to mind the drooling cadaverous char-
acter in the next bed, who disgusts Marlow with his lecherous account
of his war experiences.
Madow is ever wary of being 'drawn in' to a more benign world. A
moment of warmth when he tells Nicola that he wants to sleep with her
again is suddenly interrupted and overwhelmed by a perverse scenario of
self-hatred.
He tells her he wants to watch himself in a mirror:
'So I can turn my head while I'm doing it and leer at myself. And so
that when it starts shooting up in me and spurting out I can mist to one
side coming off your hot and sticky loins and spit straight in my own
face.' (p. 197)
The Observer Position: The Oedipal Situation and

Detective Stories
Throughout the narrative there is a recurrent triangular structure: a
couple involved in an intimate act and an observer. Philip, up his tree,
observes the couple in intercourse; in fantasy, Marlow observes the
perverse intimacy of Nicola and BinneyIFinney; young Philip walking
through the woods with his father feels observed by a scarecrow in
the woods; Marlow, as discussed above, even thinks of himself
observing himself in a mirror, making love, or rather making hate,
with Nicola. These various triangulations suggest that triangle which
is at the heart of the narrative, and of psychoanalytic theory - the
oedipal triangle.
In ordinary development the child has to come to accept his exclu-
sion from the distinct relationship between the parents. All children
inevitably harbour fantasies (sometimes conscious, but more often
deeply unconscious) of spying upon and controlling the parental
intercourse. Awareness of exclusion, with all the attendant feeling of
separateness, frustration and jealousy, leads to frightening murderous
impulses directed towards one or both parents. In this situation the
child derives much support from seeing his parents well and healthy
(despite his murderous impulses) and able to continue their relation-
ship outside his control. However, when events (in this case the
mother's betrayal of father and her subsequent suicide which links
sexuality, betrayal and death) give external confirmation to these
deep wishes and fears, a psychic catastrophe results. External reality
now lends support to the child's belief in (and terror of) his phan-
tasies and wishes. The capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality,
inner from outer, distinctions upon which sanity depends, becomes
critically compromised. Philip's witnessing of his mother's inter-
course is a double betrayal. Lurking behind the betrayal of father, and
obscured by it, lies the more ordinary oedipal 'betrayal' - the child's
recognition that his mother chooses as the object of her passion
someone other than himself.
The scene where Philip views the intercourse ends with his saying
'One day I am going to be a detective'. This wish has found expres-
sion in his vicarious identification with the hero of his detective story.
The detective is a rich cultural symbol. On the one hand the detective
is always the oedipal child trying to make sense of the incomprehen-
sible world of the parents, their odd language, gestures and noises
from the parental bedroom. The child senses that this 'incomprehen-
sible' world contains certain vital clues central to his own life, yet
inevitably he will also view it as a world of corruption and betrayal.
The detective's looking and spying satisfies the wish to look at and
control the 'corrupt' sexual couple. On the other hand the detective
hero satisfies the longing for a strong father who can expose corrup-
tion and restore order to the family, put the world to rights. 'The
Singing Detective' satisfies both aspects. He is someone who will pen-
etrate and expose the corrupt world around him, his eyes are
everywhere. But he also represents justice, truth and morality. The
murderer of the woman will be found. His ability to sing captures the
admired characteristic of the actual father, now linked in fantasy to
the all-powerful detective.
The Singing Detective is a detective story on more than one level.
As well as the actual detective story within the narrative, the whole
drama itself is structured like a detective story as we, the audience,
are in the position of observers trying to put the clues together from
fragmentary images, which like pieces of a jigsaw, at first, seem
incomprehensible.
From within his retreat Marlow's view of the world is very
restricted. Any union between two people, symbolising, at depth,
the primal scene, can have only catastrophic consequences either
for one or both of the participants. Britton (1989) has pointed out
that the capacity to be able to represent, psychically, the union
between the parents, to 'observe' that union and be aware of its sig-
nificance, is central to mental health. It forms the basis not only for
observing others but also of acquiring the capacity for self observa-
tion, namely insight. H e describes a central psychic triangular
structure made up of the child's relationship with each parent sep-
arately, the triangle being completed by the child's
acknowledgement of the primal parental couple in relation to each
other and separate from him. The closure of this psychological tri-
angle unites the child's psychic world and provides a 'third position'
which forms the basis not only of the observation of others 'but for
seeing ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining
another point of view, whilst retaining our own; for reflecting on
ourselves whilst being ourselves' (p. 87).
A marked feature of Marlow's condition is the lack of the we of
psychic mobiliry that this 'third ~osition'brings. He is fixed in his view
of the world - his representations of coupla are really misrepresentl-
tions, which are repetitive.
Potter shows that in Marlow's case lies, sex and mental illness have
an important relation to one another. Following some improvement in
his condition, when he has shown some awareness of how deluded he
has become, Nicola comes to see him. He tells her he is 'mad'.
Marlow: (with precision) 'I mean going off my head. Round the
bend. Bonkers. Losing my marbles. Cuckoo ...'
Nicola: (Uneasy) 'Do you want to talk about it?'
Marlow: 'Sex!'
Nicola: 'What?'
Marlow: 'That's what it's all about. Sex. Sex and lies.' (p. 197)
The Process of Recovery
Marlow finds strength to face his inner world, helped by the 'clever
psychotherapist', Dr. Gibbon, who is in many ways also a detective
though his aim is understanding, not indictment. Marlow maintains at
first that this is not a therapeutic endeavour, but a game of cat and
mouse, winner and loser. Like many patients he claims, initially, no
genuine interest in his therapy, complaining that he is there only under
protest - he calls it 'kidnapping'. This is quite thin, however, and even
in the first episode he shows real insight into his desperate need to
understand himself.
When he is offered tranquillisers and antidepressants he says:
'I'm not taking those things. I've got work to do. If I don't think, I'll
never get out of here.' (p. 16)
His refusal of antidepressants and tranquillisers is also his refusal of

their psychic equivalents, namely the use of his artistic talents to create
and live in anti-depressive fantasies, so evading the pain of his inner
world rather than confronting it. This is not something that he can
manage alone. He says, in a state of rising panic:
'I can not stand it, really truly can not stand this anymore. I can't get
on top of it - or - see clear or think straight or tell what is from isn't
and if I don't tell someone, if I don't admit it - I'll never get out of it,
never beat it off, never, never never.' (p. 28)
So what is it that Marlow has to admit, to 'think'? He tells himself via

the story that it is a murderer that he is looking for, but he shows some
uncertainty as to the murderer's identity. He says, brooding:
'It is always the least likely character who turns out to bc the killer
... well it can't be me. That's for sure. It can't be me. I didn't do it.'
(P. 143)
Potter shows here how Marlow, through his having to negate it,
reveals that at some level he identifies himself with the murderer in his
detective story.' But Dr Gibbon, the psychotherapist has a very shrewd
and different idea. He says:
'I know all the clues are supposed to point in the direction of the
...
murderer But what if they also reveal the victim a little more clearly?'
(P. 52)
He is suggesting a different reading. The pursuit of the murderer of
the dead woman in the detective story represents Marlow's pursuit of
his mother's murderer who, deep in his unconscious, he believes to be
himself. However, Dr Gibbon sees something quite different. He sug-
gests that Marlow is the victim of a catastrophe. Internal figures,
however, do not allow him to see this and torture him with guilt. He
cannot bear the humiliation that, in his view, would ensue from a full
recognition of his need for help.
Melanie Klein (1940) described how all of us, in phantasy, destroy
our loved objects, partly out of a ruthless wish to possess and con-
trol them and partly out of our hatred of our very need and depen-
dence on them. She would have agreed with Marlow, 'we all have
blood on our teeth'. However, the hatred of and attack on the loved
object are denied. Instead the world is split into idealised, always-
present objects, which are loved, and absent frustrating objects, which
are hated. Frustration is felt to come not from awareness of need, but
from the deliberate actions of the frustrating objects viewed as cruel
and triumphant. Attacked internal objects, dangerous persecutors, are
projected ounvards. Thus is created an amoral world where only survival
matters and all guilt is denied.
Klein showed how a critical phase of development ensues, which she
termed the 'depressive position'. This describes a state of mind
where there is a realisation that the hated attacked objects are the same
objects as those we love. If there is sufficient capaciry to bear the
pain and guilt arising from the rdisation of damage done to the loved
objects (internal and external), there is a movement into a different
world which is integrated and has a moral dimension. The wish to
restore the loved object and to repair the damage forms an imporrant
basis, according to Klein, for artistic creativity. This point is central to
my reading of the narrative.
Marlow's incapacity to bear the pain of the depressive position has
led to his taking refuge in the 'retreat' made up of his stories and fan-
tasies and this has been his life. In this extreme crisis a new treatment
-
will have to be used concretely a new drug, symbolically a new way of
looking at things.
The process of recovery is shown in the narrative on different
levels. Marlow's increasing capacity to differentiate fantasy from
reality, and so to acquire a greater psychic mobility, are symbolised
within the drama by his increasing physical mobility. In fact his ability
to move his neck is heralded as a landmark. Freed from the one posi-
tion in which it has been rigidly stuck his head can now move,
allowing him to view the world from different angles. Again changes
in his body symbolise psychic progress. Psychologically his world alters
as he becomes capable of seeing people in his world in a more benign
way, being less suspicious of them.
But central to this process of recovery is his rewriting of his novel
The Singing Detective, written many years earlier. From his hospital
bed he is reworking his piece of 'pulp fiction', transforming it into an
artistic achievement. He says:
'For the first time I shall have to really ihink about the value of each
and every little word. That's dangerous, that is.' (p. 255, italics in the
original)
Segal (1952) has described how works of art derive their aesthetic
depth from the arrist's capacity to face the pain of the guilt derived
from awareness of the damage done to loved internal objects. The
work of art is itself an act of reparation. We, the audience, are gripped
by such works, as we identify both with the artist's confronta-
tion with the pain of his shattered world and also with his abiliry,
through intense psychic work, to overcome it and depict it in the work
of art.
blarlow's new work is also the story of its own makinglo - it both
bears witness to his confrontation with the pain of his inner world,
the unbearable persecuting guilt, and represents his attempt
to transcend it.
In the final episode entitled 'Who Done Ic' the various themes that
have been laid out throughout the drama are brought together. Alrudy
the world has taken on a different colouring and contains more benign
figures, but Marlow's grip upon ruliry remains loose.
The episode starts with Marlowi memoria of witnessing his mother's
intercourse, the gloom of the Underground station with his mother
calling after him, allusions to his mother's suicide and his feeling
of responsibiliry for it. For the first time, Marlow recalls the image of
his mother's cofin. Soldiers on a train accuse him with the words 'You
did it'. The link is thus made becween these events and the construc-
tion of his defensive organisation. We hear young Philip's memory of the
words spoken just after his mother's suicide, words which are then
repeated by the adult Marlow, in voice-over, as we see his stricken face
on the hospital ward.
'Doosn't trust anybody again! Doosn't give thy love. Hide in theeself.
Or else they'll die. They'll die. And they'll hurt you! Hide! Hide!' (p.
233)
This sequence is interrupted by the words of Marlow saying 'There

was something about that journey', referring to the journey back
from London to his newly widowed father. When the sequence is
completed we discover that Marlow is talking to Dr Gibbon and is
struggling to remember these events. H e describes how the internal
persecuting figure of the scarecrow became an hallucinatory presence
the previous night. H e now realises that the scarecrow bears the face
of the cruel teacher who beat young Mark Binney after Philip had
pinned the blame on him for the 'filthy wicked horrible thing' (shit-
ting on the teacher's desk). In what is probably the most poignant
scene of the whole drama Marlow expresses the full pain of his (real)
guilt. He relates that young Mark was 'a backward child' who
everyone in the class exploited and describes with terrible pain how
he later discovered that young Mark Binney ended up in 'the loony
bin'.
Fundamental changes are taking place in Marlow's inner world as
he emerges fiom his retreat. The capacity to experience both the pain of
the loss of his mother and also his feelings of real guilt bring a new inte-
gration of experience and thus an increased ability to differentiate
fantasy from reality. In other words, he enters into a state of mind
characteristic of the inception of the depressive position which also
brings feelings of joy and achievement. This is symbolically expressed
by Dr Gibbon, who immediately Marlow has faced this almost unbear-
able pain, tells him to walk. As Marlow rises from his wheelchair and
stands for the firsr time, Dr Gibbon bursts into song so linking him, for
Marlow, with a loved father, now brought alive in his inner world."
Marlow finds support in this renewed link with the loved aspects of
his father. H e then remembers himself as a young boy meeting his
father on his return home from London, immediately afrer the
mother's suicide. His father asks him if the mother's body was beauti-
Ful and then turns to his son and says, 'Philip I love you'. Young Philip
is, however, unable to accept his father's love. He is suddenly terror-
struck:
Philip: 'Shhh!'
Mr Marlow: 'What?'
Philip: 'Somebody might hear us!'
But Philip points at a scarecrow and Mr Marlow is clearly at a loss
to understand.
Mr Marlow: 'Sonly an old scarecrow Philip. Him cont hurt tha!'
(P.222)
The text continues:
... but the boy shakes his head, dumbly unable to put into words sorne-
thing dark and mysterious. (p. 223)
The scarecrow now occupies the 'observer position', observing the
tender intimacy berween a couple (father and son), the same posiuon
once occupied by Philip as he witnessed a different scene of intimacy
with all the terrifylng consequences. It stands for a terrifylng image of
human destructiveness. It has no feeling and annihilates at will. This
memory again presages the onset of unbearable pain and guilt for
Marlow. As the camera, Marlow's eye from his hospital bed, approaches
the image of scarecrow in the wintry gloom, we hear Nicola, half-crazed,
chanting softly, 'Ding Dong Bell, Pussy's in the well . . . Who pushed her
in? Who pushed her in?'
Marlow's recovery process is not linear bur is marked by advances
which are often followed by retreats into terrible persecuted states, as
the internal figures take their revenge upon him for his bid for Freedom
from their grip, echoing clinical descriptions of the negative thera-
peutic reaction (e-g. Riviere, 1936, Rosenfeld, 1971). This process is
shown vividly in the scene that immediately follows Marlow's trans-
formation in his session with Dr Gibbon, described above. When he
returns to the ward we see how he is altered. His feeling of inner
strength is accompanied by a belief in goodness both in himself and in
the world around him. He greets his fellow patients and with a clear
sense of personal triumph manages to get himself onto the bed without
help.
However, he then quite suddenly retreats into a perverse world and
imagines himself now a voyeur watching Nicola and her imagined
lover, BinneyIFinney, celebrating their triumph in selling onto an
American studio the screenplay they 'stole' from Marlow. He takes
great pleasure in witnessing Nicola's downfall as the part in the film
that she believed was hers - was to be her 'big chance' - is coldly
given to someone more famous and younger. Her hrious words are
at first directed to BinneyIFinney but then towards Mariow himself,
again revealing his identification with this cruel and corrupt figure.
She says:
'You're rotten with your own bile! You think you're smart but really you
are very very sad, because you use your illness as a weapon aglnst other
people and as an excuse for not being properly human ... ' (p. 232)
Again Marlow is confronted with a terrible truth which although it

represents real insight, can only be experienced as accusation.
However he rediscovers the 'good object' that can support him in his
pain. We return to the memory of Philip's meeting with his father and
their walk in the woods. Philip runs off and hides from his father, who
now thinks he's alone. In a moment of agony and great inner strength
the father screams out his pain into the heavens. But Philip runs to him
and stands by his side and then 'Almost shyly, Philip reaches and then
curls his hand into his father's hand, as they walk'.
Again Marlow moves forward. We return to the ward and find him
in imagination standing alone in the ward.
Marlow: 'Look at me! Look at me! I did it! I walked! I can walk!
Look. Look at me.'
Nicola (who has appeared on the ward): 'For heaven's sake - sup-
pose you fall over.' Philip. 'Hold on to me. You are not ready for this!'
Marlow: 'Hold on to you?'
She looks at him wryly, well understanding the resonances of the
question.
Nicola: 'There aren't too many others any more, Philip.'
They seem to study each other. His face is still wet.
Marlow: 'Be bop a loo bop.'
Nicola: 'Yes, but isn't it time you climbed down out of your tree.':'
(pp. 242-3)
The text continues,
Marlow and Nicola stand as before examining each other, but in the
middle of a now totally empty ward. A place in the mind. [my emphasis]
Marlow: 'Well - one thing's for sure - I'm going to (gasp) I'm going
to walk right out of here. I'm not staying in this place!'
Nicola: 'But are you going to stay in this condition?'
Marlow: (Passionately)'No!'
Nicola: 'I don't just mean your skin and your joints.'
Marlow: (Subdued) 'No.'
Nicola: (Gently) 'You nasty old sod.' (p. 243)
We again return co the reality of the ward and find Marlow standing on
his own. He falls and nurse Mills rushes to his aid. M d o w says in a
delighted tone 'Nicola isn't in the river.' The policeman who 'told' him
that Nicola had commined suicide was, really, only an hallucination. H e
is now differentiating Nicola from his mother and delights in the fact of
her being alive.
Exaaly at this point the two mysterious men appear, wearing
trench coats and trilby hats." They have walked right off the page and
into the ward.
First Mysterious Man: 'Where are you going?'

Marlow: 'Home.'
Second Mysterious Man: 'But that's off the page ennit?'
The First Mysterious Man uses the flat of his hand on Marlow's chest,
pushing him back.
First Mysterious Man: 'You're going nowhere, Sunshine. Not until

we senle this.'
Marlow looks round for help and can see no one. He moistens his
lips.
Marlow: 'S-settle what-?'
First Mysterious Man: (with menace) 'Who we are? What we
are."'
Second Mysterious Man: 'That's right. That's absolutely right.'
Suddenly they grab at Marlow's arms. He cries out.
First Mysterious Man: 'We'll break you apart!'
Second Mysterious Man: 'Limb from Limb.' (pp. 245-6)
These figures, personifications of the 'internal Mafia' described by

Rosenfeld (op. cit.), make their appearance at a critical point. Marlow
has made real progress, having faced the terrible pain of his mother's
suicide and his own rral guilt represented as arising from his betrayal of
the helpless young Mark Binncy. Rosenfeld points out that the internal
organisation demands allegiance and becomes terrifying just when the
patient moves towards an object which offers red help. For Rosenfeld's
psychotic patients, these figures were hallucinations. For Marlow they
are imaginary characters from his story, representing forces in his mind
that have distorted and crippled his thinking, now become 'real' in this
hallucinatory way.
Marlow is an author as well as a patient. His rewriting of his novel
is his atrempt to visualise this internal situation, in order to deal with
it, to overcome it. Yet, he doesn't quite achieve this. In this last episode,
there is a breakdown in che boundary separating Marlow's fictitious
creations horn reality (the hallucination of a policeman informing him
of Nicola's 'murder' of BinneyIFinney and her subsequent 'suicide';
the anonymous men who have walked off the page and into the ward,
to t o m r e him).
In the final denouement 'The Singing Detective', Marlow's creation,
crashes onto che ward, gun blazing, answering Marlow's scream for
help. A violent shoot-out ensues. Everyone around Marlow, who we
might see as representing parts of himself, is killed. Marlow watches,
horrified. The First Mysterious Man is shot. The Second Mysterious
Man begs for mercy. Marlow, watching in horror, exclaims 'No! Wait!
That's murder.' But 'The Singing Detccrive' replies, 'I'd d l it pruning'
(p. 247).
He aims his gun but, following the gunshot, we see it is Marlow who
is shot by what the text refers to as 'his other persona', who announces:
'I suppose you could say we'd been partners, him and me. Like
Laurel and Hardy or Fortnum and Mason. But, hell, this was one sick
fellow, from way back when. And I reckon I'm man enough to tie my
own shoe laces now.' (p. 248)
We return to reality, normality, the calm of the ward, the patients and
nurses. Marlow emerges from behind a screen dressed and ready to
leave. Nicola is waiting and she has his trilby hat" ready, which he puts
on jauntily as they leave arm in arm. Reginald, his fellow patient, has
reached the end of the novel and simultaneously reads aloud the last
words:
'And-her soft-red lips-clam-clamp-clamped-themselves-onhis. The

end-'
He lowers the book.
'Lucky devil.' (p. 248)
This intimate scene, between Marlow and Nicola is, again, observed,
but no longer by a destructive envious figure; instead it is admired.
Marlow has faced heroically the devastation of his own internal
world, but the ending of the narrative is ambiguous. The figures of
Marlow's story have now been endowed with the omnipotence of
their author, now victim of his own creations. This, I think, might be
viewed as representing the author's (I am now referring to Dennis
Potter) recognition that the very act of writing a novel, controlling
and manipulating characters in fantasy, can Fuel a writer's own omnipo-
tence. Creative work involves recognising this omnipotence, strugg-
ling with it, instead of being overtaken by it. Marlow doesn't quite
achieve his, but Dennis Potter certainly does. Although it appears to
be a 'happy ending', the shoot out conveys the violent manic quality.
After all, parts of the self, internal objects cannot, in reality, be just
killed off.
As the story ends we hear Vera Lynn singing 'We'll Meet Again'
which, maybe, is a recognition that the whole process, like the strug-
gles of the depressive position, is never dealt with once and for all. It
will have to be gone through again, though next time maybe, on a
much more secure foundation.
In a television interview Potter discussed the character Philip Marlow.

He said:
Itis the (illness) ... that is the crisis ... it is the illness which has stripped
him ... that starting point of extreme crisis and no belief, nothing except
pain and a cry of hate, out of which were assembled the fantasies and
the fantasies became facts and the facts were memories and the memo-
ries became fantasies and the fantasies became realities, and all of them
..
became him and all of them allowed him to walk . (Potter, 1994, pp.
71-2)
Of the structure of The Singing Detective, he says:
... by being able to use, say, the musical convention and the detective-
story convention and the 'autobiographical' in quotes, convention, and
making them co-exist at the same time so that past and present weren't
in strict sequence because they aren't - they are in one sense, obviously
in the calendar sense, but they're not in your head in that sequence and
neither are they in terms of the way you discover things about yourself,
where an event of 20 years ago can become more, it can follow yes-
terday instead of precede it ... out of this morass, if you like, of
evidence, the clues and the searchings and strivings, which is the
metaphor for the way we live, we can start to put up the structure called
self. In that structure we can walk out of that structure and say at least
now we know better than before who we are. (op. cit., p. 71)
Notes
1. The author would like to express his gratitude to Elizabeth Spillius,
Michael and Margaret Rustin and David Tuckett who all made valuable com-
ments on earlier drafts of this paper.
2. In a radio discussion some years ago the painter John Bellany discussed
the works of Lucien Freud and made the distinction between ruthlessness and
fearlessness in art. He believed that a painter had to be fearless in what he
shows of the human form but distinguished this from ruthlessness which, he
thought, showed lack of compassion for his subject. In The Singing Detective
Potter is totally fearless but never ruthless.
3. All quotations are from The Singing Detective, Faber, London (1986).
4. Marlow's capacity to recapture an image of a strong 'internal' father is
an important leitmotif of the story.
5. The wood and its trees are important, symbolically, throughout the
work. Here they stand for his 'good internal objects' from which he has clearly
derived a vital internal support. Later however we see lurking in the woods
objects which are the source of foreboding and terror.
6. Binney refers to this character as imagined by Marlow and 'Finney' to
the name the character uses, in a subtle playing with fantasy and reality, when
referring to himself.
7. John Stciner used this expression to describe a rigid system of defences
that provides a son of shelter which, whilst supporting the patient's continued
existence, freezes him developmentally.
8, This situation was first fully described by Herbert Rosenfeld (Rosenfeld,
1971) who discussed patients who were internally dominated by a cruel inner
organisation that appeared to offer them support but actually made them
hostage. Such patients dreamed of, or made frequent references to, Mafia-like
figures. These figures often made their appearance just when the patient was
allowing the analyst to have a contact with something warmer and more
human in themselves. At this point the patient would become terrified of some
dreaded attack, feeling he had betrayed some secret. A very vivid illustration
of this process occurs at the end of the The Singing Detective, which will be
described later in this chapter.
9. Freud, in his paper Negation (Freud, 1925) showed that repressed
unconscious material often makes its first appearance in consciousness
through manifesting itself as its negation. As a patient put it to me in his first
association to a dream in which a man in authority was killed: 'Well, one thing
is for sure, it wasn't my father.'
10. Scgal makes a similar point in 'Delusion and Artistic Creativity' (Segal,
1974) referring to W~lliamGolding's The Spire.
11. The song is, inevitably, very fitting to the situation 'Into each heart
some rain must fall, but too much has fallen in mine' - recalling Freud's apho-
rism that the aim of psychoanalysis is to transform hysterical misery into
ordinary unhappiness.
12. Climbing down out of a tree is, of course, an overdetermined image. It
refers both to Nicola's recognition that Marlow needs to come down to earth,
to be part of the world, rather than (mis) using his gift as a writer to detach
himself and view the world of human affairs from the lofty position that has
become his retreat. But for us, the viewer, privy to Marlow's internal world,
it also refers to his need to move away from that moment, in which, psychi-
cally, he is frozen, up his tree both excited and horrified as he observes his
mother's lovemaking.
13. These mysterious figures occupy a very strange position in the narra-
tive. They are rather bumbling but also terrifying. Although at first they
appear in the story that Marlow is rewriting, they also turn up in the fantasy
of his betrayal by Nicola and Binney and, as described here, make their entry
into the 'reality' of the ward at this critical point of the narrative. They
never really seem to know what their job is - they just follow orders and
they do not even have names. Potter is making, I suspect, a knowing refer-
ence to the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet - especially
as recreated by Tom Stoppard in his s lay Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead. They are characters in someone else's play and driven by forces out-
side their control.
14. This, incidentally, would appear to echo Segal's view (see Segal, 1964)
that the naming of parts of the self and of the internal objects, that is giving
them a real identity and owning them, is an important aspect of the depressive
position. Giving things names creates the possibility that the individual can
possess them, rather than be possessed by them.
15. The hat represents the remnant of his identification with 'The Singing
Detective'.
Turning A Blind Eye
The Cover U p For Oedipus
John Steiner
My dear, I am sorry to say this, but no-one has understood before now
that 'Oedipus' is not about the revelation of truth but about the cover
up of truth. Everybody knows who Oedipus is from the start and every-
body is covering up. Just like Watergate. Just like all through history -
the lie is what societies are based upon. And it has nothing to do with
the Oedipus Complex because Oedipus never had a complex. (Pilikian,
1974)
In recent years it has become evident that our contact with reality is
not an all or none affair and psychoanalysts have become particularly
interested in situations where reality is not simply evaded but is in
addition distorted and misrepresented (Money-Kyrle, 1968; Bion,
1970; Joseph, 1983). In this paper I want to consider one such situa-
tion, namely that in which we seem to have access to reality but chose
to ignore it because it proves convenient t o do so. I refer to this mech-
anism as turning a blind eye1 because I think this conveys the right
degree of ambiguity as t o how conscious or unconscious the knowl-
edge is. At one extreme we are dealing with simple fraud where all the
facts are not only accessible but have led t o a conclusion which is then
knowingly evaded. More often, however, we are vaguely aware that
we chose not to look at the facts without being conscious of what it is
we are evading. These evasions may lead to a sense of dishonesty and
to various manoeuvres which deny or conceal what has happened by
creating a cover up.
We are familiar with the idea of gradations in our sense of aware-
ness because we recognise that different mechanisms of defence affect
our contact with reality in different ways. In repression for example, a
symbolic connection with reality is retained even if the actual material
which led to the conflict is unconscious. With projective identification,
contact may be completely lost or may be vicariously retained through
the reality sense of another person. In some instances knowledge of
reality may be fragmented through pathological splitting and in others
4. Turning A Blind Eye
the very s m m a required to perceive reality are attacked and impaired
(Bion, 1957b). Turning a blind eye seems to be more complex and tricky
and probably involves the operation of several mechanisms which I will
only be able briefly to touch on later in this paper. I will mostly be
concerned to show how it operates in the drama of Oedipus and how we
can I a n to recognise it in our clinical work.
Acknowledgement of the reality behind the Oedipus complex
involves the recognition, first of the parents as a sexual couple, and
then of the consequent jealous feelings which in phantasy lead to mur-
derous and incestuous impulses. The traditional view is that we are
unconscious of these impulses just as Oedipus was unconscious of his
actions. If, however, insight is available but turned away from and mis-
represented we have a very different situation. It is then not only the
oedipal configuration of impulses and anxieties, but also the cover up
through which these are evaded, which has to be examined and under-
stood.
The quotation at the beginning of this paper was taken from a
newspaper interview with a rather unusual theatre director. It made an
impact on me because it seemed to represent a new view of the play
which exactly paralleled a view of the Oedipus complex in which
turning a blind eye plays a significant role. I later discovered the study
of Oedipus Tyrannus by Philip Vellacott (1971),which presents a sim-
ilar but more subtle and scholarly view and which forms the basis of
the present paper. Before discussing the play in detail I will briefly
describe some clinical material: I hope to be able to show that a study
of the mechanisms at work in the play helps us to recognise similar
mental mechanisms as they appear in the consulting room and deepens
our understanding of the Oedipus complex.
Clinical Material
My patient was a 40-year-old doctor who presented himself as an
innocent victim dominated by forces which he could neither undcr-
stand nor control and which led to repeated experiences of failure and
humiliation (Steiner, 1982). As the analysis progressed it became clear
that he understood a great deal about his situation and knew what he
was getting himself into. This insight, however, made no difference to
his propensity to repeat actions which led to familiar painful outcomes
and I was forced to conclude that he was ignoring the insight he had.
He was talented and intelligent but led an isolated and impover-
ished life. Much of the time he presented himself as successful, always
about to have a break-through in his work or with a girlfriend, and he
treated me with superiority and condescension. It was clear, however,
that he knew that this view of himself was false. He could sometimes
admit his sense of loneliness and could describe how he was excluded
by his own desperate shyness from the things he valued in life. This
latter view seemed to correspond to a psychic reality which he mostly
found intolerable and which he consequently decided not to look at.
Some way into the analysis an exciting but platonic relationship
ended when his girlfriend told him that she was having a serious affair
with another man. He continued to be interested in her and would
imagine what she was doing and wonder if she still thought of him. He
then reported a dream in which he broke into her flat, knowing where
the key was kept, and got into her bed while she wus out. When she
returned with her boyfrtend, he called out to warn her of his presence
and the boyfiend came into the bedroom. The dream faded out with
the feeling that he knew that he would soon be asked to leave.
In the dream both views of himself were represented. On the one
hand he was aware of the existence of a couple from which he was
excluded and where his presence was not wanted, like a small boy con-
scious of his parents' relationship with each other. On the other hand,
when I interpreted this, he became evasive and defensive, not so much
denying the existence of such feelings as denying their significance, so
that they became something he could ignore. He had many such
dreams and also many phantasies with a similar structure, and from
these I knew that he would tell himself that when his girlfriend found
him in her bed she would realise how desirable he was and what a mis-
take she had made, so that she would send her lover away and
welcome him back. He knew this was false, but he used the remote
possibility that it could happen as a comforting argument to cover up
his awareness of the reality of his loneliness and this seemed to help
him cope with his feeling of exclusion.
Such phantasies were associated with excitement both in the
moments of triumph which he argued might after all materialise
despite the odds, and in the experience of humiliation when as
inevitably happened, the triumph collapsed. In the transference this
would be experienced as an excitement when he felt he had drawn me
into a collusion with his view of himself as successful and desirable but
also if 1 helped him to accept the reality of the actual world. He would
then claim that I was trying to humiliate him by expelling him from.
the dream world where he could at least enjoy comforting phantasies.
These phantasies made it difficult for him to learn from experience.
For him the real world was a quite awful place which he was ready to
ignore under the sway of powerful and persuasive arguments. One
could not, however, say that he was completely ignorant of the reality
he was evading, and I do not think mechanisms such as splitting or
repression were at work. I think he turned a blind eye and then tried
to maintain a cover up as he became superior and morally righteous.
It was therefore of great interest to me to discover that Sophocles
seemed to recognise something similar at work in his hero Oedipus.
The Story of the Play

You will remember that the tragedy of Oedipus begins when Laius,
King of Thebes, is told by the Oracle of Apollo that his fate is to die
at the hand of his son. In order to avoid this prophecy, Laius and his
wife Jocasta pierce the feet of the new-born baby and give him to a
shepherd to be left to die in the neighbouring mountains of Cithaeron.
The shepherd takes pity on the child, and saves his life so that Oedipus
finds himself brought up in the royal court of Corinth as the son of the
childless King Polybus and his Queen Merope. As a young man, he
attends a banquet where someone drinks too much and suggests he is
not the true son of his parents. Oedipus, not satisfied by their reassur-
ance, goes to seek the truth from the Oracle at Delphi.
The Oracle is evasive over the question of his origins, but, instead,
repeats the prophecy made earlier to Laius, and warns Oedipus that he
is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. In order to avoid this
fate and to preserve Polybus and Merope, he decides never to return
to Corinth, and, setting off in the opposite direction, he comes to a
place where three roads meet, and there confronts a carriage preceded
by a herald who pushes him out of the way. In anger he hits back, and
when the occupant of the carriage strikes him, he retaliates by killing
the man and his four servants; one man only escapes to take the news
back to Thebes. Oedipus continues on his way and arriving at Thebes
he finds the city tyrannised by the Sphinx who strangles all those who
fail to guess her riddle.
The riddle goes as follows: 'There is on earth a thing two footed
and four footed and three footed which has one voice ... but when it
goes on most feet then its speed is feeblest'. Oedipus accepts the chal-
lenge and solves the riddle, perhaps helped by the fact that the word
for two footed is di-pous while his own name Oedipus means swollen
feet, and refers to the injury inflicted by his parents. The answer he
gave was that a man crawls on four feet as an infant, walks on two as
an adult, and hobbles with the help of a stick in old age. The defeated
Sphinx commits suicide and the grateful city offers Oedipus the
recently-vacated crown of Thebes and the recently-widowed Jocasta as
Queen.
Oedipus rules Thebes for some seventeen years until the city is once
more afflicted with disaster in the form of a plague, and once more the
oracle is consulted. This is the point at which Sophocles's Oedipus
begins. It opens with the people pleading with Oedipus to help them
in their suffering from the plague. Jocasta's brother, Creon, interrupts
them with the long-awaited message from the Oracle which states that
the city is polluted by the continuing presence of the murderer of
Laius. Oedipus swears to find and banish the wrong-doer, and the
ancient soothsayer 'Iiresias is sent for to identify the guilty man. This
he at first refuses to do, but when Oedipus becomes childishly abusive,
liresias gets angry and tells him in plain terms first that he, Oedipus,
is the killer of Laius and next, by clear implication, that h:: is not the
son of Polybus and Merope as he claims, but of Jocasta and Laius. It is
he, therefore, who is 'the unholy polluter of the land ... living in
shameful intercourse with his nearest of kin'.
To these accusations Oedipus replies with more abuse and begins to
accuse Creon of plotting to overthrow him. Jocasta enters and
Oedipus heeds her appeal and becomes more reasonable. When she
discovers that he is accused by liresias of killing Laius, she reassures
him that prophets are not to be trusted, as was clear in the prophecy
given to Laius, which she explains was evidently false because first,
Laius's son was exposed and left to die, and second, Laius was killed
by bandits at a place where three roads met. Oedipus is disturbed and
begins to question Jocasta about the details of the King's death. How
was he attended? What did he look like? Who brought the news back
to Thebes? Then, explaining his forebodings, he gives an account of
his origins in Corinth, his doubts about his parentage, his message
from the Oracle, and finally a description of the slaying of the man at
the place where three roads meet. If the man he killed was Laius, he is
doomed. The witness, at the time, however, stated that Laius was
killed by a band of robbers, and although the evidence pointing to
Oedipus seems inescapable, there is just a chance that the witness will
stick to his story of robbers and everyone agrees to suspend judgement
until they have interrogated him. The issue of Oedipus's parents is also
left unspoken, despite Jocasta's account of the prophecy given to
Laius, Oedipus's account of that given to him, and the unspoken evi-
dence known to Oedipus and surely to Jocasta of the scars on his feet.
These are only brought into the open with the arrival of the shep-
herd from Corinth who announces the death of Polybus. Oedipus and
Jocasta rejoice at this news as if it should be a source of reassurance,
proving again the falseness of prophecies. Oedipus then raises the
absurdly remote danger that he may still inadvertently marry the aged
queen of Corinth and Jocasta repeatedly tries to reassure him. The
Corinthian shepherd, apparently amazed that they know so little of
the truth, explains his parentage to Oedipus, having himself been the
man who handed over the baby to Polybus. Finally, the Theban shep-
herd who witnessed the killing of Laius appears and proves to be the
same servant who saved Oedipus as a baby.
Jocasta now realises the whole truth and, becoming increasingly dis-
traught, pleads with Oedipus not to pursue the matter further.
Oedipus, however, continues with the denial and even introduces a
new argument. If he is not the son of Polybus, he is possibly not royal
at all, probably the son of a slave girl, and that is why Jocasta is making
such a fuss. Jocasta rushes out and under the threat of torture the shep-
herd tells the whole story. The mood changes and Oedipus in a truly
heroic acknowledgement proclaims, 'All true, all plain, fulfilled to the
last word. Oh light of day, now let me look at you for the last time. I
am exposed, a blasphemy is being born. Guilty in her I married, cursed
in him I killed'. This is the climax of the play, and is followed by a
description from a messenger of events which took place out of sight
within the palace. Oedipus finds Jocasta has hanged herself and taking
her broaches, he blinds himself with them. The play ends with Creon
in control and Oedipus expecting to be banished.
VeUacott's Interpretation
Phillip Vellacott suggests that in this play, which must rank among the
half-dozen masterpieces of world literature, the playwright offers his
audience two simultaneous interpretations. The first or traditional
interpretation is that Oedipus is an innocent man caught in the trap of
relentless fate. Oedipus himself offers this view when he says, 'Then
would it not be a just estimate of my case to say that all this was the
work of some cruel unseen power?' You will recall that this is the view
asserted by my patient. It is also the view espoused by Freud when he
discovered the Oedipus Complex, and described it in terms of moral
conflict. Unconscious instinctual forces, like the fate prescribed by the
gods, drive us in ways which seem incomprehensible. In this view, the
play is about the gradual uncovering of the truth as Oedipus ruthlessly
searches to expose it, and Freud himself has likened this to the course
of an analysis where the unconscious is gradually revealed to the
patient (Freud, 1917).
Although this classical interpretation of the play is undoubtedly the
one most easily accessible to the audience, Sophocles at the same time,
intends another interpretation to be available which is perhaps only
obvious to the careful reader, although influencing all of us, and
accounting for the dramatic power of the play. In this interpretation,
we see Oedipus as having been aware of his true relation to Laius and
Jocasta ever since the time of his marriage. There is evidence in the
text to suggest that certainly Tiresias, but also Creon, and even Jocasta,
knew, or at least suspected that it was Oedipus who killed Laius, and
perhaps also that he was Jocasta's son and about to marry his mother.
I believe one can argue further that each of the participants in the
drama, for their own reasons, turns a blind eye to this knowledge, and
that a cover up was staged which held for seventeen years until the
plague erupted to reveal the corruption on which the society of Thebes
was based.
On the traditional reading, the play, in fact, hardly qualifies as a
tragedy, since it is little more than an account of a sensational disaster
falling upon an innocent man. If, however, Oedipus was aware, then
the tragic qualities of this masterpiece become understandable. I
believe one can suggest that the fascination of the play derives from
the exposure of the cover up for Oedipus rather than from the expo-
sure of the crime of Oedipus.
Sophocles may have expected us to recognise that Oedipus acted
with knowledge, but this view would not have been accepted by the
majority of those who saw his play and indeed seems not to have been
accepted by most of the scholars who read Vellacott's book. To me,
however, it is most convincing, but as a theme which is to coexist with
the traditional view, not to replace it. We are meant to accept the idea
that both can be simultaneously true, that he knew and at the same
time did not know. It is this which I mean to convey when I suggest
that he turned a blind eye to the facts.
In the same way a modern view of the Oedipus complex would not
replace the classical Freudian view but complement it. Put very
crudely, the complex can be thought to result from the moral conflicts
which arise when murderous and incestuous impulses are evoked in a
child's relationship with his parents and siblings. I am emphasising
here that these conflicts are universal and do not in themselves account
for the pathological forms of resolution of the Oedipus complex. We
have, in addition, to look at those situations which arise when the psy-
chic reality of these impulses is denied and a cover up of a perverse
kind is staged.
I will explore this theme further by using Vellacott's observations of
the play to examine the role which the principal characters may have
played in such a cover up. I shall then try to link them back to the
mental mechanisms at work in the individual patient when he is strug-
gling with the conflicts surrounding the Oedipus complex. I will
emphasise the way chance is used to justify turning a blind eye to the
evidence, and how collusion between individuals enhances the power
of the resulting evasions and misrepresentations.
The observer who stops to consider the events of the play is likely
to ask himself first of all, 'Why, if these things can be brought to light
now, were they not discovered seventeen years ago?' Oedipus himself
asks why there was no enquiry and is told that the preoccupation with
the Sphinx led the elders to turn their eyes away from such mysteries
as the murder of their king. 'What about Tiresias? Why wasn't he sum-
moned and asked to identify the murderer then? Why did he stay
silent for seventeen years if he knew all the time?' Creon simply
answers, 'I don't know. In matters I do not understand I prefer to say
nothing'. There was a witness, but he says they were attacked by a
band of robbers, and as soon as he saw Oedipus offered the crown and
the hand of Jocasta, he asked the queen to send him to the country as
far from Thebes as possible. It is clear that we are meant to realise that
he recognises Oedipus and fears that the truth may be got from him.
The Attitude of Oedipus

Vellacott points out that from the play, it is easy to reconstruct the
state of mind of Oedipus as he arrived at Thebcs. As he walked the
streets he must have heard everyone talking about the death of Laius.
He had just killed a man together with his servants, and it is hard to
imagine that he did not ask where King Laius had been killed, how he
was attended, whether there was a herald, whether the king rode in a
carriage, what age he was, and what he looked like. If he received
answers to these questions, could there have been any doubt in his
mind? When he hears these details seventeen years later he can only
say, 'Alas, now everything is clear'.
The text indicates even more self-knowledge to have been almost
inevitable. The memory of the words of Apollo's priestess: 'You shall
marry your own mother and breed children from her, and your own
father who gave you life, you shall kill', might be expected to be still
very alive. This is the fate he was trying to avoid, so that we are sur-
prised if he killed a man that his thoughts did not connect the murder
with the prophecy, and if the did not ask, 'Could this man be my
father?' Of course he argues that he believed Polybus to be his father,
but he very recently had reason to question this, and had had his
doubts reinforced by the Oracle. After his triumph over the Sphinx,
Oedipus married the widow of a man, similar to the one he killed, who
was old enough to be his father, and he did this within a very short
time of being told by the most impressive of all authorities that he was
destined to kill his father and marry his mother. And the man who
acted in this way was no fool, but gifted with adequate reasoning
power.
The tragedy of the play is made poignant, not only by the fact that
he was led first by rage, and second by ambition, to these two crimes,
but that he was persuaded to turn a blind eye to what he was doing.
How could he have lived with such knowledge? Sophocles and
Vellacott show us the plausible f a ~ a d which
e he erected to cover up the
truth, and which he persuaded himself and others to accept.
This version said that on hearing the prophecy his one concern was
to get as far from Corinth as possible to avoid his parents; the knowl-
mchoanalysis and Culturc
edge that Polybus was probably not his father was suppressed. This
version said that when he reached Thebes, it did not occur to him to
connect the man he had killed on the road with the King of Thebes, in
spite of the herald; or to connect the widowed Jacasta with the wid-
owed mother Delphi had assigned him as wife, in spite of the doubt
cast on his parentage in Corinth. The version said that he had never
thought of comparing his age with the time that had passed since
Jocasta had married her first husband, and insisted that the one thing
that he must fear was going back to Corinth, killing Polybus and mar-
rying Merope.
Vellacott shows how easy it must have been to get away with this
story because we too are able to read and see the play, and accept it
uncritically. We collude in the cover-up as did the other characters in
the drama. What allows us to do so is the element of chance. All the
evidence points to Oedipus, but the case is not yet proved; it is just
possible that we are mistaken. Perhaps Oedipus himself argued in the
same way. When a homeless young man is offered a kingdom and a
wife, he might well be persuaded not to ask too many questions.
Jocasta's Attitude
Let us briefly consider what Jocasta's state of mind might have been
when Oedipus arrived at Thebes. She had, a few days earlier, been told
of the death of her husband, and all we know of their relationship is
that, because of the prophecy, he avoided her sexually, and when she
did have a child, he cruelly ordered its death. In the play, she repeat-
edly expresses her anger and contempt of prophecy, and is obsessed
with a hatred of oracles. She is more emotional and less logical than
Oedipus, and some of her attempts at reassurance are quite foolish.
For example, she seems to say, 'Even if you are proved to have killed
Laius and hence will be accursed and banished from Thebes, take com-
fort in the fact that the 35-year-old prophecy that he would be killed
by his son is false9.If Oedipus was born in Corinth, this can be of little
interest to him, but the queen is clearly preoccupied with the fateful
prediction, because again when they hear that Polybus is dead she tells
him, 'At least your father's death is a comfort'.
It is interesting to look at the way she propounds the philosophy of
chance. She asserts that: 'Our mortal life is ruled by chance. There is
no such thing as foreknowledge'. Her reassurances all seem to reveal
the dream world she inhabits, and she is even led to say, 'To live at
random, as one can, is the best way. As for your mother's bed, have no
fear on that score; many a man has dreamt he found himself in bed
with his mother. But the man to whom these things count for nothing,
bears his life most easily'. This philosophy is an essential ingredient of
the attitude of turning a blind eye. All the evidence points to one con-
clusion, but it does not prove it - there is just a chance that it is
otherwise, so it is wisest to ignore it. 'The man to whom these things
count for nothing, bears his life most easily.'
When Oedipus was offered her hand as part of his reward for
freeing the city of the Sphinx, he was a popular figure, similar in
appearance but nearly twenty years younger than her husband, and the
marriage offered her the chance to continue to be Queen of Thebes,
and to bear children. I think we are intended to suppose that these
advantages led her to turn a blind eye to the truth and to collude in
the cover up.
Creon's Attitude
In a similar way, we can examine the dilemma Creon was placed in
when he held responsibility for the city after the death of Laius. He
claims to have no love of responsibility and since he is in any way con-
sulted on important issues, has no wish to be king. Thebes needs a
leader, and if he can get a young man on the throne who will be
advised by the more experienced Jocasta and himself, he can retain his
influence. Throughout the play he is reticent and curt. 'I prefer to say
nothing' is his reaction, as we have seen. Moreover, he shows no sur-
prise when told of Xresias's accusations. Because of their terrible
import, he should surely be horrified that tragedy was about to strike
his family, but all he says is, 'If Tiresias says that, you know best'.
Moreover, he knew both Laius and Oedipus and must have noticed the
resemblance which Jocasta speaks of. The quarrel between Oedipus
and Creon is made to appear foolish and trivial, both of them speaking
in anger. However, if a cover-up had taken place, it makes sense if
Creon tries to deny his complicity. Oedipus certainly cannot be saved,
but Creon could and, in fact, does come out of it unscathed. Oedipus
is angry at this, but Creon seems to be saying, 'It was your affair. You
married my sister and took the crown when it was offered. I was con-
tent to have the power without kingly trappings. All I did was to keep
quiet, and this is what I will continue to do'.
T h e Attitude of the Elders

Finally, we need to consider the role of the chorus of elders who are
on stage throughout the unfolding of the drama. Although usually
spoken as dialogue between the characters, many of the arguments
seem to be directed to the chorus, and in the traditional reading of the
play they appear to act as a kind of jury of respected citizens. They are,
however, very clearly concerned with their own interests, and with
great subtlety, Sophocles shows us how difficult it is for the ordinary
citizens to speak out as they begin to suspect that all is not well with
Oedipus.
At first, they elaborate on their distress at the suffering caused by
the plague, and display an unquestioning religious fervour, which con-
trasts with the angry disrespect shown by Oedipus to Tiresias, and the
scepticism of oracles voiced by Jocasta. They are loyal, but do not
want the past investigated too closely. When Oedipus proclaims that
he will find the guilty man, they assert, 'I did not kill Laius, nor can 1
point a finger to his killer. As for an inquiry, it is Phoebus (i.e. the
Oracle) who can tell us'. They thus prefer divine knowledge to that
arrived at by investigating reality.
Although they are present throughout the interaction between
Tiresias and Oedipus, they at first avoid all reference to the accusa-
tions made. Indeed, they speak of an unknown robber with
bloodstained hands who has committed the most unspeakable of
unspeakable crimes, and refer to him as trying to keep at bay the
prophecy spoken at the earth's centre. It is evident that they have
something terrible in mind but they prefer not to be specific, and speak
as if the wrongdoer is at large roaming the countryside.
Eventually, they admit, 'Certainly what the learned augurer told us
is disturbing, deeply disturbing', but they prefer to suspend judgement.
'We cannot accept it, we cannot refute it; we do not know what to say.'
Their real reliance is neither on Tiresias nor on rational possibility, but
on public opinion, the nationwide reputation of Oedipus. They decide
to ignore everything - the challenge is too much for mortals and must
be left to the Gods. They thus assert their piety but they also give space
for a cautious concern with their own interests. Although piety would
lead them to side with Tiresias, he, like the Sphinx, represents the
unseen world, and Oedipus, they remind themselves, was clever
enough to overcome that challenge and may even win again. They thus
affirm their loyalty and say, 'Oedipus won his throne by his services to
Thebes. I will never think evil of him without proof'. We might add,
not when there is a chance that he might survive the crisis.
Their next major intervention occurs after they have heard Jocasta
and Oedipus give all the details which they have intelligence enough
to interpret. They are aware that something terrible is happening and
are in mortal fear. They have been the close associates of Oedipus in
government, and they know that when the gods destroy a sinner those
nearest to him are engulfed in the cataclysm. They, therefore, begin
with a hymn in praise of the Olympian laws and a prayer for inno-
cence and purity for themselves. They plead with Zeus to punish the
wrongdoer, and thus to uphold religion and reverse the decline of
respect for the oracles and for the gods. Finally, when the tragedy is
revealed in its full horror, they can only wish that they had never
known Oedipus and seem overwhelmed by the catastrophe.
The Depressive Position and the Oedipus Complex

What then is the psychic reality of the Oedipus complex? Freud
showed us that oedipal impulses are part of everyone's reality so that
in phantasy we have all killed our fathers and slept with our mothers.
If we d o not evade the reality of these impulses, we will confront their
consequences, and experience the fear and the guilt which necessarily
follow from them. If persecutory anxieties predominate, facing reality
involves facing the threat of retaliation sometimes expressed as a cas-
tration threat. If depressive anxieties are active, facing reality involves
facing the catastrophic loss of the parental couple on which the patient
depends. If this reality can be faced it can lead to an experience of loss
which enables mourning to take place, and which ushers in the expe-
riences which Klein described under the heading of the depressive
position (Klein, 1935, 1940). These involve internalisation, symbol
formation and the drive to make reparation which enables the parental
couple to be more realistically installed as symbolic figures in the
internal world. In this way, growth and learning from experience is
made possible.
If the oedipal crime is not acknowledged to have taken place, but is
misrepresented, distorted or covered up, then there is nothing to
mourn, and the reparative processes associated with the depressive
position cannot operate. There is also nothing to fear because no crime
is acknowledged except, of course, the fear that the cover-up will be
exposed. The result is that the external couple is not attacked as it
would be if psychic reality was acknowledged but instead the attack is
mounted against an internal representation of a good intercourse,
namely one in which truth is respected. The external status quo is
apparently preserved but there is an inner corruption which is repre-
sented by the plague in the play and specifically confirmed by the
oracle. The personality is then felt to be based on an insecure founda-
tion and the need to cover up leads to further evasions and distortions.
It is this kind of evasion of reality which Vellacott's interpretation of
the play allows us to examine.
The Importance of Chance in the Mechanism of Turning

a Blind Eye
Further work is needed to understand what mechanisms are involved
in turning a blind eye. It is, however, occasionally possible to observe
a sequence which may account for some instances. We sometimes
notice a patient who seems to be in full contact with reality and makes
an observation or reaches a conclusion which demonstrates this. Then
it not infrequently happens that we listen while he begins to mount an
argument which gradually convinces him that his original observation
is false or at least not necessarily true. These arguments often involve
considerable ingenuity and are sometimes greatly admired by the
patient who may become increasingly excited by them as they proceed.
They may function like propaganda and eventually convince the
patient that his original observation need no longer be taken seriously.
Chance seems to play an important role in this process as if it forms
the vital flaw through which the truth can be attacked. Everything may
point to the initial truthful observation but it has not been proved
beyond doubt; there is still a chance that it may be wrong. The deci-
sion to evade reality therefore involves a gamble and this may be
connected with the addictive hold which some of these mechanisms
have on the personality; it is not uncommon to meet patients who
appear to continue to turn a blind eye when it no longer seems to lead
to any advantage.
This philosophy of chance is most clearly propounded by Jocasta,
but espoused by Laius and Oedipus as well. Laius ignored the warning
and allowed the fateful intercourse with Jocasta - there was a chance
that it did not matter. There was a chance that the prophecy could be
avoided and this justified killing his son and turning a blind eye on the
consequences to his wife and to himself. Even the exposure of Oedipus
has to do with chance, since to kill one's own son is certainly a pollu-
tion, but to expose him leaves the possibility, unlikely as it is, that he
will survive. Guilt is thus evaded. For Oedipus too, there was a chance
that Polybus was his true father, and to preserve this belief he had to
turn a blind eye to the evidence of the scars on his feet, to the accusa-
tion at the banquet in Corinth, to the lack of reassurance from the
Oracle, and later when the accusations actually began to be made, to
the words of liresias and the gradual accumulation of the evidence
throughout the play. Knowing that he was destined to kill his father, he
could still take a chance and conclude that the man he killed may not
be his father and the widow he married may not be his father's widow.
At some point, perhaps when the plague made him aware of the
internal corruption, he begins to realise that the cover-up cannot last,
and he shows an impressive determination to face reality. His resolve
was, however, difficult to sustain, and throughout the play we see the
struggle between the wish to continue the cover-up and the wish to
make a clean breast of it and face the full truth. Finally when he can
evade the truth no longer he takes full responsibility for his actions
and in a truly heroic moment he faces his guilt. Sophocles, however,
goes on to show us how impossible it is to sustain this degree of self-
knowledge. Even the self-blinding seems to be a partial retreat from
truth. The elders and, no doubt, the audience expect suicide and
Oedipus justifies himself by explaining, 'When I come to the land of
death - if I could see, I d o not know with what eyes I should face my
father or my unhappy mother, since against them both I am guilty of
sins too black for strangling to atone'.
This point is even more striking when we meet Oedipus in
Sophocles's final play, Oedipus at Colonus. Here Oedipus goes back
on his admission of guilt completely. In what seems to be an absurdly
illogical series of denials he asserts that he feels no guilt because, first
he did not know that the man he killed was his father, second that the
man struck the first blow so that he killed in self defence, and finally
that since his father had tried to kill him as a baby he was perfectly
right to avenge himself. I cannot unfortunately discuss this play further
here but it presents a fascinating study of the retreat from truth into
omnipotence (Vellacott, 1978).
Collusion
There is, however, a second factor in the creation of such illusory
worlds where we believe something against the evidence of our senses
because it suits us to do so, and that is the factor of collusion. A cover-
up requires conspirators who agree either covertly or tacitly to
collaborate. If Creon had called for a proper enquiry, the witness
would have been interrogated and the truth would have come out. If
Jocasta had not ignored the oracle which she so hated and despised,
she might not have turned a blind eye to the scars on the feet of her
young husband, to the way he resembled Laius or to the fact that his
age was precisely that which her son would be, had he lived. If the
elders too had been more vigilant and not so concerned to back the
winning party, they might have demanded an enquiry, or at least sent
to Corinth for references about the origins and character of the new
king. The cover-up could only take place because it suited several par-
ties at the same time, and thus enabled the participants to be of mutual
service to each other.
It is clear that Vellacott's Oedipus is a reluctant hero who does not
face reality until circumstances make it difficult to evade it any longer.
I believe this is how many of us come to analysis, delaying it until our
symptoms can no longer be ignored. Moreover the struggle to evade
reality continues throughout the analysis and the retreat into omnipo-
tence is a characteristic feature of negative therapeutic reactions.
Nevertheless the fact that we d o sometimes face the truth however
imperfectly, is a considerable achievement, and this is also the case
with Oedipus.
Discussion
(a) Social and political implications.
The social and political implications of turning a blind eye are too
complex and too important to be discussed here. I will however,
simply mention that I believe we turn a blind eye to a number of dan-
gers which threaten our society and our future. Unemployment at
home, and poverty and starvation in the third world are examples, but
it seems to be above all the build-up of nuclear weapons which poses
such a threat that neither we nor our leaders can properly comprehend
it. Yet all the information pointing to the seriousness of the situation is
available and we seem to have to avoid drawing the unhappy conch-
sions which a realistic appraisal would demand. We can only carry on
our lives as normal by turning a blind eye.
(b) Clinical implications.

I introduced the fragment of clinical material at the beginning of
this paper to illustrate how a patient who is evidently not psychotic,
and fully capable to observing reality, can nevertheless misrepresent it
to himself and to others and consequently live in an unreal world of
phantasy and illusion. Although we all do this to a worrying extent,
the problem becomes tragically disabling in those patients who seem
unable or unwilling to emerge from this state. Elsewhere I have char-
acterised it as a borderline attitude to reality in which truth is neither
fully evaded as it may be in psychosis, nor for the most part accepted
as it may be in neurosis, but is rather twisted and misrepresented
(Steiner, 1979, 1984).
These patients feel they need to use such misrepresentations to
maintain their equilibrium and they often come to treatment when for
one reason or another their defences are unable to sustain the status
quo. In treatment they seem to seek only to regain their balance and
are, therefore, against understanding which they feel would only
undermine their defences further (Joseph, 1983). It is not simply that
they use this or that defence mechanism which could be worked on
and understood to their advantage. They use a whole organisation of
defences and fear that if any part of it is examined, the whole edifice
will collapse.
In the case of my patient, I think we can see how the unreal world
he lived in and the mechanism he used to maintain it are illuminated
by the discussion of Sophocles's play. In his phantasy world he imag-
ines how he can defeat his rival and share his girlfriend's bed, and
couples are of such importance to him because he has projected on to
them internal objects which represent his parents. These deeper
oedipal conflicts have not been resolved by allowing the establishment
of an internal parental couple upon whom he could depend. Instead
he has in phantasy repeatedly triumphed over his father and felt him-
self to be his mother's favourite.
But he has never faced the consequences of his actions and he
never, or at least only very rarely, acknowledges the reality which the
phantasy world denies. This reality involves an awareness of his
childish incompetence and his consequent dependence on his par-
ents. It involves facing the fact that it was their intercourse which
brought him into existence and their parental care which allowed
him to survive and develop. It is this reality to which he turns a blind
eye, and he is consequently sentenced t o relive his oedipal strivings
in a perverted form. Thus he is seduced into situations where grati-
fication is derived either from objects which collude with his
phantasy and gratify him in his illusion or, if as more often happens,
reality thwarts his ambitions, from objects who provide him with
masochistic pleasure.
The two views of himself which he seemed to hold, appeared to
coexist rather in the way Freud suggested when he wrote; 'We may
probably take it as being generally true that what occurs in all these
cases is a psychical split. Two psychical attitudes have been formed
instead of a single one - one, the normal one, which takes account of
reality, and another which under the influence of the instincts detaches
the ego from reality. The two exist alongside of each other' (Freud,
1940, p. 202). It is important to note that this kind of split is rather
different from the splitting described by Klein (O'Shaughnessy, 1975).
It was first elaborated by Freud in his discussion of fetishism (Freud,
1927) and is I think characteristic of the type of situation which I con-
nect with turning a blind eye. I think it is intimately connected with
various forms of dishonesty and perversion.
My patient seemed to get drawn into a cover-up of the truth which
involved a conspiracy in which that side of himself which was capable
of facing reality and which wanted to live in the real world was afraid
to speak out. He seemed to deal with it by using his own weakness and
need, to persuade it that a cover-up was necessary. In the transference,
I was often drawn into various manoeuvres to prevent the cover-up
from being exposed and was often in danger of finding reasons of my
own for turning a blind eye to uncomfortable facts. I believe we have
first to struggle to deal with some of our own inclinations to collude,
like many of the figures in Sophocles's play, so that we may then be
able to help our patients to begin to face their internal, as well as their
external reality.
Summary
Phillip Vellacott's study of Sophocles and Oedipus is used to suggest
that both the play and the Oedipus complex need to be understood at
two levels simultaneously. In the classical view Oedipus is a victim of
fate and bravely pursues the truth. Freud likened this to the course of
an analysis where the unconscious is gradually revealed to the patient.
At the same time Sophocles seems to intend us to understand that the
chief characters in the play must have been aware of the identity of
Oedipus and realised that he had committed parricide and incest.
There is some ambiguity about the degree of awareness of this knowl-
edge and in the paper I put forward the view that each of the
participants, for their own reasons turned a blind eye to it so that a
cover-up was staged.
In the same way, a modern view of the Oedipus complex would not
replace the classical view but complement it. Oedipal conflicts are uni-
versal and do not in themselves account for pathology. The view is put
forward that a pathological resolution of the Oedipus complex arises
when the psychic reality of these impulses is denied and a cover-up of
a perverse kind results.
It is suggested that turning a blind eye is an important mechanism
which leads to a misrepresentation and distortion of psychic reality.
Note
1. This phrase seems to date from the occasion during the Baltic campaign
of 1801, when Lord Nelson refused to obey Sir Hyde Parker's signal of recall
in the middle of battle. He put his telescope to his blind eye and declared that
he could not see the order to retire (Hannay, 1911, p. 357). The phrase,
turning a &f car, seems to be considerably older (O.E.D.,1927).
Mind and Society
Psychoanalysis
The Last Modernism?
Michael Rustin
Introduction
I argue in this paper that psychoanalysis in Britain, particularly in the
Klein-Bion tradition, has remained firmly 'modernist' in its approach.
In this respect it has remained consistent with the perspective taken up
by Freud, though of course in many other ways the psychoanalytic tra-
dition has shown itself flexible and capable of much creative
development. Segal's work has been exemplary in both these respects,
demonstrating a commitment to understanding through the paradigm
of psychoanalytic thinking whose scope - which encompasses clinical,
aesthetic, and political spheres - has been characteristically 'mod-
ernist'.
The term modernism gains its meaning from two different
antitheses. The first of these is the contrast between the modern and
the traditional. Freud was self-evidently a modernist in this first sense,
bringing the perspectives of what he saw as science to bear on a hith-
erto undiscovered territory - the mind - and calling into question all
sorts of received assumptions about the proper sources of authority
and belief, not least those of religion. The second, and more recent
antithesis, is between the modern and the post-modern. This framing
has sought to place 'modernism' as the product of a specific historical
moment, and has called into question its claims to be writing a new
script for humanity and t o be providing a new source of legitimation
for its beliefs. In particular, the claims of reason, of science, of uni-
versal moral truths, and of a linear idea of historical progress, are put
into question within this frame of thinking. Spatial difference tends to
replace temporal sequence as an organising category, and plurality and
variety are preferred to hierarchies of rationality and moral virtue. The
ideals of emancipation and enlightenment are reappraised, within
these terms, as potentially just another form of domination, and the
liberatory claims of the stratum of intellectuals who upheld them are
unmasked as aspirations t o power.'
When one recognises Marxism, and some of its political enact-
ments, as one exemplary kind of 'modernism', one can understand
some of the contemporary reasons for the rejection of the modernist
project. But the concurrent rejection of avant-garde art and architec-
ture, of 'western science', of patriarchal power, and of the authority of
professions of all kinds, have put into doubt many other aspects of the
claims of a progressive secular intelligentsia to be leading the way to
the future. I shall argue that psychoanalysis in Britain has retained a
recognisable 'modernist' form in relation to such post-modern frames
of reference, as well as in its continuing distance from 'traditionalist'
world-views.
What is Meant By Modernism?

Psychoanalysis came late in the historical succession of projects of
rational enlightenment, Scientists were engaged from the sixteenth
century onwards in the use of the resources of reason and observation
to investigate nature. Philosophers, following these transformations of
understanding, contemporaneously began to legitimate an under-
standing of nature based substantively on reason and sensory
experience alone.' Philosophical investigation of human nature and
motivation, the investigation of the laws of history, and the scientific
study of society first in the framework of political economy, then of
sociology, followed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Parallel with these extensions of scientific enquiry into the human and
social spheres, was the development of scientific biology - the investi-
gation of organisms, of the body, and of evolution. The extraordinary
power of science, in its understanding of the material, biological and
social spheres, was widely linked to a philosophy of progress. The
advances of reason and science were deemed to make possible the
advancement of humanity.
Psychoanalysis sought to extend the domain of reason to the sphere
of the emotions, and of the residues of irrationality which were not
readily comprehensible within rationalistic categories. In his investiga-
tions, Freud drew attention to spheres of motivation whose origin lay
in nature and biology, but which had been disregarded within frame-
works driven by the concerns of natural science and by the prescriptive
purposes of ethics. Nor did he agree to relegate the provenance of the
life and death instincts simply to the primitive past of mankind, but
insisted that these were foundational aspects of human nature itself.
This insistence on 'foundations', on irreducible and universal facts of
human nature, or as Money-Kyrle put it 'facts of life', is one of the
defining attributes of the Kleinian psychoanalytic tradition.
By the time psychoanalysis announced its new investigations into
5. Psychoanalysis
the frontiers of irrationality, the alarming consequences of the irra-
tional for the project of an enlightened and transparent social order
were already becoming apparent, through the tensions of mass democ-
racy, class struggle, and technological warfare. Freud's extension of a
psychoanalytic method to the phenomena of the mind and the emo-
tions, came at a relatively late stage in the development of a rationalist
cast of thought. Psychoanalysis thus began its attempt to open up this
new sphere of rational understanding at the point when confidence in
inevitable social progress was already beginning to waver. Freud was
as critical, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of mass social move-
ments organised around utopian ideas of social progress, as he was of
traditional religion. Nietzsche's exposure of the will to power under-
lying apparently altruistic ethical goals has its affinities with Freud's
recognition of the irrational impulses and drives -the life and death
instincts - inherent in all human motivation.
The psychoanalytic movement has continued to be shaped by this
original spirit of ambivalence about the hopes of social improvement.
It has been committed to them, as part of its project, yet distinctively
equipped and inclined to expose their tendencies to illusion and self-
deception. Although there have been many British psychoanalysts with
a mildly left-of-centre outlook, what is most distinctive about the psy-
choanalytic world-view is its insistence on the recognition of
fundamental human flaws, and on their continuing capacity to disrupt
political and social life. The intervention of British psychoanalysts in
the debate about nuclear weapons, in which Segal (1997a) took a
prominent part, must have seemed surprising to many, since psycho-
analysts whatever their sympathies had usually been most notable for
their uneasiness about engaging in political debate as psychoanalysts.
But the terms of this intervention, and of Segal's (1997b) subsequent
analysis of the Gulf War, were characteristic. She sought to draw atten-
tion, in true psychoanalytic style, to unconscious phantasies in the
political process which were being widely denied. These deep struc-
tures of mutually-supporting paranoid defences in the Cold War were
the unconscious counterpart of the institutional symbiosis which
Edward Thompson had defined in his description of exterminism as a
self-reproducing social system.
It is this continuing sense of the intractability of the resistances to
human reason that defiries psychoanalysis as a 'modern' movement.
Modernism was a movement of emancipation because of the idea that
reason had to engage with a universe always resistant to its under-
standing, and to its control. Nature, the body, even the mind, were
defined, in the high period of this tradition, as to some extent 'the
other' or the object of human reason, not its omnipotent creation. The
relationship of mind to these entities was a continuing struggle, albeit
one that had been seen for three hundred years as a history of human
conquest.
Two Sociological Concepts of the Modem

There are many variations of terminology and theoretical assumption
within this field of debate. My argument therefore needs to be situated
within a carefully defined framework. I am going to identify two soci-
ological versions of 'modernity', and situate the British psychoanalytic
tradition in relation to each of them. According to one of these posi-
tions, modernism was a movement which sought to understand, and
develop new languages and cultural forms to represent the intractable
obstacles which remained to human freedom and the powers of
reason. According to the other position, 'modernity' signifies the
impending victory of reason. In this view, nature, and other obstacles
to human choice, no longer exist, or if they do, this will not be for
long. I argue that this latter position is in its main assumptions post-
modernist. The contrast I wish to draw is between positions which
have become essentially idealist, even omnipotent, about the possibil-
ities of human choice and freedom, which I characterise as
'post-modernist', and those which retain the idea that human freedom
is unavoidably constrained by forces which remain in part necessarily
beyond its understanding and control. This is the position which I
think of as 'modernist'. The crucial difference is over whether 'moder-
nity' should be understood as an unending struggle, or as a condition
which has already arrived.
Firstly, the theory of modernism in its classic form. Fredric
Jameson's seminal essay 'The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism',' gives
an account of high modernism which enables us to situate the psycho-
analytic movement in its wider historical context. Jameson argues that
central to the high period of 'modernism' was the idea of 'depth'. This
idea was elaborated in various forms and idioms. Among these were
the idea of authentic human creative powers, held to be alienated from
men and women by the capitalist labour process; a contrast between
essence and appearance, and of the binary oppositions between science
and ideology and true and false consciousness, which derive from this;
an existentialist model of good and bad faith, authenticity and inau-
thenticity; the semiotic opposition between the signifier and the
signified - signifiers, in this view, owed their meaning to a linguistic
system which structured experience of the world; and also Freud's
model of latent and manifest content, the latent being defined in rela-
tion to his concepts of the unconscious and the repressed.'
Jameson drew attention to other features of the era of high mod-
ernism. It was dominated, or at least with hindsight it appears t o have
5. Psychoanalysis
been dominated, by great individual pioneers or cultural heroes and
heroines - Le Corbusier, Picasso, Einstein, James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, Sartre, and Freud. These individuals were prophets of new
ways of seeing and understanding, often standing in heroic opposition
to a previous dominant canon or orthodoxy.
The social meaning of the combative, heroic stance of early and
high modernism (some of its leading figures remained attached to their
oppositional mode even after they had achieved a considerable intel-
lectual dominance) was that these movements symbolically enacted
conflicts with a traditional social order, the ancien rtfgime described in
its late nineteenth century manifestations in Arno Mayer's The
Persistence of the Old Regime.' Mayer pointed out that in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century in which the 'modern movement'
was born, most European societies remained politically authoritarian,
religious orthodoxy continued to be powerful, patriarchy was scarcely
challenged, and subordinate nationalities were widely suppressed,
from Bohemia to Ireland. Especially this was the case for the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, Russia, and Germany, not coincidentally,
according to Mayer, the sites of the most revolutionary 'modernist'
positions. Britain, the most liberal of the major nations, for this reason
also had the weakest 'modern movement', one which was substantially
dependent on intellectuals and artists who had entered its culture from
outside (from America, Ireland, the Continent, or from Britain's own
unknown countries of the working class or of womankind). In other
words, there were real social battles being fought.
Intellectually, the moderns identified themselves as enemies of con-
ventional forms of expression and representation, which they saw as
obstacles to human freedom and authenticity. Ibsen's endeavours to
create a modern dramatic form in which struggles for self-realisation of
ordinary (middle class) citizens could be represented, the modem poets'
search for a register of complex emotion, modern architects' insistence
on a scientific idiom in which form would follow function and not con-
ventional decorative norms, the socialists' exposure of the oppressiveness
of capitalism and empire, Nietzsche's critique, from an aristocratic per-
spective, of conventional ethics and religion as legitimations of the weak,
Freud's exploration of the innate forces of irrationality, are examples.
The positive positions taken up by these different examples of the work
of the 'modern movement' differ substantially, in both their political and
cultural commitments. Negatively, however, they have in common the
insistence on new forms of expression, and an antipathy to conventional
forms of authority. Perry Anderson (1992) developing Mayer's thesis
about the oppressive weight of the ancien regime of Europe, argued that
in fact the only cause which the 'modern movement' had in common was
its hostility to tradition.
At all events, the advance of human understanding required the
probing of unknown depths, whose secrets were protected, implicitly
or explicitly, by forces of conservatism which could not afford to see
the world rendered transparent to understanding, and thereby opened
to choice. The modernists, in their different discourses, sought to
demystify, reveal, and clarify. Marxists analysed the deep structure of
exploitation, beneath the apparent freedom of exchange of the labour
contract. Existentialists, at the point when the authoritarian structures
of French society had been first deeply compromised then shaken
apart by the Occupation, drew out the moral contrast between the bad
faith of war-time collaborationist conformity, and the authenticity of
risk and political commitment. Freud analysed the 'deep' or uncon-
scious origins of the 'surface' phenomena of neurotic symptoms,
dreams, and slips of the tongue, and more subversively the pervasive-
ness of repressed sexual desires.
These struggles now seem far away, modernist rebels having
become in many fields leaders of new orthodoxies. Conventions that
were once 'modern' or revolutionary became in their turn restrictive.
The austerity and elitism of some modernist genres is obvious. The cel-
ebratory moments of 'overthrow' at different moments of modern
architecture, Communism, and according to some critics, psycho-
analysis, is understandable in this light.6 Several of the leading forms
of modernist expression had even become appropriated by the domi-
nant institutions of a later period. For example, the 'international
style' of modern architecture, by the multinational corporations, and
of course Communism itself in its oppressive role as a State ideology
or quasi-religion.
Jameson suggested that the sweeping away of this modernist uni-
verse of discourse, which had its own austerity and incipient
dogmatism, is in many respects liberating. This is because this new def-
inition of culture as a relativistic play of discourses and ungrounded
representations, driven by pleasure rather than truth, corresponds to
some aspects of a new social and economic reality. This is a late capi-
talism in which (especially after the collapse of Communism) there
apparently is no 'other' to the dominant order. The world can thus
plausibly be represented as one of differences, not divisions, in the
plane of geographical diversity rather than of historical succession and
progress. Jameson does not believe that 'the end of history' has in fact
arrived. But he argues, like David Harvey (1990) that we can read and
recognise the forms of a dominant capitalist order through its signs
and artefacts (for example architecture) and the aesthetic experiences
they offer. This is one way of knowing this powerful social reality.
There is another theory of 'modernity' which displaces the earlier
modernist oppositions between reason and the various spheres of
5. Psychoanalysis
nature, society, tradition, and the mind which resist understanding.
According to this perspective, which defines the present as the state of
late modernity, or more plainly, post-modernity, the relationship
between 'Nature and Culture,' or the understanding and its objects, is
now changing. Manuel Castells in his major trilogy 'The Information
Age', defines three great historical stages. The first is the domination
of Nature over Culture, which extended for millennia. The second,
'established at the origins of the Modern Age, and associated with the
Industrial Revolution and with the triumph of Reason, saw the domi-
nation of Nature by Culture'. The third stage, which we are now
entering, is one in which 'Culture refers to Culture, having superseded
Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived ("preserved") as
a cultural form'. This will 'allow us to live in a predominantly social
world. It is the beginning of a new existence and indeed the beginning
of a new age, the information age, marked by the autonomy of culture
-
vu-d-vis the material bases of our existence'. Castells Roes on to sav
that 'this is not necessarily an exhilarating moment. Because, alone at
last in our human world, we shall have to look at ourselves in the
mirror of historical reality. And we may not like the vision'. (Castells
1996, I? 477-8) What we may be then looking at, as psychoanalysis
would tell us, are those elements of Nature that lie within us.
Anthony Giddens, in Britain, and Ulrich Beck7 in Germany have
developed a related view. The core idea of 'modernity' in Giddens'
and Beck's work is used to describe a society in which virtually all
forms of human experience have been shaped by prior human inter-
ventions. They now belong to the domain of reflexivity. 'Modernity's
reflexivity', Giddens writes, 'refers to the susceptibility of most aspects
of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revi-
sion in the light of new information or knowledge. Such information
is not incidental to modern institutions, but constitutive of them ... '
(Giddens, 1991, p. 20). The sphere of conscious human agency, they
argue, has reshaped not only society and the psyche, but even nature
itself, with all the risks of ecological disaster that this heightened
power of human intervention has now produced.
In Ulrich Beck's first major work, Risk Society, this development is
presented as the outcome of a still incomplete democratic revolution.
The norms of rational reflection are now pervasive, and more citizens
than ever before have the means of education and communication
with which to reflect on the determining conditions of their lives, and
thus to shape them. This process remains incomplete, Beck states,
since powerful institutions remain resistant to democracy, equality,
and reflexivity. The family still confines women (in Germany at least)
to a kind of 'feudal' dependency, technological agency is in the hands
of unaccountable corporations, and the state still retains many author-
itarian powers from its absolutist past. Beck does express some con-
cerns about what social ties will bind citizens to one another, in this
imagined world of autonomous reflexive choice. The process of 'indi-
vidualisation' which both Beck and Giddens see as cutting individuals
free from traditions and collectively-given roles and identities, is at
risk of leaving them isolated and subject to intolerable anxiety."
Anthony Giddens (1991, 1992), whose analysis in many respects
concurs with Beck's, has in recent work focused attention on the
psycho-social aspects of this transition to a reflexive life-world. He
notes the pervasiveness of published guides, manuals and therapies for
all possible aspects of living. These indicate, he says, that traditional,
taken-for-granted, ritualised forms of life are in decline. Individuals
have little choice now but to choose their identity and life-trajectory.
They adopt reflexive strategies to enable them to do this. As the taken-
for-granted, customary meaning is drained out of social roles and
relationships, individuals seek 'pure' relationships, through which they
can define their identity. Giddens shares some of Beck's anxieties that
the erosion of social obligations, and the emancipation of individuals
from their normative constraints, is a condition not without its risks.
Like Castells, he describes 'fundamentalisms' as retreats back to
belonging and security, and argues for new kinds of negotiated social
relationships as ways of creating a post-modern kind of social soli-
darity.
But whilst the negative possibilities of this vision of individualisa-
tion, and of the globalisation of the economy, polity and culture are
acknowledged by Beck and Giddens, there are few conceptual
resources available in this model with which to critically analyse them.
For one thing, the powers that are primarily shaping this process,
namely those of a globalised capitalism, have become invisible, or are
misdescribed as merely technological developments, said to be revolu-
tionising human relations to time and space." Largely lost from sight
are the constraints constituted by the unavoidable social conditions of
human life - for example the need for continuity, reciprocity, and
mutual recognition - though an idea of 're-socialising' this danger-
ously individualised world is sketched out in this work. ('New
Labour's project to repair a social fabric damaged by individualism
draws on these ideas). What are also missing in this discourse are the
limits to human freedom posed by our bodily and psychic natures,
which have been in different ways the main objects of psychoanalytic
investigation.
Reason floats free, in this model, without necessary limits or
obstruction. What is 'post-modern' about this theoretical scheme is its
assumption that only historical anachronisms stand in the way of full
human autonomy and self-determination. The problem is what will
5. Psychoanalysis
hold human beings together in this fully individualised and reflexive
world, and how they will manage the anxieties of autonomy.
Psychoanalysis and Modernity

How can the discipline of contemporary psychoanalysis be related to
these contrasting ideas of modernity and post-modernity? What
grounds arc there for continuing to see the psychoanalytic theory and
practice in its mainstream forms in Britain as still 'modernist' in its
outlook?
Psychoanalysis is characterised by both its object and method of
investigation. It presupposes both an ontology (a theory of what
exists) and an epistemology (a theory of how we can know about what
exist). It was in its origins in both these respects 'realist' in its assump-
t i o n ~ . ' 'Realism'
~ refers to the idea that the objects of our
consciousness exist independent of our knowledge or awareness of
them. It is defined in this respect in opposition to idealism, the idea
that we can only know the objects of our own consciousness. The 'real
world' presupposed to exist by psychoanalysis is, as the world of
nature is presupposed to be in the natural sciences, stratified in char-
acter. This concept of stratification refers to different kinds of
structures which have causal properties. In the natural sciences, the
entities which comprise these 'stratified' levels include the universes of
sub-atomic physics, the material elements which form the subject-
matter of chemistry, biological organisms, and the phenomena of mind
and consciousness. Explanations and models constructed at each of
these 'levels' adduce some new properties of nature, which are not
causally reducible to those at more fundamental levels, although they
are causally connected. (If one bangs someone hard enough on the
head, consciousness ceases, but this fact by no means signifies that the
phenomena of the mind can be fully explained as the outcome of phys-
ical forces.")
In psychoanalysis, these 'levels' were originally defined as the con-
scious and unconscious minds, and elaborated as Freud's topo-
graphical description of the mind. Subsequently, this model has
evolved into an account of the 'internal world', populated by 'internal
objects', and into the modelling of different 'parts of the self '. One can
see how closely this model corresponds to the contrast between 'sur-
face and depth' which Fredric Jameson held to be characteristic of the
ontology of modernism.
A commitment to a realist epistemology signifies the idea that what
can be known is not confined to knowledge of the objects of our sen-
sory experience. It follows from the realist ontology already described,
and from its commitment to stratification and thus 'depth', that what
may be directly manifest to the senses will not be coterminous with
reality. Since these 'levels' or structures of reality are causally related
to (though not reducible) to one another, it follows that what we
observe or experience through our senses may also lie in a causal rela-
tion to such structures. What we observe, in short, should be
understood as the effects of entities which have causal powers. Thus,
astronomers observe a variety of causal effects (of light waves, radia-
tion etc.) of nuclear reactions taking place far out in space, originating
at remote points of time. Medicine observes and treats the 'symptoms'
of bodily processes, perhaps originating in genetic material, or in the
chemical abuse of particular cells. The sociologist Emile Durkheim
characterised suicide rates as the effects of changing patterns of social
solidarity in nineteenth century Europe.
Psychoanalysis plainly continues to operate with realist epistemo-
logical assumptions such as these. Freud analysed neurotic symptoms,
such as those described in his case histories, as the effects of uncon-
scious mental conflict, often seen as a conflict between libidinal
impulses and the repressive structures of the mind which denied them
recognition or expression. Freud initially attempted to develop a
mechanistic model, explaining such effects as if they were discharges
of instinctual energy. But even when his model became a more fully
mental one, and drives came to be seen as invariably structured by
beliefs, and as intentions towards 'objects' (primarily other persons),
states of mind and the different constituents of behaviour were seen as
the effects of mental structures. In the Kleinian tradition, the para-
noid-schizoid and depressive positions are typical structures of this
kind, giving rise as their effects to characteristic forms of mental life.
The mechanism of projective identification, one of the principal dis-
coveries of the Kleinian tradition, by which feelings which cannot be
processed or tolerated within the mind are unconsciously perceived as
aspects of another person, has been investigated as such an effect.
Projective identification is held within this tradition to be a form of
mental functioning which takes place in both infantile and adult life.
It has been made accessible to observation largely in the setting of psy-
choanalytic clinical practice, which as I have argued elsewhere (Rustin,
1997) constitutes the primary laboratory in which psychoanalysts seek
to investigate their theoretically-defined object of study.
It may be argued that the relation between the structures of mind
characterised as the paranoid-schizoid or depressive positions are not
best described in terms of cause and effect. Rather than seeing the the-
oretical structure as a cause, and the symptom or state of mind as its
effect, it may be thought more illuminating to view these as two dif-
ferent aspects of the same reality, seen from different points of view.
But the difference may be mainly one of temporal perspective.
5. Psychoanalysis
'Structures', like the 'positions' referred to, are characterised as
enduring or recurring states, associated with characteristic phenomena
of mind, recognised mainly in the setting of the transference relation-
ship. The phenomena of mind which are regarded as providing the
'evidence' for the existence of these structures, are always located in
particular moments of time, in sequences of interactions within the
consulting room. The enduring 'structure' is thus constituted and con-
tinually reproduced by the succession of mental events that it explains,
and that are taken to be the observable grounds for its existence. The
question then is, need this 'structure' be presupposed as a separate
entity, or may it be no more than a typification, a sort of summary ver-
sion, of the mental events strung out over time which provide the only
evidence for its existence?
Most psychoanalysts in the Kleinian tradition do seem to have
found it helpful and necessary t o assume the reality of such 'unob-
servable' theoretical structures, in order to achieve a coherent
understanding of the phenomena of the mind. The work of all the
major figures of this tradition, including Freud, Klein and Bion, has
been characterised by their remarkable commitment to both theoret-
ical understanding, and to the empirical knowledge which they derive
from the consulting room. This tradition has rarely defaulted in either
of the two directions which lie as temptations, an empty theoreticism
without clinical grounding, or a theoretically blind assemblage of
empirical observations.
Segal's work provides many fine examples of this conjoining of
investigation of theoretically-conceived mental structures, with evi-
dence from clinical experience. An example is her paper 'Depression
in the Schizophrenic' (1956), which argues that when schizophrenics,
in the course of development, reach the depressive position, they
experience intolerable anxieties, 'which they deal with by projecting a
large part of their ego into an object, that is by projective identifica-
tion'. This paper sought clinical confirmation for Klein's hypotheses
about paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxiety. It is an early example
of a theoretical and clinical investigation which focused on the diffi-
culties of transition from one to the other, a theme which has had
great subsequent significance in the understanding of 'borderline dis-
orders'. Her paper 'Notes on Symbol Formation' (Segal 1957)
developed the distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depres-
sive states of mind and its consequences for symbolic capacity. 'A
Psychoanalytic Approach t o Aesthetics' (Segal, 1952), made use of this
same distinction to explore the unconscious intentions embodied in
works of art. All these papers combine theoretical inference with clin-
ical observation, and in this respect are exemplary of this tradition.
Another reason for presupposing the existence of such structures,
apart from their heuristic use, is that they capture the idea of uncon-
scious constraints on individuals' psychic freedom. It seems not simply
to be that individuals do default to paranoid-schizoid states of mind,
or are difficult to extract from 'psychic retreats' in which they seek to
avoid acknowledging emotional reality, but that they cannot help
doing so. It is the essence of psychoanalytic psychotherapy that it
encounters deep obstacles to the exercise of choice, and to the fulfil-
ment of consciously-held goals, on the parts of its patients. The
structure of the 'inner world' seems no less determining in its effects
than any of the other causes which limit human freedom, which is not
to say that its effects cannot be modified through understanding.
By contrast, theorists of a more post-modern cast of mind, such as
Giddens, Beck and Castells, are inclined to minimise these intractable
obstacles to self-understanding and freedom. One ideal type of 'reflex-
ivity' in Giddens account is the so-called 'pure relationship', that
which is established for its own sake, beyond the constraints of family
or other ascribed social roles. H e sees such relationships as principal
settings for mutual self-exploration and self-definition, as, it seems, the
relational form of the future.
The psychoanalytic tradition has resisted this idea of self-determi-
nation without limits. It has insisted on the unavoidable 'facts of life'
of gender, generation, and mortality in human lives. These 'facts of
life' require individuals to confront the experiences of finitude and
limitation, and of loss and change, as the life-cycle evolves, if for no
more exceptional reason. The human psyche, and the equilibrium of
mind and emotion, are incessantly threatened by these facts of experi-
ence, which occur in the primordial dimensions of what one is, what
one has, and what one is becoming. It is the interior mental dimen-
sions of these categories of experience which provide the subject
matter of psychoanalysis, but which remains resistant to under-
standing."
The question of whether it is useful or valid to presuppose the 'real
existence' and causal powers of theoretical structures arises in relation
to social as well as psychological explanation. Some 'realists' in the
human sciences, such as Rom Harrk, have argued that the theoretical
entities presupposed by sociologists, such as class, or organisation, or
culture, are largely redundant. This is because their real empirical ref-
erent lies in the rule-governed, normative, interactive behaviour of the
individuals whose behaviour they purport to explain. These structural
terms function, we might say, merely as snapshots, when the reality is
always a moving picture.
But the same objection can be made to this denial of the reality of
social as to that of 'psychic structures'. It seems evident that indi-
vidual behaviour is sometimes validly explained as an effect of their
5. Psychoanalysis
membership of abstract structures or systems, such as armies, bureau-
cracies, or social classes. 'Snapshots' or not, these structures appear to
summarise the constraining powers of social interactions, conven-
tions, and sanctions, upon individuals, and their persisting patterns of
behaviour over time. Margaret S. Archer, in a recent valuable contri-
bution t o the understanding of sociology in philosophically realist
terms, (Archer, 1996) explains this property of structures in terms of
temporality. Structures are entities constructed or reproduced by
human actors at one point of time, which become the objective con-
straining environment for themselves and other human actors at
subsequent times.
We could say something similar about psychic structures. We
imagine such structures as developing through sequential interactions,
for example between mother and baby. These interactions will be
affected by innate dispositions, and by contingencies of physical well-
being or anxiety, but they are also what the mother and baby are able
to make of them. But we identify recurring patterns (for example, a
mother's depression and a baby's response to this), and we theorise
these patterns as the outcome of psychic structures, which constrain
the repertoire of responses available to mother and baby. Marx's way
of putting this relationship between structure and process, in a very
different context, was to say that 'man makes history, but not in cir-
cumstances of his own choosing'. This maxim seems to apply pari
passu to several other domains of human science."
Limits to Reason
A realist theory of knowledge presupposes the autonomy and resis-
tance of its objects to human understanding. The heroic attributes of
the search for understanding in the era of high modernism reflected
the belief that such understanding could be won only with difficulty,
and that the outer boundaries of what remained to be explored were
probably infinite. The full transparency of nature, human nature, or
society, to human understanding were a remote if not an unattainable
condition. This is a different world-view from that which imagines
that the distinction between nature and culture has almost been abol-
ished.
The idea that the objects of our understanding are resistant to it
reflected the social conflicts within which the modern movement was
embedded. Social, cultural and psychic structures were the product of
powers that resisted the claims of the new strata of intellectuals of the
modern movement. Even nature was far from being conquered, at the
end of the last century, and Marxists viewed the forms and relations of
production which were engaged in its conquest in a deeply ambivalent
way. Capitalism, as Jameson put it, was for Marx both the best and the
worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.
'Depth', in this context, signified both the latent potentialities that
were excluded or suppressed by the dominant order (authentic forms
of being or expression), and the multi-layered powers of the existing
order to resist change. According to Marx, for example, the formally-
voluntary exchanges of the labour market masked unrecognised
relations of exploitation. Modernist artists regarded the dominant
conventions of representation in the arts as blocking contemporary
forms of expression. In Freud's thinking, the unconscious incorpora-
tion of moral prohibitions in the superego prevented understanding of
the realities of human desires, and thus the capacity to cope with them
on the basis of realitv.
What does the weHkening of such ways of thinking signify? Is it that
there are no longer significant constraints to human understanding
and decision, that we now live in a world virtually of our own making?
Are we near to abolishing the limits imposed on our experience by
nature, by social structure, and by scarcity? This hubristic view is
widely current, though the prevalence of both cynicism (the absence of
values) and anxiety (demands for moral renewal) suggest that this out-
look does not offer all the comfort one might expect.
But another view of this celebratory state of mind is that a domi-
nant system of powers has succeeded, for the time being, in silencing
most ways of thinking about the world different from its own. We may
now be so wholly inside the dominant culture that we can scarcely
recognise it as such. We live its assumptions and goals (consumption,
pleasure, gratification, competition) but scarcely perceive them as only
one world among potential others. It is not that nothing remains to
resist our understanding, but that the impulse to understand has been
defeated, or incorporated. Because it is a system to which there
appears to be no longer any feasible alternative, it has become an
entitv which it is difficult to think about.
he British psychoanalytic movement, always reluctant to step out-
side its distinctive sphere of competence and interest, has been so far
rather little affected by these cultural developments. Far from cele-
brating the impending victory of reason and culture, it has gone on
looking for new fields of intractable 'unreason' t o investigate.
Psychotic states in adults and children, borderline disorders, autism,
and a variety of symptomatically - or causally-defined conditions (the
victims of trauma, eating disorders, paedophilia) continue to provide
an abundant clinical field within which the theoretical and empirical
potential of this tradition can be further developed. From time to time,
as with Segal's intervention in the Gulf War, (or, in a different psy-
choanalytic mode, Slavoj Zizek's writings), the social problems of the
5. Psychoanalysis
post-modern world provoke powerful psychoanalytic insight. This
British psychoanalytic tradition continues to function as a conservative
form of modernism.
The last modernism, perhaps? This seems unlikely. It is much more
probable that at some point this dominant world order will become
recognisable and subject to challenge as all structures of power have
before it. The constraints of nature are not about to vanish, as the
environmental movement frequently reminds us. Societies will con-
tinue to open some possibilities and opportunities, and close others, as
effects of their structures. Whilst certain forms of pain and suffering
are happily diminishing (with reduced mortality and increased life
expectancy), the biological structures of gender and generation will
continue to exert their power over human minds and bodies.
There is a particular respect in which psychoanalysis is well
placed to rejoin a broader and more critical scientific and cultural
discourse, if and when this reemerges. Psychoanalysis was created as
a discipline at a point when the conflicts and problems attendant on
modernisation were already in evidence. It was from its beginnings
a modernism without illusions or utopias. Its commitment was to
the reality principle, which means in social terms acceptance of
unavoidable scarcity, authority, choice, and loss. This tradition has
valued love and understanding above all other values, but also
insisted on the existence and potency of hatred, and intolerance of
reality. Such a 'modernism without illusions' is what critical social
debate today requires.
Conclusion
This paper began with a contrast between two versions of modernism
and modernity. The most current of these was centred on an idea of
'reflexivity' which postulated few limits t o emancipation, in biology,
material scarcity, or social tradition. The linked processes of globalisa-
tion and individualisation, based on the informational economy, are
said to be setting mankind free to choose to be himself. 'God is dead',
some might say, but it doesn't matter.
The 'high modernism' of the earlier part of this century was also
committed to rational understanding, but in a setting of a more intense
struggle against the 'other' of irrationality, oppression, misrecognition,
and inauthenticity. Psychoanalysis was the child of this late phase of
the Enlightenment. I argue that it has retained its affinity to this cause.
Its methods of intellectual transmission, its commitment t o 'craft prac-
tice', its sense of its own tradition, its loyalty to its great individual
pioneers, (there has been no 'death of the author' here), and its
capacity for theoretical innovation, have perpetuated in it something
of the mentality of an avant-garde movement even as it has become in
some respects socially conventional and established.''
Psychoanalysis has held on to its foundational sense of struggle
between enlightenment and obscurity, rational freedom and irrational
compulsion, the pleasures of understanding and the pains of mental
conflict. It has done so because the 'other' of psychoanalytic mod-
ernism, the irrational, has not disappeared with material progress.
Indeed, erosion of social boundaries and identities may engender deep
anxieties formerly contained in secure if limited social identities. The
encounter with pain and distress in their patients keeps psychoanalysts
in contact with the continuing limits to human powers, and protects
them against at least some dangers of complacency.
Notes
1. For such reappraisals of the role of the modernist intelligentsia see for
example the work of Zigmunt Bauman, notably his Legislators and Interpreten
and Modernity and the Holocaust. Foucault's writing has also been central to
this realignment of contemporary thinking.
2. On this, see Ernest Gellner's (1975) The Legitimation of Belief.
3. This 1984 essay is reprinted in F. Jameson, Postmodemism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991.
4. I have argued elsewhere (The Good Society and Inner World, London:
Verso 1991, chapter S) that the idea of 'depth' in psychoanalysis belongs to a
'realist' conception of science. This in general sustains the idea that the objects
of scientific investigation are deep structures, conceived in the form of theo-
rics and abstract entities, perceived through their empirical effects in the world
of experience.
5. Mayer's relevance for this debate was established by Perry Anderson
(1992).
6. The iconoclastic fewour of destruction of modernist idols - the demoli-
tion of tower blocks made into spectacle, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the
successive attempts to unmask and discredit Freud and his circle, echo or
parody the critical spirit of modernism at an earlier time.
7. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity, 1991;
The Ttansformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern
Societies, Polity, 1992. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, London: Sage, 1992. For a
sympathetic critique of Beck, see M.J. Rustin, 'Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich
Beck's Risk Society', Radical Philosophy 67, May 1994. A version of this article
was also published in Dissent, summer 1994.
8. Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim explore these consequences of indi-
vidualisation for emotional life in more detail in The Normal Chaos of Love
(1995).
9. Castells's analysis does continue to recognise global capitalism as an
agency, and is very far from celebratory about its present direction. But it is a
weakness in his argument that those developments which are due to 'infor-
mationalism' and those due to capitalist economic relations, are not clearly
separable. In my view the latter still constitute the determining structure
within which the informational economy has been developed as a resource.
10. The idea that psychoanalysis embodies a 'realist' approach to human
science has been explored in some detail by David Will (1980, 1984, 1986). I
discussed these issues more briefly in Rustin (1991).
11. Why this is so is explained in Edelrnan (1992) and Darnasio (1995).
12. Perry Anderson (1992, p. 42-3) in his discussion of Marshal Berman's
(1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air points out that Marx also presupposed
a human nature which defines both the limits and vossibilities of human ful-
filment, and does not imagine a 'human nature' which will ever be wholly
self-created. See also Geras (1983).
13. Anthony Giddens quotes this axiom in elaboration of his 'structuration
theory', which also seeks to grasp the dialectical relationship between human
agency and constraining structure, the former seen as constrained but yet also
as constituting and reproducing the latter. The difficulty with Ciddens's model
is that the constraints of structure are not sufficiently stratified, and are unrea-
sonably supposed to be diminishing towards infinity with the advance of
'reflexivity.'
14. One can add other attributes of psychoanalytic discourse characteristic
of 'modernism', and which continue as its recognisable 'style'. These include
its reliance on the emblematic case study (its singular work), its admiration for
individual style in its leading practitioners, and the presence in psychoanalytic
case studies of luminous moments of transcendence or transformation. These
sometimes figure in the reports of psychoanalytic child psychotherapists as
'epiphanies' (literally, appearances of the divinity), moments when clouds of
hatred and violence, which may nearly have nearly reduced a therapist to
despair, clear away, and the child actually sees the blossom tree outside the
window, as was described in one case report by Andrea Watson (1990). O r as
a schizophrenic child patient of Margaret Rustin once declared, 'I'm not a col-
lapsti; I'm a human being'.
Emotion and the Malformation of Emotion
Richard Wollheirn
It is a great honour and a great pleasure for me to have been invited

to contribute to this volume. In advancing psychoanalytical theory,
Segal has enriched the philosophy of mind. I have learnt many things
from her work. But to say this is not to exhaust the great debt that I
owe her for the help, encouragement, and criticism that I have
received over more than three decades. This essay is, I am aware, an
inadequate recompense.
1. In 1991 I gave a course of four lectures at Yale University on the
topic of the Emotions. These were the Cassirer lectures, and part of
the charge was to produce, in due course, a text for publication. In the
summer of 1992, while in England, I used two separate occasions to
present some of my ideas to psychoanalytic audiences. The second of
these two occasions was a 'conversation' at the Freud Museum, where
John Steiner was my interlocutor. As the meeting was drawing t o a
close, Segal asked me a question, to which I had no answer. I promised
her one in due course, and this belatedly is it.
Before I give my answer, before I even state the question, I must
begin, as I did at the Freud Museum, way back, with in effect a prCcis
of what I had said at Yale. It sets the stage for the present paper. I must
apologise for the fact that most of this paper is stage-setting for itself.
2. If we are to provide an account of some particular mental phe-
nomenon - whether this is desire, or pain, or (as in the present case)
emotion - we must first locate it on a broad map of the mind, which
we shall find to be dominated by a deep divide running across it. This
divide separates mental states from mental dispositions. Mental states
are those brief, transient events in the life of the mind which make up,
in William James' great phrase, the 'stream of consciousness'. Or d o so
once we have recognised that the stream of consciousness does not
have to be, in the narrow, or determinate, sense, conscious. For mental
states can be conscious, preconscious, or unconscious. Mental states
are further marked by intentionality, or thought-content, and by sub-
jectivity, or the fact that there is something that it is like for the person
to be in such a state.' Examples of mental states are perceptions, pains,
daydreams, pangs of hunger, lust, and terror, and thoughts, including
those thoughts which we think and thoughts that come unbidden into
the mind. Mental dispositions, by contrast, are underlying modifica-
tions of the mind. They have histories, often of considerable
complexity, and they shape, and are shaped by, mental states. Mental
dispositions lack subjectivity, though they possess intentionality. There
is nothing particular that it is like for the person to have a disposition,
but dispositions do have thought-content. Examples of mental dispo-
sitions are knowledge, belief, desire, skills, memory, imagination,
virtues, and vices.'
Emotions too are dispositions: and, like all dispositions, they man-
ifest themselves from time to time in mental states. However there is
the confusing fact, against which we need to be forewarned, that, in
many cases, the very same word may be used to refer to the mental dis-
position and to the mental state in which it characteristically manifests
itself. An example: a man who is afraid of snakes will, from time to
time, and as a result of this disposition, find himself in a mental state
which we call that of being afraid of some snake or other.
Some theorists of the mind have, in recognising that emotions are
dispositions, completely ignored the mental states in which they man-
ifest themselves. Others have failed to recognise that emotions are
dispositions and have thought of them as nothing more than the
mental states that, on the view of the matter I favour, manifest dispo-
sitions. Freud, with his talk of affects, is in the second group, and
conspicuously so, and the general psychology that psychoanalysis has
inherited from him has been correspondingly impoverished.
Specifically Freud identified emotions, or affects, with perceptions of
the discharge of psychic energy. His notorious denial of unconscious
emotions can be made sense of only in the context of this skewed con-
ception of what emotions are.
To understand what any particular kind of mental disposition is,
and to mark it off from others - to understand, say, belief, and to dis-
tinguish it from desire, or to grasp what memory is, and to distinguish
it from imagination - the first task, in each case, is to grasp the func-
tion of dispositions of that kind, or the role that they play within the
person's psychology. So we might start by recognising that the func-
tion of belief is to give a picture of the world, or that the function of
desire is to target the world, or that the function of emotion - now we
approach our topic - is to inculcate in the person an attitude or ori-
entation towards the world, where this is something that is not
provided by either belief or desire unaided. We can hold things true of
parts of the world without this affecting the regard in which we hold
them, and we can strive after things in the world without our warming
to them - and, if this seems unlikely, this is only because it taxes our
imagination to think of someone having desires without in point of
fact having congruous emotions.
However, it would be wrong t o conclude that emotion is nothing
but an attitude. An emotion will also include beliefs, phantasies,
wishes, and feelings, and a fuller understanding of emotion will
require us to be able to describe how these various constituents of
emotion fit together in a way that leaves them subordinate to the atti-
tude.
However, something that philosophy has often been keen to repre-
sent as integral to emotion needs, I believe, to be separated off from
it, and that is action. It is only insofar as emotions generate desires,
and these desires in turn pair themselves off with instrumental, or
means-end, beliefs, that emotions are connected with action. The con-
nection between emotion and action, which philosophers are inclined
to make direct, is, in fact, at two removes. Emotion gives rise to desire,
desire seeks out belief, and then, and only then, do desire and belief
jointly motivate action..'
If, in order to understand what emotion is, we need, as I have
claimed, to grasp its function, that is not the end of the matter. What
additionally we need to grasp is the characteristic history - the history
within the life-history of the person - that emotion has. My suggestion
on this count is that emotion forms in the immediate aftermath of the
satisfaction or the frustration of some desire the person has.
To put flesh on these bare bones of a suggestion, we need to add the
following points:
First, the notions of satisfaction and frustration of a desire must be
understood in a psychological way. It has been characteristic of much
contemporary philosophy to depsychologise both notions and to treat
the satisfaction or frustration of a desire as dependent on a relation
between a proposition, which gives the object of the desire, and the
world, so that the desire is satisfied when the proposition 'comes true',
and is frustrated so long as the proposition remains false. An example:
if I desire that my child recovers from an illness, that desire of mine is
satisfied just when it becomes true that my child recovers, whatever
else might be the case: for instance, whether I know of it or not. And
my desire is frustrated so long as it remains false that my child
recovers. Internal difficulties apart, such a view, which may be called
a semantic view, fails to account for the interest that we take in the
future of our desires: it fails, for instance, to distinguish between the
interest we take in some state of the world that we desire and some
state on which we merely take out a bet. I propose that we replace this
semantic view with one that associates satisfaction and frustration with
an experience: an experience that may be conscious, preconscious, or
unconscious.
Secondly, we need to recognise a tendency in ourselves, once one of
our desires has been satisfied or frustrated, to search for some factor
that has precipitated this outcome. At first, our thoughts are likely to
flutter around the area, but, as they stabilise, and start to fix on one
item to the exclusion of others, that item is now cut out to become the
object of an attitude, which, as it too stabilises, becomes the emotion.
Thirdly, the concepts of satisfaction and frustration must be under-
stood in a very broad, some would say loose, fashion so that, alongside
real satisfaction or frustration, we must be ready to include merely
believed-in satisfaction or frustration, and, alongside actual satisfac-
tion or frustration, we must - at any rate, for some desires - be ready
to include anticipated or prospective satisfaction or frustration. These
expansions of the concepts are necessary in order to preserve the
causal history I have proposed for emotion, and that is because, in
many circumstances, the mere belief in satisfaction or frustration, or
the vivid anticipation of satisfaction or frustration, will have precisely
the same causal efficacy as satisfaction or frustration, real and actual.
The next claim that I made at Yale, and rehearsed to my psychoan-
alytic audiences in London, was that the formation of emotion is a
process that can be taken to different lengths, with correspondingly
different grades of outcome.
In the first, or simplest, case, all that happens is that, the desire
having been satisfied or frustrated, there will be later occasions when
the experience of satisfaction or frustration is revived: it repeats itself,
without anything that has the structure, or complexity, of an attitude
having had the chance to develop. Certain - though not all - cases of
joy, dejection, rage, are unmistakably of this abbreviated or aborted
character.
In the second, or standard, case, our thoughts having decisively set-
tled upon something that we regard as the precipitating factor, the
experience of satisfaction or frustration does not simply repeat itself,
but it is projected outwards on to the precipitating factor, and an atti-
tude may now be said to develop. This attitude is generally tinged with
pleasure in the aftermath of satisfaction, and with unpleasure in the
aftermath of frustration, and the emotion (as we may now call it) may,
in the first case, be thought of as positive and, in the second case, as
negative. Joy, wonder, gratitude, hope, are positive emotions: hatred,
anger, indignation? jealousy, envy, spite, resentment, scorn, guilt, fear,
are negative emotions. Negative emotions outnumber positive emo-
tions.
As to the third, or deviant, way in which emotion can form, what is
distinctive is that, though some desire of the person has been satisfied
or frustrated, the person is unable to accept or tolerate the experience
of satisfaction or frustration. Instead anxiety is aroused, defence is
invoked, and some emotion, other than that which we should expect
to arise in the circumstances, forms. I call this outcome the malforma-
tion of emotion.
- - -
If we wonder what the circumstances are in which the person

proves unable to tolerate the experience of satisfaction or frustration,
there are various ways in which the different cases may be classified,
though in practice the frontiers between them are blurred.
Sometimes the inability will derive directly from the desire itself,
either because of its content - the desire is, say, likely to arouse guilt -
or because of the person's relation to it - he is too attached to the
desire to tolerate Gustration or too split off from it to tolerate satis-
faction.
At other times the inability will derive, not from the desire itself,
but from the pleasure that the satisfaction, or the unpleasure that the
frustration, may be anticipated to bring in train. So overwhelming is
the pleasure, or the unpleasure, expected to be that the person defends
against the experience itself.
And, finally, the inability may derive, not from the desire itself, nor
from the associated pleasure or unpleasure, but from some further
consequence that the satisfaction or frustration is thought likely to
bring about. For instance, it might be feared that satisfaction, or the
pleasure that accompanies it, will then provoke massive greed for
more of the same, which the person predicts being unable to resist: or
the fear might be that frustration, or the unpleasure that accompanies
it, will induce a sense of humiliation that the person will not be able
to survive.
However, there is a more fundamental way of looking at these
cases, and so a more fundamental way of thinking about what I shall
call the malformation of emotion. We may distinguish between cases
where the inability to tolerate satisfaction or frustration of desire is
connected with comparatively transient or shallow aspects of life and
cases where the inability is grounded in enduring features of our
nature, such as the structure of the personality. Shortly we shall need
to return to these latter cases.
3. Of the three grades of outcome, the malformation of emotion
has, with one interesting exception, proved to be of least interest to
philosophers, but it is the one that is of greatest psychoanalytic
interest. The philosophical exception is Jean-Paul Sartre's Sketch for a
Theory of the Emotions.' Sartre's essay is one of the most systematic
accounts of emotion in the history of philosophy, but it is, though this
might well have come as something of a surprise to its author, exclu-
sively concerned with malformed emotion. Nothing less can be
expected from a work that takes as its model for how the emotions
form Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes.
Sartre develops his account of emotion around a few examples. I
propose to concentrate on three. Two are cases in which desire is frus-
trated - a man is in danger, a man endures loss of money or property
- the third is a case where desire is satisfied, if only prospectively - the
man is about to be united with a loved one.
Let us start with the first two cases, and initially the way Sartre
describes them might suggest that, in each of them, the man is frus-
trated and accepts frustration, and that is why he does what he does:
it is because he accepts danger that he runs away, and it is because he
accepts loss that, withdrawing into the solitude of his room, he finds
the world a place that is cold and bleak and everything in it devoid of
interest.
However, it gradually emerges that this is not how we are expected
to understand these cases. The detail that Sartre goes on to provide
militates against such an interpretation. Furthermore he is insistent
that all three cases are structurally on a par, and, in the third case,
where the man is prospectively satisfied, it is manifest that the man
cannot accept satisfaction. For, as soon as he realises that his dearest
wishes are about to come true, he cannot bear the period of waiting,
nor can he bear the thought that, when the period of waiting is over,
he will have to learn how to please the woman he loves, and least of
all can he bear the inevitable limitations of human love: that posses-
sion of another can never be instantaneous, or completed in a single
moment of time, nor can it be total, or undivided. The man's display
of what passes for joy - his restlessness of behaviour, the changes that
move across his face and body, his all but irresistible desire to break
out into song or dance - these are not, Sartre tells us, simple expres-
sions of inner happiness. Rather they are part of an attempt to
transform the world so that what would otherwise have been the mere
everyday satisfaction of his desire, with all that would have made that
intolerable, will give way to magical possession of the woman.
If we now turn back to the two earlier cases, where at first it could
be argued that frustration was accepted, and that out of this accep-
tance fear and sorrow formed, we shall now see that, as Sartre
conceives them, they too involve the attempt to transform the world,
and thus they involve an inability to accept frustration. For, if at first
the man who, in a situation of danger, resorts to flight, and the man
who, suddenly impoverished, sits in his study brooding, seem like
people trying to fight against, or trying t o adapt to, a world that has
frustrated their desires, that is not how Sartre wants us to see them.
For him, both men are engaged in the rejection of the world. Their
behaviour is not rational: it is magic. Nowhere is Sartre's commitment
to a view of all emotion as what I think of as malformed emotion, or
as based on rejection, so evident as in the lengths he goes in order to
disturb the common-sense picture of the man who flees from danger.
For flight is generally thought of as the model of a rational reaction to
a perceived situation: to danger. But not by Sartre. For him flight
reveals itself as a way of forgetting or negating danger. He compares
running away to fainting: both are forms of psychic annihilation in the
face of a world that we cannot endure. That one is active, and the
other is passive, seem like small differences in the light of their simi-
larities, or what Sartre thinks of as a common strategy that they both
advance.
Of course, it is not my claim that Sartre provides an adequate
account of malformed emotion. There are certain elements that he
introduces that stand in need of correction.
In the first place, Sartre regards what he calls the transformation of
the world, and which for him lies at the core of an emotion, as some-
thing voluntarily effected. Emotions are, or are the result of,
something that we do.
Secondly, as the phrase 'transformation of the world' makes clear,
for Sartre emotion is essentially global: our emotions, each and every
one of them, take the world, nothing less, for their object.
And, thirdly, the behaviour that, on an ordinary view of the matter,
is taken as expressive of the emotion, once in place, is regarded by
Sartre as the means that the person uses to effect the transformation
of the world in which his emotion consists. The flight of the man in
the grip of terror, the gloom and dissociation of the man locked up in
his sorrow, the nervous impatience of the man joyful at the prospect
of encountering his innamorata - all these are incantations, spells that
the man casts over himself, which are designed to replace one unhappy
view of the world with another view which is more propitious.
These are points at which Sartre's account needs revision. But sim-
ilarly there are elements that are missing from Sartre's account if it is
to be adequate to the malformation of emotion.
In the first place, there is no explicit reference - though I have been
suggesting that it is there implicitly - to what I see as the origin of
emotion: that is the satisfaction or frustration of desire. By the same
token, there is no explicit reference to what I see as the origin of mal-
formed emotion: that is, the inability to tolerate satisfaction or
frustration.
Secondly, there is no reference to a mechanism of defence, which
must be presumed to come into operation when satisfaction or frus-
tration is found intolerable. It is this that accounts for the attitude,
which, as we have seen, Sartre implausibly attributes to the will.
Different versions of the mechanism would be denial, splitting, pro-
jection, or projective identification.
Thirdly, Sartre provides no clue how, once we reject the view that
every emotion is directed on to the world as such, we can, as everyday
life shows our doing, assign particular objects to particular emotions.
And, finally, since for Sartre, as for William James before him,
though for very different reasons, behaviour is the cause, not the
effect, of emotion, a variety of relations in which behaviour can stand
to emotion - that behaviour expresses emotion, that behaviour con-
ceals emotion, that behaviour is the acting-out of emotion - are,
understandably, but to the detriment of the account, simply over-
looked.
4. Are there emotions, type-emotions, that are, as such, or in every
instance, malformed? Or is it rather the case that no type-emotions are
malformed, and that it is only instances of type-emotions that are mal-
formed? What looks like the truth is that no type-emotion is
malformed, and whether an instance of it is well-formed or malformed
is surely something that depends upon its history.
However, in this context, I should like to consider what Klein says
about envy in Envy and Gratitude.' For my suggestion is that envy, as
Klein postulates it, is very close to my understanding of a malformed
emotion. I propose to examine her account with this suggestion in
mind.
A clear starting-point is that Klein too associates the onset of envy
with satisfaction or frustration of desire. Indeed in its origins - in its
origins, that is, in the history of the individual - envy is the infant's
response to that satisfaction or frustration which is induced by the
primal object: that is, by the mother's breast. And this is important,
because envy never totally outgrows its origins, not least because later
instances of envy revive earlier instances. However, something on
which Klein's text is not explicit is whether envy is an immediate
response to satisfaction or frustration, or whether her belief is that
something else has to intervene. I put the point thus because the
account that I have offered of malformed emotion does, it will be
recognised, introduce an intervening condition: the person's inability
to accept satisfaction or frustration of desire is an intervening condi-
tion.
To resolve the crux, let us see how Klein deals with two problems
to which her account of envy, as it stands, seems exposed. They are,
When is envy an appropriate response to frustration?: that is, when is
it more appropriate than anger or hatred? The second is, Why should
envy, a negative emotion, ever be an appropriate response to satisfac-
tion?.
Klein's account has in fact an answer to both problems, and it
answers both out of the same materials, and a clue to what these mate-
rials are is supplied by a remark that is at first surprising. Klein hints
that the second of the two problems is the easier to resolve. She says
that envy is 'perhaps more understandable' in the case of the satisfying
breast than in the case of the frustrating breast. How could be so?
Klein's immediate explanation is not very helpful, for what she goes
on to say is that, in the case of satisfaction, the very ease with which
the milk comes makes the gift seem 'unattainable'. However, I believe
that, if we press this answer, several things become clear. In the first
place, when the infant responds t o the satisfying breast with envy, this
is because of some way in which it already regards the breast.
Secondly, if we wonder what, according to Klein, this way is, that is
not hard to reconstruct. The envious infant recognises its total depen-
dence on the breast, and it finds this dependence extremely painful.
Finally, it emerges that Klein thinks that, whenever the infant responds
to the breast with envy - that is, both when it responds to the satis-
fying and when it responds to the frustrating breast - it is because of
this attitude that it has.
If this is right, if this is Klein's view and we concur, then several
things become automatically clear: (1) it becomes clear why the infant
responds to satisfaction with envy rather than with some positive
emotion; (2) it becomes clear why the infant responds t o frustration
with envy rather than with some other negative emotion; (3) it
becomes clear why Klein, of these two responses, finds the first more
understandable; (4) it becomes clear that the answer to my earlier
question is that envy is a mediated, not a direct, response to satisfac-
tion or frustration; and (5) it starts to become clear why Klein's
account of envy seems like a special version of my account of mal-
formed emotion.
Let me go over these points.
(1) The attitude - phantasy, we might say - that Klein attributes to
the infant makes clear why the infant should respond to satisfaction
with a negative emotion: for the experience of satisfaction must
heighten the sense of total dependence upon the breast, which is
already found painful.
(2) That frustration from the breast should elicit a negative emotion
is, of course, fully comprehensible without invoking any phantasy on
the part of the infant towards the breast. However, that the negative
emotion should be envy, and not, say, anger or hatred, does require
explanation, and the relevance of the phantasy of excessive depen-
dence on the breast is that, under its influence, frustration will suggest
to the infant, not merely that it is deprived of the goodness of the
breast, but that this goodness, which is the source of the sense of
dependence, is something that the breast is keeping to itself.
(3) If this explains envy as a response t o frustration, it is certainly a
more cumbrous explanation than the explanation offered of envy as a
response to satisfaction. Hence we might say, as we have seen that
Klein does, that the second phenomenon is 'more understandable'
than the first.
(4) If this reconstruction of the Kleinian account is broadly correct,
then a complex phantasy - a phantasy that blends together the aware-
ness of something that is at once good and outside the person, a sense
of total dependence on this external object, and the pain that this
induces - intervenes between the satisfaction o r frustration of desire
and envy. Hence envy is a mediated response.
And now (5) for the claim that there is a broad coincidence between
the Kleinian account of envy and the account that I have been offering
of malformed emotion. For, on the face of it, all that has been shown
is that envy is like a malformed emotion in that it is a mediated
response to the satisfaction or frustration of desire. But what mediates
the response in the two kinds of case does not seem to be the same
thing at all. But is this really so?
My current suggestion is that there is not so much that divides
them. For, if we consider the phantasy of painful dependence on the
breast, and how that is likely to manifest itself, the likeliest conse-
quence is that the infant will not be able to tolerate either receiving
something good from, or being denied something good by, the breast.
As we saw a short while back, the inability to tolerate satisfaction
or frustration can have several causes, and that which is operative in
the case of envy is only one. Of these causes, some will be deep, some
will be comparatively shallow. The phantasy of total dependence on an
external source of goodness is undoubtedly a deep cause, though not
the only deep c a ~ s e If. ~this is right, and Klein's aetiology of envy is
right, then envy is not only a malformed emotion, it is a malformed
emotion of considerable depth.
5. 'Envy', Klein writes, 'spoils the capacity for enjoyment'.' If this
seems to fit in with my assimilation of envy to a malformed emotion,
there are two seeming points of divergence.
The first point of divergence is that Klein's claim seems narrower in
scope. It tells only half the story. For how about envy and the inability
to tolerate frustration? However, it would be consonant with Klein's
account of envy, and something to which she would have had no
obvious objection, to say that it also spoils the capacity for normal dis-
appointment.
The second point of divergence is more serious, and it is that,
whereas my account proposes the inability to tolerate satisfaction or
frustration as the cause, or some part of the cause, of envy, Klein seems
to suggest that it is the effect of envy. If these proposals are not in out-
right conflict, how they fit together needs elucidation.
I make two suggestions.
In the first place, in discussing envy, I was led to distinguish between
envy itself and the precondition of envy. The precondition of envy I
have been identifying as a belief or phantasy about dependence upon
some external source of goodness, whereas envy itself I have thought
of primarily as an attitude towards this source of goodness. I was led
to make this distinction by a concern for the structure of emotion.
Klein, relatively untouched by this concern, seems not to have made
the distinction, and I suggest that, for much of the time, she used the
term 'envy' to cover both the emotion and its precondition. In conse-
quence, when she asserts that envy causes the inability to tolerate
experiences of satisfaction or frustration, she may merely have meant
something that I would claim too: that is, that the phantasy that is the
precondition of envy has this effect.
Secondly, Klein might have been making the point, which I see no
reason to dispute, that what causes envy is also reinforced by envy.
However, as we shall see shortly, there is more than one way of under-
standing causal relations in this situation, and I defer my response until
I give my reply to Segal's question, to which I am at last in a position
to turn.
6. Segal's question made use of a claim that I made in my book
Freud."The claim was that it is an implicit, if not fully explicit, feature
of Freud's understanding of the neurosis that its constituents - and I
took specifically belief and desire as examples - can get themselves
enmeshed in ways that are not to be found outside the neurosis.
Consider, for instance, the relation between a desire and a belief that
would ordinarily be thought of as presuppositional of the desire. Now,
within the neurosis, these can get reorganised so that the desire, which
is otherwise outdated, can find itself retained solely so as to legitimise
the belief, which, dear to the person, is itself threatened by reality. This
claim I illustrated by considering a symptom of one of Freud's famous
patients, the Rat Man.
At a period when he was working for his examinations, the Rat
Man established for himself the following routine: he'would work in
the evening, though with scant powers of concentration, until mid-
night or one o'clock, and then, at what is traditionally thought of as
the bewitching hour, he would get up from his desk and go over and
open the door as if to let his father in. Then he put on all the lights,
he would take out his penis, and he would examine it carefully in a
mirror. In this way he gave his father the opportunity, first to be
impressed by his son's habits of work, and then to be scandalised by a
very thinly disguised display of masturbation. Subservience and defi-
ance - more specifically, the desire to submit to his father's authority,
and the desire to dispute his father's monopoly over sexuality - alter-
nate in this elaborate ritual, and in this way the two principal desires
that the Rat Man entertained towards his father find expression.
And, it must now be understood - and this was something of which
Freud, at the time of the telling of the incident, was not himself aware
- that the Rat Man's father had been dead for nine years. So the ques-
tion arises, How could the Rat Man desire to impress his father, how
could he desire to usurp his father's position, unless he believed, in the
face of all evidence. that his father was still alive?. For the belief that
his father was alive'is presuppositional of both of the two desires.
Freud's answer (or so I interpret him) is this: the Rat Man did have
a shadowy belief that his father was, in some way, still alive. This was
clear from the sessions. However the belief was superstitious, as its
invocation at the ghostly hour of the spirits testifies, and it was thus
out of line with the rationalistic tenor of the Rat Man's mind. It was
however a belief that the Rat Man very much wished to continue to
hold. So Freud concluded that the two desires that the Rat Man
retained vis-a-vis his father had a special function: they had the func-
tion of bolstering the shaky belief to which they committed him. He
held the desires, which he might have been expected to abandon,
partly so as to go on believing the belief that they presupposed.
So finally to the question that Segal asked, and that I could not
answer; Do we find in the orbit of malformed emotions internal con-
tortion of the sort that I postulate within the neurosis?
7. There are various ways of interpreting this question, and simi-
larly there are various phenomena that might be thought to justify a
positive answer. It was, in some part, the difficulty of settling for the
most fruitful interpretation that left me without an answer. I have now
an interpretation to propose, which, whatever its shortcomings, gives
us a chance to comDare and contrast the wavs in which desire and
emotion can figure in psychic organisations.
I shall take the question to be asking, 'Can a malformed emotion
that presupposes a phantasy owe its existence, or at least owe its reten-
tion, to the protection that it gives to the phantasy?'
The answer to this question is, I believe, No, and the reason is that
the dependence of the emotion upon the phantasy is unconditional.
Reconsider the situation with belief and desire within the neurosis
as this is exemplified in the Rat Man case. The Rat Man's belief that
his father survives does not as such cause him either to desire to win
his father's approbation or to desire to appropriate his father's sexu-
ality. The belief is a presupposition of both desires, but, in itself, the
cause of neither. This opens the way for the belief, when conjoined
with some further suitable condition, to cause one or other or both of
these desires. We could then say that the belief causes the desire
because of this further condition. And this is precisely what we have
seen to occur in the case of the Rat Man. The further condition is that
the belief comes under threat from reality, and what that allows us to
say is that the belief causes the desire defensively, or in order to protect
itself brn this threat from reality. What makes this possible is that the
belief does not in itself cause the desire. There is no unconditional
dependence of the desire upon the belief.
If we turn to envy and the phantasy that it presupposes, the situa-
tion is different. For, in any such case, the phantasy is a presupposition
of the emotion, but it is also its cause. It causes the emotion without
the conjunction of any further condition. The phantasy of the total
goodness of the breast causes envy of the breast, whether or not it, the
phantasy, is under threat from reality. The dependence of the emotion
upon the phantasy is unconditional. For this reason there is no way for
us to think of the emotion as owing its existence or retention to the
protection that it gives to the phantasy, or as a defence.
What is still perfectly possible is that the emotion, so long as it
endures, should protect the phantasy. And, if emotions are stronger
than phantasies, or if specifically envy is more impervious to reality
than the phantasy about the breast that it presupposes, this might
make a difference. It might in part explain the strength of our resis-
tance to psychic change. But, if the preceding argument is right, what
has been ruled out is that the existence or retention of the emotion can
be explained by reference to what it does for the phantasy, or that we
can regard the emotion as a defence against the erosion of the phan-
tasy. For the emotion would have come about whether or not the
phantasy was under threat from reality.
To talk of an emotion as a defence is clearly to claim more than that,
in some way or another, it protects the psyche. It is to make a claim
about why it comes about. The claim must be that it comes about
because of the protection that it offers the psyche.
8. Central to my Cassirer lectures is the claim that the function of
the emotions is to provide the person with an attitude. And, since this
is not something that either beliefs or desires do for us, it further
serves to separate off emotion from belief and desire.
The answer I have just given to Segal's question, fits in with this
general claim. For the smooth, or what I have been calling 'uncondi-
tional', causal transition from phantasy to emotion is to be accounted
for in terms of the element common to emotion and phantasy. For,
tempting though it is to assimilate phantasy to belief, phantasy is not
belief. At the core of phantasy too lies an attitude.
There is a general moral to be learnt from all this, and it holds even
if much of what I have been saying is false. It is that the differences
between the various types of mental phenomenon, perhaps more
specifically between the various types of mental disposition, are
important enough for psychoanalytical theory to take serious stock of
them. I believe that, by and large, it has done just this, and this has in
6. Emotion a n d the Malformation of Emotion
turn enhanced its intuitive appeal. Certainly no-one has been more
sensitive to these differences, and t o the distinctions that enshrine
them, than Segal.
Notes
1. The phrase derives from Thomas Nagel, 'What is it like to be a Bat?',
reprinted in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1975).
2. This map of the mind is heavily abbreviated from that which I offer in
Richard Wollheim, The Thread of life, (Cambridge, Mass: Haward University
Press, 1984).
3. In view of what I shall later on be saying, let me here confront the charge
that, in separating off emotion and action, I offend, not only against some cur-
rent philosophical analyses of emotion, but also against the Kleinian account
of envy. It is not at all clear to me that this is right. The Kleinian account seems
to fit in perfectly well with the view that normally envy does give rise to cer-
tain aggressive impulses against the envied object, and that normally these
desires in turn give rise, either in reality or in phantasy, to action. But I find
no suggestion that this is an issue of conceptual necessity. On the contrary,
there are indications of what the circumstances would be in which these con-
nections were facilitated, and what the circumstances would be in which they
were inhibited.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip
Mairet, with an Introduction by Mary Warnock, (London: Methuen, 1962).
2. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude, reprinted in The Witings of Melanie
Klein, Volume 111, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle, (London: Hogarth Press, and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975).
6. Another deep cause of the inability to accept satisfaction or frustration
of desire, which is analysed in Herbert Rosenfcld, Impasse and Interpretation
(London: Tavistock, 1987), is the narcissistic personality structure. Here the
immediate cause of the inability is a phantasy, resulting from massive projec-
tive identification, in which separateness is denied. Rosenfeld's patient, Adam,
cannot tell whether satisfaction (or frustration) comes from outside or inside
himself: see pp. 19-24, and 63-84.
7. op. cit., p. 186.
8. Richard Wollhcim, Freud, (London: Collins, 1971), pp. 132-6.
Pride
Michael Feldman
' consciousness or feeling of what is befitting or due to oneself or one's

A
position, which prevents a person from doing what he considers to be
beneath him, or unworthy of him; especially as a good quality, legiti-
mate, "honestn or "proper pride", self respect. A high or overweening
opinion of one's own qualities, attainments or estate, which gives rise to
a feeling and attitude of superiority over, and contempt for others, inor-
dinate self-esteem.' (Oxford English Dictionary)
The concept of Pride, as the above definitions attest, covers a number

of different states of mind, from healthy self-respect at one extreme,
to a state which is dominated by destructive qualities at the other. In
psychoanalysis, therefore, we may on the one hand be concerned to
help the patient achieve or sustain a benign and justifiable pride in
himself and his achievements, or on the other hand be dealing with
what seems like an intractable and deadly process which attacks and
undermines any constructive efforts on the part of the analyst or the
patient himself. Between these two extremes, as I will illustrate there
is also a form of Pride which though it serves as a defence against
dependency, loss and feelings of inadequacy, is less malignant. In
addition to focusing on the way pride expresses itself in the indi-
vidual, pride can also be a powerful organising force within groups,
giving rise to a range of cultural and social phenomena in peace and
war.
Since antiquity, many writers have explored the nature of pride,
describing with great depth and subtlety the internal forces which give
rise to pride, or which feed it. The particular contribution psycho-
analysis has to offer, lies in understanding not only the mental states
involved, but how they are brought into being and what functions they
serve for the individual (or the group). The work of Freud, Klein and
Bion has enabled us to develop a model of the internal world and its
functioning by means of which we can understand the different
expressions of pride in terms of the nature of the relationships
between the different internal figures or agencies upon which our
7. P d e
mental life depends. Building on the work of Freud and Klein, Bion
has also explored the way in which some of the irrational impulses
which have been studied in the individual, also manifest themselves in
powerful group processes (1961).
The Melian Dialogue

In his great account of the Peloponnesian war, written some time
around 420 BC, Thucydides maintained that, central to the history of
Athenian imperialism was the duel between wisdom and moderation
on the one hand, and pride and hubris on the other (1931).
Thucydides examined the relationship between universal psycho-
logical laws, and the political and historical developments in which
they became manifest. He was interested, in particular, in the process
by which man allows himself to be so carried away by power and suc-
cess that he is filled with hubris and pride, conceives immoderate
desires which lead in turn to imprudence and danger, and inexorably
to failure. Hubris thus becomes not an impious presumption, invoking
the punishment of the Gods, but something strictly human.
Thucydides was also concerned with the way such a course lay in
wait for the city which is prosperous, particularly one which possesses
an empire and great power. In fact he argued that the process works
even more surely with cities than with individuals, 'because they are
throwing for a higher stake, freedom or empire, and because when a
man has a whole people acting with him, he magnifies himself out of
all reason'. (It is precisely this interaction between the individual and
the group which was examined first by Freud, and more recently, in
greater detail by Bion, as I will describe below.)
Thucydides contrasted hubris with justice, wisdom and moderation,
and the use of reason to keep these manifestations of 'human nature'
under control, even when it 'leaps eagerly forward towards a partic-
ular act'. In groups, however, men did not seem able to behave
rationally, and exercise control, but were subject to sudden changes of
mood and behaviour. In politics, therefore, wise actions are possible
only if a rationally minded and personally disinterested leader can
hold his own against the crowd and make his own reason prevail
against their passions.
He identified Pericles as a rare example of an outstanding leader,
someone possessed of what we could call 'proper pride', and said of
him, 'The reason for the difference was that he, deriving authority
from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of trans-
parent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he
led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dis-
honest means, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the
strength of his own high character, could Venhlre to oppose and even
to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant,
his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by
groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence'.
Some of the elements I have briefly outlined contribute to what has
been termed the Melian dialogue; the great debate between the inhab-
itants of the island of Melos, who found themselves faced with the
might of the Athenians, but who believed that they had justice on their
side. They realised, however, that arguments in favour of a just solu-
tion were unlikely to be effective against Athenian imperialism. They
thus tried to demonstrate that it was also in the long-term interests of
the Athenians to allow them to remain neutral.
The Athenians propose '... That it is for the benefit of our empire
that we are here, and also the safety of your city, ... since what we
desire is to have dominion over you without trouble to ourselves, and
that you should be saved to the advantage of both'.
The Melians inquire, 'How could it prove as advantageous for us to
become slaves, as it is for you to have dominion?'
The Athenians reply: 'Because it would be to your advantage to
submit before suffering the most horrible fate, and we should gain by
not destroying you'.
The Melians ask: 'And so, you mean, you would not consent to our
remaining at peace and being friends instead of enemies, but allies of
neither combatant?'
To this the Athenians respond: 'No; for your hostility does not
injure us so much as your friendship; for in the eyes of our subjects
that would be a proof of our weakness, whereas your hatred is a proof
of our power'.
When, at the conclusion of this debate, the Melians refused to
capitulate, the Athenians laid siege to the city of Melos, and eventually
obtained their unconditional surrender. The men of military age were
put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, and the
Athenians colonised the island with SO0 of their own citizens.'
In his historical account, Thucydides explores with great subtlety
the relationship between the internal, psychological dialogue and the
political one. When the Athenians argue that the friendship of the
Melians would injure them in the eyes of their subjects, being proof
of their weakness, whereas their hatred was proof of Athenian
power, I think we can read this not only as a political statement, but
also a description of an internal, psychological situation, an internal
debate, in which, it is argued, the appeal of love, friendship and jus-
tice will weaken and humiliate, while the evocation of hatred gives
rise to a reassuring sense of power. Unlike Pericles, whose pride
seemed to be based on a sense of internal security and worth, the
7. Pride
Athenians could not risk acting in a just fashion, but had t o feed their
pride, psychologically maintaining the support of some internal
group, by carrying out actions, however destructive, which made
them appear powerful.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives
In Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego (Freud, 1921) Freud
made clear that group psychology and individual psychology are
inseparable. He evolved a model of internal psychological structure,
where the experience of primary figures, or groups in the external
world become internalised and psychically represented, and he inves-
tigated the nature of the dialogue between these different internal
agencies.
He (Freud, 1914) differentiated, for example, between the ego and
the 'Ego-Ideal', the internal structure which becomes possessed of all
good qualities in the highest degree, and against which the self is
judged. In his 1921 paper, he suggested that it might be helpful to con-
sider the relationship which develops between the Ego and the ego
ideal, 'and that all the interplay between an external object and the ego
as a whole, with which our study of the neuroses has made us
acquainted, may possibly be repeated upon this new scene of action
within the ego'. In trying to account for some of the extreme phe-
nomena encountered in groups, Freud suggested that in the members
of the group, the ego-ideal was temporarily displaced by the group
ideal, as embodied in the group leader.
The ego ideal (which he later included as a component of the super-
ego) acts in a limiting and regulatory fashion upon the ego, and, as he
puts it, the abrogation of such functions 'would be a magnificent fes-
tival for the ego.' Indeed, he suggests that in mania, there is a fusing
of the ego and the ego ideal, thus abolishing any tension or control
between them, and the person, 'in a mood of triumph and self-satis-
faction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of his
inhibitions, his feelings of consideration for others, and his self-
reproaches'.
Klein explored the way in which manic defences came into play
when the individual felt threatened by anxiety, depression and guilt
which he is unable manage. She suggested (Klein, 1940) that the ego
was driven to build up omnipotent and violent phantasies, partly to
control and master threatening and dangerous objects, partly in order
to save and restore the loved ones. 'From the very beginning these
omnipotent phantasies, both the destructive and reparative ones, enter
into all the activities, interests and sublimations of the child. In the
infant the extreme character both of his sadistic and of his construc-
tive phantasies is in line with the extreme frightfulness of his persecu-
tors - and, at the other end of the scale, the extreme perfection of his
"goodn objects.' She suggested that idealisation was an essential ele-
ment of the manic position, inevitably accompanied by a greater or
lesser denial of psychic reality. 'Omnipotence, denial and idealisation,
closely bound up with ambivalence, enable the early ego to assert itself
to a certain degree against its internal persecutors and against a slavish
and perilous dependence upon its loved objects..'
Later, she emphasises the desire to control the object, the sadistic
gratification of overcoming and humiliating it, of getting the better of
it, and in particular the triumph over it which are such important fea-
tures of what she terms the manic position. They interfere with
processes of reparation, and lead to the object becoming once again a
persecutor, reviving paranoid fears and mechanisms of defence.
Bion explored the way in which these primitive anxieties affected
groups, and the nature of the defences which were mobilised to cope
with them. One method of coping with psychotic anxieties, is to
function according to premises which deny psychic reality. As Segal
(1989) has described, '... Such psychotic premises may underlie our
sense of superiority to other groups, our unwarranted hostility or
fear of them. Our individual psychotic parts are merged into our
group identity, and we don't feel mad because the group sanctions
it'. She points out that the predominance of more psychotic func-
tions of a group '..Is perhaps a particular danger of political
..
groupings, whether national or ideological . Political groupings
seem to embody most easily feelings of superiority, messianic mis-
sion, convictions of rightness and paranoia about others. This may
also be because political groupings have to d o with the search for
power, which in itself is a primitive aim'. She goes on to suggest that
'We use group and political processes in a destructive way also by
projecting our sanity into the leaders of the group..' idealising our
leaders and hoping they will use their own capacities and what has
been projected into them, to protect us. 'Unfortunately this projec-
tion does not work, for the fact is that when a group is dominated
by psychotic anxieties and defences it throws up the leaders and gov-
ernments which best express them!'
What I hope to show is that some of the processes which were
understood by Thucydides, and explored by Freud, Klein and Bion
more than two thousand years later, can help us to formulate the
nature of the internal situation which obtains when Pride, in its var-
ious forms is manifested, whether in the individual, or the group.
Bion (1957) wrote: '..in the personality where life instincts pre-
dominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts
predominate, pride becomes arrogance'. I will describe and illustrate
7. Pride
the nature of the internal object relationships which underlie these two
primary expressions of pride.
To turn now to the first definition given at the beginning of this
chapter where pride is an outward manifestation of self respect, a
'proper' pride that is legitimate
I believe that this definition implies a particular quality in the indi-
vidual's relationship towards his internal and external objects. When
the person has a sense both of the presence of relatively well integrated
good internal objects, and feels supported by them, he is able to resist
the pressure towards actions which are 'dishonest' or unworthy of
him, and his relationships with others involve reparation and c o n ~ e r n . ~
I think it is this form of 'proper pride', or self respect which, according
to Bion, results from the predominance of the life instincts.
In Thucydides' description of Pericles, he spoke of him 'Deriving
authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth..' which freed
him from the need to seek power by dishonest means, the need t o say
pleasant things, and enabled him to oppose, and even to anger the
crowd, rather than having to seduce them, or comply with them. I
would argue that the sense of capacity and acknowledged worth to
which Thucydides refers, depends in an essential way on the indi-
vidual's secure relationships with his internal objects. When such
internal relationships are unsatisfactory, the individual cannot with-
stand either the seductive excitement the group offers, or the threat it
poses, and a variety of pathological, collusive interactions are entered
into, as I will describe later.
Pride here, an aspect of self respect is based on an essentially benign
and secure internal relationship and stands in marked contrast to the
second definition offered above where pride is a manifestation of arro-
gance and superiority.
In The seven deadly sins of London, published in 1606, the play-
wright Thomas Dekker berates London as follows:
'0London, thou art great in glory, and envied for thy greatness ...
Thou art the goodliest of thy neighbours, but the proudest; the wealth-
iest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee
fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest; for thou art attired
like a bride, drawing all that look upon thee to be in love with thee,
but there is much harlot in thine eyes.'
He goes on to describe the care lavished on London by the Queen.
'She that ... became thy Mother, and laid thee in her bosom, whose
head was full of cares for thee ... She ... who had continually her eye
upon thee, and her heart with thee.' After the queen's death, he spoke
of the fears that were abroad in the city, which was left full of tears,
and became an orphan. 'But behold, thou hadst not sat many hours on
the banks of sorrow, but thou hadst a loving father (King James) that
adopted thee to be his own; thy mourning turned presently to glad-
ness, thy terrors t o triumphs.'
And yet, he goes on, '0thou beautifullest daughter of two united
monarchies, blessed also by the graces which heaven poured upon
thee, give me leave to tell thee, that thou hast seven devils within thee,
and till they be clean cast out, the arrows of pestilence will fall upon
thee by day, and the hand of the invader strike thee by night.. Justice
will take flight, and dwell elsewhere, and ..Desolation, will turn thy
gardens of pleasure into churchyards'.
He then considers the nature of these seven devils, beginning thus:
'Let me tell thee then, that thou dost lie with Pride ... because Pride
is the Queen of Sins, thou hast chosen her to be thy concubine, and
hast begotten many base sons and daughters upon her body, as vain-
glory, curiosity, disobedience, opinion, and disdain.'
Dekker, like Thucydides, is not only concerned with the broader
political and social issues of his day, but also with profound questions
of individual psychology. Why does someone turns away from the care
and love of a mother, represented by the benign queen, to embrace,
instead, pride, the queen of sins? He captures beautifully the seductive
and corrupting appeal of pride, and in the context in which this pas-
sage is set, it is clear that he is making a subtle pun on the word 'lie',
so when he says 'thou dost lie with pride' he refers both to the inter-
course as an attack on the mother and the caring parental couple, as
well an attack on truth.
While Dekker refers to the seven devils of which London is pos-
sessed, Milton, in Paradise Lost, explores most beautifully the way in
which this corrupting devil inveigles itself into the mind, the very sub-
stance of Eve.
The spirits sent to search out Satan find him,
'Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,

Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams;
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
The animal spirits, that from pure blood arise
Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise,
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires,
Blown up with high conceits engendering pride'
Milton captures in a vivid and beautiful fashion the seductive means

by which Satan strives t o reach 'The organs of her fancy' to produce
7. Pride
illusions, phantasms and dreams. Like Dekker, he recognises the
quality of something corrupting, subtly perverse, and sexual, in the
means by which Satan hopes to arouse 'vain hopes, vain aims, inordi-
nate desires, blown up with high conceits engendering pride'.
One can regard these as powerful representations of essentially per-
verse and destructive elements within the individual psychic apparatus,
which through seduction attempt to secure an unholy alliance with
more healthy parts of the ego - taking the Queen of Sinnes as a con-
cubine, as it were. It is this process which I believe also concerned
Thucydides, when he described the seductive and destructive power of
success, and the pride or hubris which it engenders.
Developments in psycho-analytic thinking have enabled us to gain
further insight into the nature of those internal objects, their relation-
ship to each other and to the self, which supports either the pride
which involves love, concern and reparation, or that form of pride
where hubris, arrogance and contempt predominate.
1 think destructive pride manifests itself in several different ways. In
one, closely linked with manic states, triumph, excitement and a
feeling of omnipotence are manifest. In another form of pride, a more
subtle, organised, sometimes perverse structure or organisation seems
to play a predominant role, and hatred and contempt prevail. The
third, which is closely related, involves a righteous, or pious superi-
ority and inaccessibility, where the hatred and destructiveness are
more hidden.
Clinical Illustrations
I should first like to consider that form of pride in which triumph,
excitement and omnipotence are pre-eminent. Freud, you may recall,
suggested that in mania the ego-ideal, rather than controlling the ego,
joins up with it. This results in a 'magnificent festival for the ego',
characterised by triumph and self-satisfaction, and the abolition of
feelings of consideration for others. Klein, on the other hand, was par-
ticularly concerned with the way manic defences were employed
against depressive anxiety and gililt. When the individual is faced with
his dependence upon an object he both loves and hates, and which in
phantasy he has attacked and damaged, the resulting guilt or despair
may be unbearable. She suggests, for example, that the child's desire
to 'grow out' of what he experiences as his frustrating limitations is
always associated, t o some extent, with the wish to reverse the child-
parent relationship, to gain power over the parents and t o triumph
over them: with phantasies of being powerful, rich and potent, while
father and mother become weak and helpless. However, she says, such
triumph, 'through the guilt to which it gives rise, often cripples
kychoanalysis and Culture
endeavours of all kinds. Some people are obliged to remain unsuc-
cessful, because success always implies to them the humiliation or even
the damage of somebody else, in the first place the triumph over par-
ents, brothers and sisters'.
The defences mobilised can result not only in the avoidance of
guilt and anxiety, but also the obviation of any awareness of depen-
dence upon the valued object, in the external or the internal world.
One mechanism by which this is achieved involves the phantasy of
invading the object, gaining control of it, and possession of its valu-
able properties. Any feelings of dependence, ambivalence or guilt are
replaced by pride, triumph and contempt. This, however, leaves the
individual feeling vulnerable either to a retaliatory attack felt to be
coming from the object or the re-emergence of guilt arising from
awareness of the object's state and his own responsibility in bringing
this about.
A patient of mine, a tall young man, arrived for his session at the
start of the week. After a short silence he said he felt he had not
greeted me properly - I might think he wasn't pleased to see me, or
pleased to be here. He said the weekend had been a good one. On
Sunday he had been for a walk with a friend, and they had had a long,
rewarding conversation. He had also telephoned another close friend
in Paris, whom he had neglected for a long time, and they had spoken
for an hour and a half.
The patient has recently joined a firm of management consultants,
at a high salary, and has been assigned his first two projects, which
were complicated and involved using a variety of new skills. His great
difficulty in coping with such a situation had been one of the problems
which had brought him into analysis some four years previously. He
told me that he had in fact completed both projects, and felt very
proud of that fact. He repeated that he felt very proud. What he con-
veyed was a mixture of 'proper pride' in having achieved something
difficult, but at the same time, as became clear later, a sense of superi-
ority and triumph, as if he had achieved all this without help.
Later in the session he told me that he was going to have to miss the
following session as there was an important planning meeting at work,
and added that he might have to miss further sessions because of these
meetings. He sounded quite unconcerned about this prospect.
He then reported a dream. There was a place that it seemed as if he
was in the habit of coming to - like a school, or something. He had
left something behind there - he wasn't sure what, and he crept back
to get it. A fierce dog had attacked him, and bit his leg.
In his associations, he told me that when the family lived in Canada,
he and his sister would creep into the playroom of the large and lux-
urious house of their neighbours, and watch their colour television,
7. Pride
without permission. He said these neighbours were very strange - a
brother and sister living together, and they did actually have a fierce
dog.
At the start of the session the following Monday the patient said he
felt annoyed and resentful, he didn't know why. He was then silent.
He told me he had been to see his dentist. He was very proud of the
fact that his teeth were generally in excellent condition, and the den-
tist would often say his teeth were perfect. On this occasion, however,
the dentist had found a slight mis-alignment which would probably
need correction. The patient said he hadn't really understood what the
problem was, and the dentist had not explained it properly to him,
which really annoyed him. He then said he wished he could trust the
dentist, but felt very suspicious of him. On Saturday, he went to a film
with his friend Jane. It was brilliant, and he really enjoyed talking to
her afterwards.
I thought the episode with the dentist illustrated his defensive use
of pride. It reflects his dependence upon a phantasy of himself as
having a perfect body or mind which he could feel very proud of, as a
narcissistic defence against the awareness of his actual difficulties and
limitations, and his dependence on others which any separation threat-
ened to bring to awareness. When the dentist observed even a slight
mis-alignment, he became irritable and resentful; critical and dis-
trustful of the dentist. I thought this showed the fragility of his
defence, and why he needed quickly to turn to the brilliant time he
had had with Jane.
The following week, he told me that his boss at work had been
extremely pleased and complimentary about the projects he had com-
pleted, and had asked him in a surprised tone, 'Did anyone help you
with this?' (From the way he spoke, the patient seemed t o have no
conception of having received help of any kind from anywhere: on the
contrary, he felt he had truly done it all himself.) After the project
meeting, however, he had felt depressed, but hadn't been able to
understand why. That evening he had told his flat mate about the reac-
tion of his boss, and his flat mate had been very pleased and excited. I
thought he had briefly projected the feelings of excitement and tri-
umph into his flat-mate, and remained with some unformulated
feelings of depression and guilt, which presumably resulted from the
attack on the relationship with a helpful object.
He then reported a dream in which there was a party going on in
his flat - it was lively, excited and noisy, but then he went outside and
found that there was a funeral taking place below.
I thought the patient's first dream on the Monday, about a place he
was in the habit of coming to, like a school, or something, was a com-
munication about the analysis, where (at least in his dream) he felt he
had left something of value over the weekend. He had been made
aware of the separation, and the fact that there was something impor-
tant missing from his mind, and from his life.
I knew something of the bleakness and emotional deprivation
which the patient had experienced as a child, when his father was
abroad in the diplomatic service, and his mother withdrew into a
rather depressed and cut-off state, and I thought it was this state which
was repeatedly evoked by the weekend breaks. He felt the only way to
recover what he had left behind, which was associated with richness
and colour, was to creep back, hoping he would not be discovered and
attacked.
The patient's achievement at work, the fact that he had telephoned
his friend in Paris, the pleasant walk and conversation with his friend
in London, or the enjoyable evening with his friend Jane could have
been a source of proper pride, based on his recognition that he had
been helped in a way which he could value, and he could feel sup-
ported in a benign way by his analyst.
The patient made it clear, however, how difficult it was for him to
retain a proper internal relationship with his objects. Confronted with
the break, and his awareness of having left something valuable behind,
he felt he had to creep back to try to recover it. In the past, he and his
sister succeeded in getting access to the colour television in this way;
but in the dream he was attacked by the fierce dog. What I want to
illustrate is that his sense of pride, which temporarily protected him
from any conscious awareness of loss, and the recognition of his
dependence on his object for help and support was based on methods
of using his internal objects which increased his paranoid anxieties,
and left him very vulnerable.
The fear he expressed at the start of the first Monday session, was
that I might think that he was not pleased to see me. Through this, I
might recognise the way he had dealt with the break, and any feelings
of dependency or gratitude by becoming so 'blown up with high con-
ceits' that he no longer had any need of me, and was unconcerned
about missing the following session. Furthermore, if I recognised that
this state of manic omnipotence had been achieved by his secretly
creeping in and taking possession of something which belonged to me,
this increased his fear that I would attack him (the fierce dog of his
dream).
However in addition to this persecutory anxiety he was also bur-
dened by depressive feelings. Rather than acknowledging a helpful
object which supported him (when asked by the boss who praised him
if he had received any help, the implied answer is 'No') he instead
betrays it and triumphs over it. It is this which, I am suggesting, gave
rise to his feeling of depression - namely a feeling of guilt as to the
7. Pride
damage he had done to his object and also, to some extent, an identi-
fication with it.
This seemed to be vividly represented in the second dream, where
there was an atmosphere of excitement and triumph, a party going on
in his flat, where he is the immensely proud, blown-up object of admi-
ration and celebration, while there is a funeral going on below. Thus
in terms of the patient's psychic reality, his greedy possession of all the
valuable goods caused the depletion and even the death of the object
on which he depended.
One crucial element in this defensive system which you may have
noticed, is that in each example, there is an alliance between the
patient and another figure - whether it is the boss who praises him,
the sister with whom he used to creep into the neighbour's house,
the friend with whom he speaks for an hour and a half on the tele-
phone, the dentist who usually tells him his teeth are perfect, the
friend with whom he has these satisfying and brilliant times, or the
flat-mate with whom he has this excited party. These alliances may
be presented as supportive and benevolent, but on closer examina-
tion represent a relationship with a corrupt but seductive figure. The
more sane and constructive part of the patient's personality is pro-
jected into a third object which is felt as a threat as it contains
awareness of the inner corruption. It seems as if this state of mind
depends in some essential way on a collusive alliance with an internal
figure which supports, justifies and encourages in just the way
Milton so well describes - Satan at his most seductive, reaches 'the
organs of her fancy', forging reassuring illusions, or blowing up
'high conceits engendering pride'.
As I will illustrate in the next case, the seduction into collusion
with this perverse object is so irresistible as it offers protection from
any awareness of loss or dependence upon an object and so evades
envy of such an object and any guilt as to the destructiveness
directed towards it. These are always complex situations. The figure
with which an alliance is forged is not necessarily perceived as
having devilish intent; on the contrary, it is often seen as a friend,
supporter and admirer, and as we have just seen, such an alliance
does defend the patient against pain, loneliness and greyness. And
yet as Thucydides has described, destructive consequences seem
inevitably to flow when this type of pride is engendered. In Dekker,
and Milton, there is no ambiguity about the destructive attack
which is made on the good object - it is not merely defensive, but
is much closer to what I think Bion had in mind when he says that
when pride becomes arrogance, one is in the presence of something
deadly.
A female patient of mine was accustomed to arriving exactly seven
minutes late for her sessions. Nothing I said or did made any differ-
ence to this; on the contrary, she was proud of her ability to resist any
pressure to change. When she occasionally arrived on time she became
quite flustered, and had to explain that it was a mistake. It became
clear that there was, for this patient, a constant internal figure, or
voice, which insisted that arriving on time would be a contemptible
exhibition of her needs, and her dependency - she, in identification
with this figure, was disdainful of other patients she saw hurrying to
arrive for their session on time. For her this would represent a cata-
strophic loss of face, and I sometimes got a glimpse of the state of
degradation and humiliation she feared. This internal figure would be
satisfied only if she broke off treatment completely, murdered me, or
committed suicide. The seductive offer was that she could be proud of
such actions as they would represent a triumph both over me, and that
side of her which did actually feel affectionate, dependent and
grateful. She had negotiated a compromise: she could come to her ses-
sion, but only seven minutes late and also behave in such a way as to
prevent any real movement taking place. When she 'slipped up' as it
were, by coming on time, or giving me a dream which revealed more
insightful, and co-operative aspects of herself, she became very fright-
ened that the 'devil' inside would become enraged and attack her, and
so, such events were often followed by long periods of silence and
immobility.
Rosenfeld (1971) has investigated in some detail the internal
dynamic situation which obtains in those patients who manifest a
proud, arrogant, superior and contemptuous attitude towards others,
and towards anything in themselves which is associated with affection,
dependency, and gratitude.
(You will recall the Athenians saying, '... Your hostility does not
injure us so much as your friendship; for in the eyes of our subjects
that would be a proof of our weakness, whereas your hatred is a proof
of our power'.) H e suggested that in such patients there is an idealisa-
tion of omnipotent and essentially destructive parts of the personality,
the consequences of which are devastating for the patient's develop-
ment. These destructive elements often appear highly organised,
represented in the patient's dreams, for example, as a powerful, secret,
idealised and fascinating gang, like the Mafia, dominated by a leader.
As with the female patient I have just mentioned, the gang or the
leader often presents itself as protecting the individual from pain, guilt
or humiliation, using a combination of threats and seductive appeals
to feed her pride.
The final aspect of pride which I want to consider, is where it man-
ifests itself as self-righteousness. This was an important feature in the
analysis of the following case.
7. Pride
A young teacher, the oldest of three brothers, described an incident
at the school where he worked, when he and another teacher had
come up with a scheme for reforming some unsatisfactory procedures.
When they presented this to the headmistress, however, she raised
questions about their motives, which reminded him of his mother's
attitude which he had always felt was suspicious and critical towards
him. The patient conveyed very vividly not only the sense of rejection
and the injury to his pride, but a feeling of outrage and grievance
which resulted.
When, instead of simply accepting his version, and confirming the
injustice which had been done to him, I tried to explore the situation,
to understand the complex motives involved, he became resentful,
accusing me of not having listened, not believing him, imposing my
own views, and siding with the headmistress in a way he found unfair
and damaging. He persisted with his complaints and accusations in a
relentless and impenetrable fashion. Indeed, it seemed necessary to
maintain his position, since any softening or weakening would consti-
tute a loss of face, and injure his pride in a way which he could not
bear. For the rest of the session he remained encapsulated in a state of
angry, righteous indignation. Whatever I tried to say was either
ignored, or attacked with sarcasm and contempt.
It seemed as if the only way out of this impasse would have been for
me to acknowledge my failure and accept blame: there was some
implication that this would then enable him to acknowledge that he
too, was not perfect, he might even become quite magnanimous.
The injury may be real, or imagined, and is commonly some com-
bination of the two, but the point I wish to emphasise is the extent to
which it is used by the patient righteously to sustain a particular con-
struction. The patient is, at times, only too aware of his
competitiveness, his provocativeness and his aggression, and the
damage they cause in his relationships. However when he felt that I
was attempting to examine, or even dwell on these aspects of his con-
duct, rather than the constructive and innovative ones that he was so
proud of, he felt I was robbing him of something he needed, con-
fronting him instead with more complex and much more painful
aspects of the situation.
What I was also struck with in this interaction was the way in which
the patient turned to an internal figure or group, like a jury, which sup-
ported him in an unquestioning manner, not only reassuring him, but
feeding his pride and his sense of righteousness. There was a gratifying
and protective alliance with this body. It was agreed that he had tried
his best with the headmistress, and in the session with his analyst, but
had been misunderstood and hurt, yet again. I believe it was possible,
from my point of view, to see that his mother, the headmistress or his
analyst had inevitably behaved in ways that were not ideal. And yet it
was evident that the patient projected into these figures the inade-
quacy, and the undesirable motives which he vigorously repudiated in
himself. The internal alliance in which he was embraced allowed no
room, no possibility of dialogue, of thought or of understanding. On
the contrary, it fed his pride, his omnipotence, and his sense of right-
eousness. At times it seemed almost possible to hear a soft, seductive
voice whispering in the patient's ear, raising 'discontented thoughts',
and blowing up his conceits which made him so self-righteous and
proud.
As Rosenfeld has described, it was very clear that any concession to
thought, to a different point of view, any move which might disturb
the way the internal alliance functioned, was treated as contemptible
weakness and capitulation. While the patient appeared to be
demanding justice, it was my impression that what was demanded was
only agreement There was no room for justice, or for thought, and
indeed it felt at times as if any attempts to work in the face of this
proud, relentless, unforgiving and impenetrable alliance were certain
to be defeated.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have explored the complex phenomenology of Pride,
showing how the accounts given in various Classical sources is both
complemented and enriched by a psychoanalytic understanding. I
have suggested that the state of mind, and the way of relating to
others which is associated with pride, in its various manifestations, is
crucially dependent on particular types of internal relationships.
While I believe this has been understood, and portrayed in the exam-
ples from Thucydides, from Dekker and from Milton, psychoanalytic
understanding has enabled us to develop a model which clarifies the
nature of these relationships, and how they affect the way the indi-
vidual functions.
According to this model, the experience of that form of pride which
is allied to self-respect derives from the individual's sense of a rela-
tionship with an internal object based on the forgiveness, affectionate
support, and the respect of a benign figure. This in turn depends on
the individual's sense of having been able to accept food and help from
the object which is recognised as separate, and possessing its own valu-
able properties. The inevitable experience of dependency and
vulnerability, the hatred, envy and jealousy and the destructiveness
which these gives rise to are sufficiently modified by gratitude and love
to allow reparation and forgiveness both towards the object and from
the object. These painful and disturbing elements of the personality
7. Pride
can then be tolerated within a more inteerated structure of the self.
with a better relationship to the individial's internal obiects., - froi
which he derives strength.
Thus Pericles was said to have derived authority from his 'capacity
and acknowledged worth', and did not seek power by dishonest
means. This enabled him, in the words of Thucydides, 'To control the
multitude in a free spirit'. The internal strength and support which he
seemed to possess meant that he did not need to say pleasant things to
the crowd, indeed he could venture to oppose and even anger them
when necessary.
I think this conveys a sense of someone who has established a secure
belief in his own worth based on an internal relationship with good
objects whom he values, and by whom he is, in turn valued. Contrast
this with my first patient, the tall young man who said he was so proud
of having completed the projects for his work. If this achievement had
been based on an appreciation of the extent to which he had been
helped to use his own capacities, and which would also have allowed
his object a sense of achievement, the internal relationship would have
been strengthened.
His material suggested, on the contrary, that faced with the experi-
ence of separateness and loss, so reminiscent of his childhood, he
turned to manic and omnipotent mechanisms. Filling himself with
pride and excitement either at the perfection of his body and mind, or
the achievements which were entirely his own, he denies the existence
of a helpful or supportive figure. However, in the vicious cycle which
ensues, he is then either confronted by someone fiercely trying to
defend his possessions, or someone who has been so robbed and
depleted by the patient's manic depredations, that he succumbs and
dies - hence the funeral which took place below the party.
In addition to this form of pride which is essentially defensive, and
based on the omnipotent possession of the object's good qualities,
there is what I think is a more destructive form of pride. This seems
almost invariably to involve a seductive and collusive alliance with an
internal agency - either a single figure or an organised gang. It has the
quality of a much more malignant attack on the mother, or the
parental couple. It is the allure of this relationship which holds some
of our patients in its thrall, and which is so vividly captured by Thomas
Dekker in his description of London turning away from the benevo-
lent and caring queen, and choosing instead Pride for a concubine to
lie with.
Psychoanalytical research suggests that for all individuals, their
internal objects are at times hated and attacked, devalued and tri-
umphed over. Normally, however, processes of repair and reparation
permit the gradual restoration of the 'King' and 'Queen' (that is the
internal parental figures) to their proper place (see Klein, 1935;
Riviere, 1936; Rey, 1988). This suggests a different and more pro-
found understanding of Pericles' sense of his own worth. It derives not
from an unvarying relationship with good internal objects, but rather
from his capacity, repeatedly, to repair and restore his damaged
internal objects to their 'proper places'. It is this process which, I am
suggesting, provides the basis for the individual's sense of 'proper'
pride.
By contrast, when the more destructive aspects of the personality
predominate, such reparative work largely fails, and the omnipotent,
perverse and erotised embracing of the 'concubine' Pride becomes
irresistible.
This is the relationship which Rosenfeld has investigated, and
described as the idealisation of destructive parts of the personality,
where pride and arrogance prevail, and where there is a corresponding
devaluation of, and contempt for qualities such as love, concern and
gratitude.
Variations in the nature of the alliance express themselves in dif-
ferent forms of pride. With some patients it has an excited,
blown-up quality; with others (like my second, female patient) it is
quieter, haughty, and intractable. Or a sense of righteousness may
dominate the picture; the assumption of a posture of moral superi-
ority, and the implacable assertion that one has been unfairly
treated. I think this latter always depends on the presence of a col-
lusive relationship with a corrupt and corrupting internal figure or
group which feeds the pride, contempt and disdain, which argues
with devilish subtlety and persuasiveness that any compromise
would be disastrous.
It is this internal voice which Milton represented so well as Satan
whispering in Eve's ear, forging illusions, phantasms and dreams, or
raising discontented thoughts, vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate
desires, blown up with high conceits engendering pride.
Notes
1. It is a reflection on the complexity of the psychopathology of pride and
indeed any human character, that, against this background, the Athenians built
a city of great beauty, in a lovely natural amphitheatre. There, many centuries
later, a farmer discovered a statue that we now know as the Venus de Milo.
Here then, were achievements in which one believes the Athenians could
indeed take proper pride.
2. 'Junius', the pseudonym for an 18th century political commentator, says
of an admired political leader 'He was trained ... to the truest and noblest
7. Pride
sorts of pride, that of never suffering a mean action. Drydcn (1666) makes a
similar point: 'To rescue one such friend he took more pride, Than to destroy
whole thousands of such foes'.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration
Ledn Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg
As old as mankind, human migrations have been examined from

many points of view. Numerous studies have considered their histor-
ical, cultural, sociological, political and economic implications. It is
remarkable, however, that this theme has received such little atten-
tion from psychoanalysts, especially since so many are immigrants
themselves.
The decision of an individual or a group to emigrate arises from
internal and external factors. An individual's past, his predominant
psychological characteristics, and the particular moment in his life will
determine whether or not he decides to emigrate and, if he does, the
quality of the migration. A situation of personal (or collective) crisis
can lead to emigration which, in turn, can become the origin of new
crises.
Migration triggers different types of anxieties in the person who
emigrates: separation anxiety, persecutory anxieties arising from con-
frontation with the new and unknown, depressive anxieties over
loyalties and values which give rise to mourning for objects left behind
and for the lost parts of the self, and confusional anxieties arising from
failure to discriminate between the old and the new. These, together
with the defensive mechanisms and the symptoms they may cause,
form a 'psychopathology of migration'; the course taken will depend
on the individual's capacity for working through the anxieties, the
feelings of being uprooted and the feelings of loss.
Migration in Myths
Migration myths show both man's attempts to move on in search of
knowledge, wherever if may be found and also his tendency to put
obstacles in the way of such an attempt, punishing it so that the
migrant's experience follows a pattern of 'm~gration-exile-expulsion',
with the resultant pain, confusion, and loss of communication.
The first migration, then, from our cultural perspective, was
Adam and Eve. Moved by curiosity (symbolised by the serpent), they
entered the prohibited area of paradise where they found the tree of
knowledge and ate its fruit; for this, they were driven out, losing
paradise with all its gratifications, conditions of security and
pleasure.
Migratory journeys are also central to the Myth of Oedipus. First
of all, the condemnation to death of Oedipus, to prevent the fulfilment
of the oracle, was substituted by a migration which took him far from
his real parents and his original group. The second migration came
about when, believing he was escaping from the oracle's prediction, he
fled from his adoptive parents and went to Thebes. The third 'migra-
tion' is his exile, following the parricide and incest.
The enigma of the Sphinx can be viewed as an expression of man's
curiosity about himself and his origins, a curiosity that finds expres-
sion in Oedipus' determination to pursue his search in spite of the
warnings of liresias. Oedipus' blindness combines the punishment of
both sins: he loses his eyes, symbols of the sexual organs which suffer
castration and also the instruments for satisfying curiosity. Exile con-
verts a voluntary migration into forced migration.
In the myth o f the tower o f Babel, the urge to migrate is
expressed in the desire to reach heaven in order to attain knowledge.
But this desire is punished with the confusion of tongues, the
destruction of the power of comrnunicacion. This myth serves to
illustrate what can happen to an immigrant who, on reaching the
'new world', different from the world he knows, finds strong inter-
nal obstacles to his integration into the host culture (learning its
language, adopting its customs and standards) fearing a collapse into
confusion.
Who are the Emigrants?

In general, the term migration has been used strictly to define the geo-
graphical mobility of persons who move, either individually, in small
groups, or in large masses, and remain in their new environment for a
sufficiently long time to make a home there and carry out the activi-
ties of daily living. However, from a psychological point of view, we
could also consider as migration the move from a small town to a large
city, exchanging city life for the country, coming down from the moun-
tain to the plain and, for certain very sensitive and deeply rooted
persons, even moving from one home to another. It is also important
to establish a distinction between the so-called 'foreign workers' and
the true immigrants. Finally, there are persons who find themselves
forced to live outside their country: they make up the large group of
exiles, refugees, displaced persons, or deportees who, for political, ide-
ological, or religious reason, have no possibility of returning to their
country of origin. Voluntary and forced migration are clearly quite dis-
tinct entities.
Sometimes, the impulse to emigrate arises from resistance to change
and fear of loss of certain values and living conditions. Many of those
who emigrate for this reason are accustomed to seek places which,
although geographically distant, present characteristics similar to those
of the place where they have lived. Such cases could be termed 'seden-
tary migrations', since the immigrants seek to avoid what is new or
different in order to recreate and preserve, unchanged, what is known
and familiar. They depart in order to avoid change.
In general terms, migrants can be classified into two large cate-
gories: those who always need to be in contact with familiar people
and places, and those who enjoy unfamiliar places and new rela-
tionships. Balint (1959) distinguished between 'ochnophilia' and
'philobatism'. Ochnophilic persons tend to cling to security and sta-
bility; they are characterised by their enormous attachment to
persons, places and objects; they cannot live alone. The philobats,
on the contrary, avoid ties; they tend toward a more independent
lifestyle, oriented toward seeking new and exciting experiences,
travel and adventure; they leave human and physical objects
without sorrow or pain; they are the ones most inclined to emigrate
in search of unknown horizons and with goals that involve risk.
Neither of these categories by itself constitutes a sign of mental
health. It would perhaps be desirable to achieve a good integration
of both tendencies in order to be able to react appropriately to life
circumstances.
Some authors maintain that the tendency to emigrate is greater in
persons with schizoid personalities, who appear to lack roots.
Others affirm that the tendency to emigrate is found more in those
persons who posses a strong ego and thus the capacity to face the
experience of loneliness which every emigrant suffers. Klein
(1963a) has noted that the feeling of loneliness arises from an expe-
rience of incompleteness which has its origin in the fantasy that
some dissociated and projected parts of the self will never be recov-
ered. Winnicott (1958) described the capacity for 'being alone' as
one of the most important traits of emotional maturity. The child
who feels excluded by the parental couple in the oedipal situation
and is able to master his jealousy, frustration and hate, enlarges his
capacity for being alone. This capacity implies the fusion of aggres-
sive and erotic impulses, tolerance of his ambivalent feelings, and
the possibility of identification with each of his parents. The indi-
vidual who has been able to internalise good objects will be in a
better position t o tolerate the frustration of separation inherent in
the migration experience.
Going Away
What nourishes the desire to go away? Sometimes it may occur as a
surprise to the individual himself, like a thought out of thin air. For
others, the decision to travel may correspond to a long-cherished
desire. It may involve a search for new horizons, new experiences,
other forms of culture and philosophies of life. The intense desire for
knowledge of something that is far away can reflect an idealisation of
what is felt to be both strange and forbidden.
The desire to go away may also result from a need to escape perse-
cution. In such instances it does not involve heading towards the
unknown, which is felt to be good or better, but rather escaping from
what is familiar, now felt as bad or harmful.
The person who decides to emigrate needs support to carry out this
decision and has to face the anger and criticism of his abandoned
objects: relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc. The world of
persons around him begins to divide according to the attitude adopted
regarding his plans for leaving; some congratulate and encourage him,
even e n w him. and others become de~ressedand anxious.
A pati&t reborted the strong reacion of one of his closest friends
to his decision to spend several years abroad having received a
research grant. His friend turned pale and exclaimed, his voice trem-
bling with emotion and anxiety, 'What a void!' With this exclamation
he synthesised the feelings of loss and emptiness produced by the
unexpected news. In contrast with this experience, the same patient
commented on the reactions of manifest envy and hostility expressed
by other colleagues upon learning his plans.
For the person who goes away, the atmosphere, in general, takes on
various colourin~sin relation to his ~ l a n s the
: dace he intends to leave
may be painted Gack and its d~fects'ma~nifiedin order to justify going
away; at the same time, the charms of the new location tend to be
exaggerated. But these feelings can be rapidly reversed, since in this
situation the individual is on 'the razor's edge' (Grinberg, 1978).
It is painful to leave and it also hurts, sometimes a great deal, to see
others go away. At times, this pain is masked by matters of the
moment, by bureaucratic preoccupations or contingencies, or by the
excitement and expectations aroused by the move; at other times-, it is
poignantly experienced. A patient recalled her leave-taking in these
words: 'Leaving was awful. It was very hard ... a terribly painful
tearing away. I-was leaving everything -behind and going to-find a
future ... and only God, if He exists, could know what it would be like
... I could not erase from my sight the faces of my family and friends
at the airport, looking at us from the other side of a glass wall, where
they could no longer hear us or touch us. I could see them as in a pho-
tograph or a film, but I would not be able to embrace them for a long
time, for I knew our destinies were uncertain, theirs as well as mine. I
had to call on all my strength in order not to burst out crying and, even
so, I felt my heart was bleeding as I left everything that had been my
past, my entire life, my dearest loved ones and my home, which for
years had been my pride, now turned into a desert'.
When psychic pain of this depressive type cannot be tolerated it is
replaced by feelings of persecution. The departure is then experienced,
on a deep level, as a feeling of being driven away from home and of
being unwanted, even though one is leaving on one's own initiative.
Very strong affects may also be blocked, isolated and repressed with a
numbing effect.
Alternatively there is a manic reaction where sorrow and pain are
denied and replaced by feelings of triumph over the ones who stay
behind, now perceived as limited, incompetent, or exposed to dangers
or hardships. Defences such as denial, isolation, and reversal of affect
usually arise when strong guilt feelings concerning those left behind
are added to the pain of separation. To the extent that the individual
can work through the experience of his migration gradually, inte-
grating the denied and split-off aspects and feelings, he will have
'grown' sufficiently to be able to 'suffer' his pain. Having experienced
the 'growing pains', he will have greater knowledge of the experience
he has lived through.
To be an emigrant, then, is very different from knowing that one is
emigrating. It implies assuming fully and profoundly the truth and
responsibility inherent in this condition.
Arriving
The emigrants on the ship or plane carrying them to a world that is
still unreal to them are not aware, until they have lived through the
experience, that a long time will pass, even after they have reached
terra finnu, before it is experienced as really solid ground.
The insecurities of newly arrived immigrants are determined not
only by the uncertainties and anxieties of facing the unknown, but also
by the inevitable regression that accompanies these anxieties. It is this
regression which makes them feel helpless, thus inhibiting them from
making effective use of the resources available to them.
Kafka describes this situation in an eloquent and moving way in his
novel Arne& (1927). When Karl, the young protagonist, prepares to
disembark in New York, carrying his trunk on his shoulder, he is over-
whelmed with emotion when he sees the Statue of Liberty. However,
his euphoria quickly changes to dismay when a few minutes later he
becomes aware of the disappearance of his trunk, which he had left
beside a stranger for a few minutes to go in search of an umbrella for-
gotten in the hustle and bustle of disembarking. H e could not
understand why, after guarding the trunk zealously throughout the
trip, he had let it be stolen so easily. The loss of the trunk sums up,
symbolically, the whole series of losses Karl suffered in migration: his
most valuable belongings, his identity, and even the transient loss of
certain ego functions.
A similar experience was reported by a young patient who remem-
bered that, when he arrived in the new country where he planned to
practice his profession, he left the diploma accrediting his professional
status, his most precious patrimony, in a taxi.
The stranger who steals Karl's trunk in Kafka's story represents all
the unfamiliar things that confuse the newcomer. Some already
familiar person or group is needed to help him become integrated, to
assume the function of 'mothering' and 'containing', which will permit
him to survive and get reorganised. The immigrant's search for
someone to trust, to take over, or neutralise anxieties and fears, recalls
the infant's desperate search for the familiar face of the mother when
he is left alone.
In order to make possible the reactivation of the protective function
of his good intrapsychic object representations, which are temporarily
inhibited by the anxiety of separation from familiar situations and by
the impact of encountering new situations, the immigrant needs to
find in the outer world persons who represent these good internal
objects, along the line of 'godparents' or substitute parents. In some
cases, acquaintances, relatives, or fellow nationals already established
in the new country fulfil the function of receiving and sheltering the
newcomers. The lack of such helpful external objects inevitably com-
plicates the immigrant's difficulties.
Unresolved deep conflicts arising from feelings in relation to
internal primary objects will result in an even deeper regression, with
increased use of more primitive mechanisms and defences: more
extreme dissociations, more marked denials when confronted with
unpleasant situations, compensating idealisations of certain partial
aspects, frequent and massive use of projective identification, etc.
New communication codes, which the newcomer must incorporate
and which are practically unknown or poorly understood during his
first contacts, increase the level of ambiguity and contradiction in the
information he receives. The immigrant thus may feel himself inun-
dated by chaotic messages, or swallowed up in a strange and hostile
world. All of this constitutes 'culture shock' (Ticho, 1971; Garza-
Guerrero, 1974).
In his regression to more primitive levels of communication, his
emotions usually find expression in such primordial elements as food,
which takes on a peculiarly relevant significance, since it symbolises
the earliest and most structuring link maintained with the mother or
with her breast (Segal, 1978). It may happen then, that the immigrant
will experience aversion for the typical dishes of the new country and
seek out longingly other foods characteristic of his own country. The
immigrant may also turn to eating in order to alleviate his anxiety, thus
recreating for himself an 'idealised breast', generous and inex-
haustible, with which he attempts to fill the emptiness left by the
various losses suffered in the migration. These meals are usually eaten
in the company of fellow countrymen, as a kind of commemorative
rite. However, they may be eaten in solitude and become compulsive,
reflecting a frantic search to recover the lost objects.
In the first period of his immigration, the individual's mind is more
occupied with the people and places he has left, and he is often filled
with the longing to meet them again. As he becomes more involved with
his new way of life and the people around him, he begins to draw away
from the memory of relatives and old friends. People gradually change,
those who have departed as well as those who have remained, as do
habits, lifestyles, and language (even if the same language is involved).
These changes increase the psychological distance between the migrant
and those in the home country. What does not change, and this is impor-
tant because of its influence and later repercussions, is the nonhuman
environment, which becomes a significant part of the sense of identity.
It is the nonhuman environment, especially the natural surroundings of
the individual which have acquired an intense emotional meaning that
usually persists unmodified as an object of longing and symbol of what
is his own. Many emigrants try to carry with them all their belongings:
old furniture which gets knocked about on the way, clothing they no
longer wear, or obsolete articles. Small objects or ornaments of slight
practical utility fulfil this symbolic function, which is highly significant
for the sense of identity. The radical change in a patient who had emi-
grated, produced by the arrival of her furniture was striking. She said:
'Since my arrival my dreams had been totally crazy; they didn't seem to
belong to me; I didn't recognise them. I had never had dreams like these.
1 wasn't like myself ... But a few days ago, my dreams have again
become the way they always used to be. I think this happened the day I
received my furniture: I felt that I was surrounded by "my" things; it
was thrilling to find myself with them again. Each object brought the
memory of a situation, a moment, a past. I feel more like myself'.
Evolution of the Migratory Process

Persecutory, confusional, and depressive anxieties (Klein, 1952)
develop shortly after the initial period of migration. These anxieties
are present as a constant feature in every migratory process, but vary
greatly in intensity, duration, and evolution.
Paranoid anxieties can develop into true panic when the immigrant
confronts the overwhelming demands that he must meet: loneliness,
ignorance of the language, finding work and a place to live, etc. Some,
because they are unable to deal with such a challenge, or out of fear of
failure, decide upon a hasty return if the conditions under which they
emigrated permit.
Confusional anxieties arise from difficulty in differentiating feelings
directed at the two primordial points of interest and conflict: the
country and people left behind and the new-found environment.
Sometimes a triangular oedipal situation is relived with respect to the
two countries, symbolically representing the two parents, evoking
ambivalence and conflict of loyalties. The experience can be lived as
equivalent to having divorced parents, with fantasies of having estab-
lished an alliance with one of them against the other. Superimposition
of cultures, languages, places, points of reference, memories, and
experiences of the present, can result in their losing their distinctive-
ness and increasing confusion results.
Depressive anxieties are generated by a massive experience of loss
of everything that was left behind, with the fear of never being able to
recover it. This makes it necessary to work through mourning:
mourning for the object and for the lost parts of the self, always diffi-
cult and which can easily take on pathological characteristics.
Mourning and Identity Problems

A patient had a dream shortly after emigrating which showed her
depressive response to the loss of her objects and parts of herself.
She dreamt that she is on her way to meet an aunt of hers, who
belonged to the idealised part of her family and who had influenced
her decision to emigrate. On her way, she leaves her purse and sweater
in some shops, intending to pick them up on her return. Everything
seemed easy and pleasant, but then everything becomes difficult. She
cannot find her aunt; there are many people on the street; then her
aunt lingers, talking with other people, and leaves the patient out of
the conversation. Suddenly she realises that the place where she left
her belongings is not on the way. She hurries back to get them, but the
shops are closed and her things have disappeared. Finally, she does not
know exactly how, she recovers her purse but not her sweater. She is
relieved because her identification documents are in the purse.
The idealised aunt whom the patient is going to meet represents
the idealised country in which she has just arrived. Along the path of
her migration, she has been gradually abandoning her belongings.
Because there is predominantly a manic structure, she at first gives
no importance to what she is leaving behind and everything seems
easy. However, frustration soon sets in, because she does not feel
well received by the idealised 'aunt-country-(mother-substitute)-ana-
lyst'; she feels left out. The feeling of depression here arises from the
loss of her belongings, and the fear of never being able to recover
them. She is able to rescue her threatened, shaky sense of identity,
and this brings relief and counteracts the fear of a more serious
depressive collapse.
Following Klein's (Klein, 1940) distinction between the paranoid-
schizoid and depressive position, guilt takes different forms varying
from the normal to the highly pathological. In 'persecutory guilt' the
main elements are: resentment, despair, fear, and self-reproach. Its
extreme manifestation is melancholia and pathological mourning. In
depressive guilt the dominant elements are: sorrow, concern for the
object, nostalgia, and feelings of responsibility. This forms the basis of
the reparative wishes that are part of normal mourning. Every object
loss is also a loss of parts of the self, and results in a corresponding
process of mourning, and this is clearly seen in the immigrant. Such
depressive feelings in relation to the self are much more frequent than
is usually admitted and form part of the psychopathology of daily life.
In extreme cases, these may give rise to true psychotic states.
Migration favours the emergence of latent pathology and thus has the
potential for providing the starting point for serious psychic distur-
bances.
The process of integration with the environment will depend on the
subject's capacity for tolerating change and loss, the capacity for being
alone, the capacity for waiting. In sum, it will depend on the subject's
mental integrity. The immigrant attempts to adapt to the new condi-
tions, struggling against confusion, and this causes him to turn again
and again to dissociations. Some persons react with manic over-adap-
tation, rapidly becoming identified with the habits and practices of the
people of the new country. Others, on the contrary, cling tenaciously
to their own customs and language, attempting to associate exclusively
with their fellow countrymen and form closed groups that function
like true ghettos.
In order to become integrated into the environment where he is
received, the immigrant must renounce part of his individuality, at
least temporarily. The greater the difference between the new group
and the group to which he previously belonged, the more profound
and extensive will be his renunciation. Such renunciations or losses
inevitably produce internal conflicts, since they clash with each indi-
vidual's striving to assure his own distinctness from others, that is, to
preserve his identity. The individual's capacity for continuing t o feel
that he is himself throughout a succession of changes forms the basis
for the emotional experience of identity. It brings the maintenance of
stability throughout the various circumstances and all the transforma-
tions and changes of living.
But, what is the tolerable limit beyond which the individual's iden-
tity may suffer irreparable harm? Consolidation of the sense of
identity depends principally on internalisation of object relations
assimilated by the ego through the functioning of authentic introjec-
tive identifications rather than by use of manic projective
identifications. These latter give rise to pseudo-identifications, a false
self. Elsewhere (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1974), we have put forward
the idea that a firm sense of identity results from a process of contin-
uous interaction between three dimensions of integration, namely the
spacial, temporal and social.
Migration has important effects on all three dimensions, although
disturbance of one may predominate. Thus, following migration,
states of disorganisation appear, to a variable degree, during which
very primitive anxieties are stirred up, producing a state of panic in the
newcomer, such as fearing being annihilated by the new culture. These
experiences often originate from a conflict between his desire to be
like the rest, in order to avoid feeling left out, and his desire to be dif-
'.
ferent, in order to continue feeling his 'own self Such conflicts lead
to confusion, alienation and a clash between different aspects of his
identity. These disturbances affect predominantly the spacial dimen-
sion (sense of individuation).
Disturbance in the temporal dimension (feeling of sameness) may
manifest itself in the confusing of memories with current situations. In
its mild forms, it is expressedY by such lapses as giving to places and
persons in the present situation names belonging to the past. Familiar
objects with emotional significance for the immigrant, which he brings
with him, permit him to recognise his continuity with his own past.
The soc~aldimension is the one most obviously affected by emigra-
tion. The immigrant loses many of the roles he used to play in his
community, roles that were part of his sense of identity. As a patient
remarked: 'In the new country no-one will know me; no-one will
know my family; I'll be nobody'. Disturbance in this dimension
arouses feelings of not belonging to any human group that can confirm
his own existence.
These three dimensions operate simultaneously and interact.
Various parts of the self could not become integrated in time without
being also integrated in space. On the basis of these spacial and tem-
poral integrations, the individual is able to establish links with objects
in the external world in a realistic and discriminating manner. Giving
up highly valued symbols characteristic of his native group, symbols
which form the basis of identity (such as culture and language) can be
felt as a son of psychic castration.
Migration and Language

One's own language, the mother tongue, never becomes so invested
with libido as when one lives in a country with a different language.
All the experiences of infancy, memories, and feelings related to the
first object relations, are bound up in it and saturate it with special
meaning. Anzieu (1976) speaks of a 'sonorous wrapping' which sur-
rounds the baby from the beginning of life, like an enveloping skin
which holds the contents together (like the psychic 'skin' described by
Bick,1968). The mother's voice, which the nursing infant recognises
from the first weeks, is like 'milk' flowing into his ear. Thus the impor-
tant place of lullabies in the folklore of all cultures.
When the baby cries, it is this voice that he hears for the first time.
Crying and weeping are bound up with all experiences of separation,
and become appeals to an object who will provide freedom from need,
privation, frustration, and pain. When the baby begins to integrate his
mother's figure as good and bad, he also begins to organise sounds,
babbling being transformed into words.
When learning a new language, an adult learns vocabulary and
grammar in a rational manner; but the accent, intonation, and rhythm,
that is, the 'music' of the language, can only be imitated and incorpo-
rated through identification with the speaker of the language. The new
language may be used defensively, since the native language is more
closely bound to the more primitive faculties and feelings. A patient of
Austrian origin used to say that 'in German the word for "urinaln
smells of urine'.
Some individuals have a striking facility for adopting a new lan-
guage but, as well as being a specific gift, this talent can be used to flee
the native language, symbolising more primitive objects which are felt
as persecuting.
Once this stage is overcome, progress in acquiring the new language
stops at a certain point, which varies for each person, corresponding
to a compromise between imposition of the environment and the
internal resistance. Sometimes, feelings of embarrassment arise when
idiomatic expressions are employed, since this is interpreted as a pen-
etration into the 'secrete language' of the natives, which always retains
a mysterious quality for the foreigner. However, the unconscious fear
of the magic effect of language leads the immigrant to resist the use of
certain expressions.
In general, the immigrant has more difficulty than the baby in
identifying himself with his environment and allowing himself to be
8. Rychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration
impregnated by the new language. He may, therefore, feel alienated
within his surroundings. Some feel themselves t o be disguised when
using the new language, as though they had lost their own language,
felt to be the only one that is authentic. The hatred one may feel for
people who speak another language and the difficulty one has in
learning a foreign language seem to be derived from the intensity of
the infant's first feelings of exclusion, as Klein (1932) has noted.
The normal capacity for learning a new language should not, in
ordinary circumstances, make it particularly difficult to use the
native language.
One of the biggest problems facing the immigrant is the difficulty
of finding his place within the new community, recovering his social
position and the status held in his native country. His feelings of lone-
liness and isolation intensify the depressive experience, since he no
longer has the support of his usual social and family environment to
accompany him in his mourning (Calvo, 1977). The failure to over-
come these feelings on the emotional level can result in a displacement
of the conflict onto psychosomatic disturbances: digestive symptoms
(the experience of migration cannot be digested); respiratory symp-
toms (the new environment is 'stifling'); circulatory symptoms (the
environment and its demands produce 'pressure' on arteries and
heart). The immigrant is prone to accidents which may in fact be
veiled suicidal attempts. In other cases, instead of somatic symptoms,
hypochondriacal fears and fantasies predominate.
There is a peculiar symptom we have observed in many immigrants
who achieve rapid adaptation to the characteristics, habits and
demands of the new location shortly after their arrival. They find
work, learn the language, install their family in their home, and even
achieve success in their professional and social relations during their
first two or three years of residence. They appear to rapidly achieve a
state of apparent psychic and physical equilibrium. Then, paradoxi-
cally, just when they might enjoy the fruits of their efforts and success,
they suddenly fall into a state of profound sadness and apathy which
obliges them, sometimes, to give up their work and their connection
with the outside environment. This syndrome, which we call 'delayed
depression', arises when all the manic defences utilised during this
period for achieving and maintaining a forced adaptation, have been
exhausted. On occasions, this delayed depression may be substituted
by a somatic manifestation such as a heart attack, gastric ulcer, etc.
Another frequent symptom among immigrants is what could be called
'hypochondria of money', expressed as a fear of poverty and helpless-
ness, an expression of the profound inner insecurity and instability.
The degree of seriousness of the disturbance triggered by emigra-
tion depends to a large extent on whether the person who emigrates is
alone or part of a couple or a family. If the couple or family enjoy
solid, stable links, these will provide a better basis for tolerating and
confronting the experiences of change. If, on the contrary, these links
are unstable, the situation of emigration will sharpen the conflicts and
can then trigger the breakdown of marriages or the development of
problems between parents and children.
Exile: A Specific Kind of Migration

A factor that makes a fundamental difference to the vicissitudes and
evolution of the migratory process, is the possibility or impossibility of
returning to one's own country. This marks the character of the migra-
tion. The feeling that 'the doors are open' for an eventual return
decreases the claustrophobic anxiety and the emigrant does not find
himself on a 'dead-end street'. If return is impossible, the situation is
defined from the very beginning; once the path of exodus is taken,
there is no alternative. That was the situation of the majority of immi-
grants from Europe to America during the last century and beginning
of this century. In general, theirs was the situation of people fleeing
from poverty and persecution who lacked even the means to go back:
they had left countries where emigration was prohibited, in a clandes-
tine manner; they fled from extermination during the Nazi period.
Such has always been the case of political refugees and exiles.
Under these conditions of forced migration, the process of integra-
tion is usually much more painful. There is more bitterness; hate
directed against his own country is greater and this is easily projected
onto the receiving country, then regarded as the cause of the immi-
grant's problems, while he maintains an idealisation of his home
country with unending nostalgia.
Those who are exiled have not come in search of something, but
have fled or been expelled: they are bitter, resentful and frustrated.
The situation for many of them is similar to that of survivors of wars
or political struggles. This situation also weighs against integration
into the new environment since such integration is perceived as a form
of treason to the cause, betrayal of the ones who have remained
behind or who have died. Becoming integrated threatens to shatter the
sacrosanct quality which some immigrants give their exiled status, a
defining aspect of their identity.
Inability to work through these conflicts results in the projection of
one side of their ambivalence onto their own family members or onto
the host culture. They can become very demanding of the new envi-
ronment, which becomes the object of their criticism as they project
onto it their own incapacity for providing and protecting. At other
times, they fall in a state of extreme dependency, manifested by intense
8. Psychoanalytic Pi?rspectives on Migration
oral dependency and a peremptory demand that every need be satis-
fied immediately.
In those cases where the previous personality of the exile is more
integrated and his prior activities have been more linked with repara-
tive and adaptive tendencies, he will be able to achieve a better
integration, developing much more satisfactory attitudes and activities
in the new country. Such an immigrant will then be able to achieve
healthy goals for himself and for others.
Thc Receiving Community

A factor of enormous importance is the manner in which members of
the host community receive the immigrant, react to his arrival, and the
influence on his development of the quality of this reaction. Bion's
model of 'container-contained' provides a useful model for the dif-
ferent vicissitudes that develop in the interaction between the
immigrant and the human group receiving him.
Bion used this model to elaborate the different paths of evolution
of a new idea, or the individual who bears it, in relation to the estab-
lishment group that receives it. The dynamic interaction between the
individual or the new idea (the immigrant) and his surroundings (the
country that receives him) brings the possibility of 'catastrophic
change' (Bion, 1970), namely a potentially disruptive force becomes
capable of violating the structure of the group and its members. The
immigrant elicits from the 'receiving group' different types of
response, the extremes of which are enthusiastic reception or absolute
rejection or annihilation.
Migration also constitutes a 'Catastrophic Change' for the migrant
himself. Inevitably it leads to the disorganisation of certain psychic
structures. Under propitious circumstances, this becomes the source
development and growth but in other circumstances it may result in
breakdown.
If these difficulties can be worked through and overcome, the pos-
sibility of true growth and enriched development of the personality
arises. Because of its disruptive force, the new immigrant may threaten
to destroy the old group cohesion and the group, because of an exces-
sive rigidity or defensive reaction, may 'smother' the immigrant
preventing his integration and development. A third possibility,
undoubtedly the best, is that both may be capable of functioning with
sufficient flexibility for the new group to accept a non-aggressive
immigrant and for integration and evolution to come about with
mutual benefit for both.
When the host culture is more (latently) paranoid the immigrant is
perceived as an intruder who seeks to deprive the local people of their
legitimate rights to work and to enjoy their possessions and property.
Feelings of rivalry, jealousy, and envy of the capabilities and powers
attributed to the 'invader' are reinforced. This may give rise to a com-
plex vicious circle, the immigrant's feelings of persecution and hate
increasing when he does not receive the welcome he expects and
needs, so resulting in further alienation. Alternatively, the receiving
group reacts very positively to the arrival of the immigrant, who is
treated with cordiality, receiving offers of all the help he needs to
become settled in the new place. When, the interaction of the new-
comer and the local group is more balanced, a process of mutual
understanding will then favour a gradual, more solid and sure integra-
tion.
Integration of the Immigrant

Integration is the result of successive complementary steps arising
from a fruitful interaction between the immigrant and his new envi-
ronment, resulting in an adaptation to the new culture and
relationships and an effective resolution of problems of attachment
and allegiance. It is clear, then, that if the immigrant's previous per-
sonality is sufficiently healthy and the reasons for the migration
justified, the conditions under which it was carried out adequate, and
the new surroundings reasonably welcoming, the immigrant will grad-
ually become committed to his new way of life. If his emotional
situation permits him to be realistic, and thus capable of accepting
inevitable limitations without falling back on denial or extreme disso-
ciations, he will be able to apprehend the new elements of the
experience and value the positive aspects of the new country. Thus his
psychological enrichment and real adjustment to the environment will
become possible.
Little by little, and to the extent to which he has been able to work
through the mourning involved in migration, the immigrant will go on
to feel himself to be an integral part of the new environment and will
come to experience as his own its particular characteristics, such as the
language, customs and culture, while at the same time maintaining a
positive and stable relation with his former country, with its culture
and language, there being no need to reject it in order to accept and
be accepted in the new situation.
Summary
Without maintaining that it always follows the same steps, we could
say that the migratory process passes through several phases.
1. The feelings that prevail here are intense sorrow for all that has
been abandoned or lost, fear of the unknown, and a very profound
experience of loneliness, privation and helplessness. Paranoid, confu-
sional and depressive anxieties occupy the scene in turn.
2. This stage may be followed or replaced by a manic state in which
the immigrant minimises the transcendental significance of the change
in his life or, on the contrary, magnifies the advantages of the change
and overvalues everything in the new situation disdaining what has
been lost.
3. After a variable period of time nostalgia appears, and there is a
deep sorrow for the lost world. The immigrant begins to recognise
feelings previously dissociated or denied and becomes capable of 'suf-
fering' his pain ('growing pains') while, at the same time, he becomes
more accessible to the slow and progressive incorporation of elements
of the new culture. The interaction between his internal and external
world is thus more fluid.
4. Recovery of the pleasure of thinking and desiring and of the
capacity for making plans for the future. In this period, mourning for
the country of origin has been worked through to the maximum pos-
sible extent, facilitating integration of the previous culture into the
new culture without any need to renounce the old one. This promotes
an enrichment of the ego and the consolidation of a more evolved
sense of identity.
9
'In My End is My Beginning' - T.S. Eliot
Pearl King
Soon afier I qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1950, I, together with a

group of colleagues, who had trained with me in the British Psycho-
analytical Society, approached Scgal with the request that she run a
clinical discussion group for us. The group included Harold Bridger,
Tommy (A.T.M.) Wilson, and Elliot Jaques, all of whom worked at
the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where I had also worked
during some of my mining. It was during this period that I first got to
know and work with Scgal.
The atmosphere in these clinical discussion groups was lively and
enthusiastic, as one would expect from a group of colleagues who had
recently qualified as psychoanalysts and who hoped that their recently
acquired skills and ways of understanding mental problems would
enable them to help whoever approached them for treatment, how-
ever ill they were, and some of the patients that we discussed were
very disturbed. I think that our approach was that if Psychoanalysis
could not cure them it could at least improve their condition.
We had all trained as members of Course A ' ' which followed the tra-
dition and approach to psychoanalysis which had been followed in the
pre-war British Society, before the advent of the Viennese and which
dealt with Klein's contributions alongside those of other psychoana-
lysts. We were the first intake of students to take part in the new
arrangement of the British Society's training programme under which
they offered two parallel training courses, Course 'A' and Course 'By,
Course 'B' being arranged along the lines acceptable to Anna Freud
and her colleagues from Vienna.
We were not over aware of the controversies that had taken place
in the Society during the Second World War beween 1939 and 1945,
concerning whether or not Klein's contributions were a valid exten-
sion of Freud's formulations and psychoanalytical concepts or were so
different that they could not be considered as psychoanalysis. Riccardo
Steiner and I have discussed these events and controversies at length
elsewhere (King & Steiner, 1990).
As I mentioned above, the members of this Seminar group came
9. 'In M
y End ir My Bgmning' - ZS.Eliot
from Course 'A' and included those whose Training Psychoanalysts had
been approved by Klein and those who had been members of the
middle Group', who had not been affiliated to either side during the
'Controversies'. We felt that our side had 'won', and that Klein's work
would now be protected in the British Society. When I applied to be
accepted for training, John Rickman, who was interviewing me,
explained that Mrs Klein and her colleagues were part of Course 'A'
and that she did not want to have a separate group of her own. He
went on to explain that they had called the two parallel courses 'A' and
'B', rather than English and Viennese, as they did not want to imply
'racial' differences.
We were proud to be part of the British Society and to have trained
in the English tradition, feeling that we could use what analytic con-
cepts seemed helpful in understanding our patients, regardless of who
had put them forward. I think that we also felt that the approach of
the 'A' group was more up-to-date and 'potent' than the 'paleo-
Freudian' approach of the 'B' group, about which to our shame, I must
say, we did not know much. But this is how stereotyped prejudices
develop! We were particularly proud because we attempted to work in
'the here and now' or the 'A-Historical present', which we felt was the
modern thing to do, in contrast to how we imagined the 'B' group fol-
lowers worked.
Arising from the high morale that we enjoyed at that time, there
was a strong belief that everyone could be helped, by our approach,
whatever their diagnosis or their age. In 1954 a woman of 63, who
was about to retire, asked me if I would take her on for psychoanalysis.
She had developed severe physical symptoms which she felt could be
helped by psychoanalysis. I wondered why she expressed so much
gratitude to me for agreeing to accept her as a psychoanalytic patient.
Would she be wasting my time, she asked? Other colleagues had told
her that psychoanalysis would not work for older patients, so she was
pleased that I did not turn her away. I was certainly encouraged to take
her on following my participation in Segal's Clinical Discussion
Group, though for confidential reasons I could not present her to that
group.
Later I discovered that S e"~ a had
l herself taken into Psvchoanalvsis
a male parient of 73 years, suffering from a psychotic breakdown, and
that she had reported her work with him in a short paper at the 20th
Congress of the International Psychoanalytical hio;iation held in
Paris in 1957 under the title 'Fear of Death: Notes on the Analysis of
an Old Man' and which is now included in her collected papers (Segal,
1986). Her patient had made a remarkable recovery from a severe psy-
chotic and depressive breakdown.
Recently I re-read this paper and realised how much I had learned
from her way of working and thinking about a patient, at that period,
during the time I was a member of her Clinical discussion group.
In the years that followed, partly because colleagues in the British
Society seldom presented or discussed the analysis of older patients
and partly because, from my own experience I did not see any reason
to question the efficacy of offering psychoanalysis as an appropriate
method of treatment to older patients, I did not give the matter much
thought.
My own experience with patients in this age group, however, has
led me to the conclusion that they can benefit a great deal from
analysis, although only a limited number of such people seemed to
find their way into analysis.
In a paper which I read at a European Conference some years ago
on 'Narcissism and Sexuality' (King, 1972), I tried to raise some of
these issues. Certain French colleagues expressed the opinion that one
could not psychoanalyse anyone over 40. However, a number of
people also came up to thank me for what I had said, as it had helped
them to understand their elderly patients.
Since then I have talked to a number of my colleagues and several
of them 'confessed' that they have analysed patients in the second half
of life with considerable success. I use the word 'confessed' advisedly
because they were almost apologetic about it, as though they were
breaking a taboo or going against the 'book'.
I decided to try to find out where this rigid attitude of some of my
colleagues had come from and what reference there was to age in rela-
tion to the prognosis of psychoanalytic therapy in the twenty-three
volumes of Freud. I found only three references, but they gave me a
clue to the present state of affairs among these colleagues. When he
was 42 Freud wrote in his paper 'Sexual Aetiology of the neuroses' in
1898 '... Psychoanalytic therapy is not at present applicable to all
cases. It has, to my knowledge, the following limitations. It demands a
certain degree of maturity and understanding in the patient and is
therefore not suited for the young or for adults who are feeble-minded
or uneducated. It also fails with people who are very advanced in
years, because, owing to the accumulation of material in them, it
would take up so much time that by the end of the treatment they
would have reached a period of life in which value is no longer
attached to nervous health ...' (Freud, 1898). Here Freud is referring
to patients of 'very advanced years'; that is, who are at quite a distance
in time from his own age. However, he had had relatively little expe-
rience with the psychoanalytical method by then and he does use the
words 'at present', so leaves open the question of extending the age
limits of the usefulness of psychoanalysis.
When he was 49, Freud wrote in his 1905 paper 'On psy-
9. Yn My End ir My Beginning' - ZS.Eliot
chotherapy': 'The age of patients has this much importance in deter-
mining their fitness for psychoanalytic treatment, that, on the one
hand, near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental
processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking - old
people are no longer educable - and, on the other hand, the mass of
material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment
indefinitely' (Freud, 1905).
What amazes me about Freud's comments is that he is referring to
people of his own age - near or above the age of fifty - and yet his
own experience of himself must have shown him that his mental
Drocesses were still elastic and that he was able to learn from exoeri-
k c . Perhaps it indicates how difficult it is to accept that we ours;lves
grow old as well as other people.
In 1912, when he was considering the aetiology of various neurotic
conditions in his paper 'Types of onset of the neuroses' he discusses
seriously the possibility that developmental biological processes may
produce an alteration in the equilibrium of the psychic processes, thus
producing neurotic breakdowns at key phases of the life cycle such as
puberry and the menopause. I think he must by then have had to deal
with neuroses linked with the menopause, for when he was 5 6 he
writes: 'It is well known that more or less sudden increases of libido
of this kind are habitually associated with puberty and the menopause
- with the attainment of a certain age in women; in some people they
may in addition be manifested in periodicities that are still unknown
...' (Freud, 1912).
Now it seems to me that Freud is touching on the possibility of
developmental crises in the course of the life cycle that are still
unknown to him. He does not, however, seem to go on to the next
step and reconsider the possibility of new factors emerging which
would facilitate the psychoanalysing of older patients.
The first person to challenge Freud's position in relation to the psy-
choanalysis of patients in the second half of life was Karl Abraham in
1919 in a paper, 'The applicability of psycho-analytic treatment to
patients at an advanced age'. After discussing his cases Abraham puts
forward hypotheses for his successes and failures. He writes: 'the age
at which the neurosis breaks out is of greater importance for the suc-
cess of psychoanalysis than the age at which treatment is begun'
(Abraham, 1919, pp. 315-16).
Abraham's findings were corroborated by a number of other psy-
choanalysts. Yet in his much quoted work on 'The psychoanalytic
theory of the neuroses' published in 1945, Fenichel can still consider
age as a strong contra-indication for psychoanalytic treatment. He
writes '... In considering analysis at an advanced age, the entire situa-
tion of the patient is decisive. If he has possibilities of libidinal and
Psychoamlysis and Culture
narcissistic gratification, analysis seems more hopeful than if the
analysis would only bring the insight that life has been a failure
without offering any opportunity to make up for it. For removing a
specific symptom, analysis may be tried even with old persons; if, how-
ever, a deep character change would be necessary to achieve the cure,
it must be remembered that the possibility of change is very limited in
older persons ...' (Fenichel, 1945, pp. 575 -6).
Following my researches into the history of the attitudes of earlier
psychoanalysts to the analysis of middle aged and elderly patients, I
began to understand where my French colleagues had obtained sup-
port for their strongly expressed opinion that you could not analyse
anyone over 40 years of age. This led me to wonder whether there
were rnetapsychological difficulties which made it difficult for some
psychoanalysts to accept the possibility of psychoanalysing elderly
patients.
I felt that there was a discrepancy between the conceptual frame-
work and theories with which these analysts worked and the clinical
experience that some analysts were reporting. It seemed to me that
when these analysts have attempted to think about the possibility of
conceptualising their work with ageing patients, they use the same
concepts and frames of reference that were applicable to the younger
patients. 1 think that this arose, not only from a 'theoretical fixation'
on the first five years of life, but also from a failure to understand and
conceptualise the inter-relation, that continues through the whole life
cycle, between the sociobiological and psycho-dynamic processes
within the individual. Concern with these seemed to stop after
puberty. There was therefore no adequate conceptual framework for
considering the possibility that later socio-biological changes would
lead to psychological ones, and that changes imposed by ageing could
be assimilated and integrated within the personality or that this
process could lead to psychological growth.
Theoretical Developments in Psychoanalytic Research and

Theory Since 1945
I then decided to explore whether there were any special advances in
psychoanalytic theory and technique since 1945, which could provide
psychoanalysts with new concepts which would help them to under-
stand and treat older patients more effectively.
Leading up to and following World War I1 certain developments
took place in psychoanalytic theory and research which I think opened
up new possibilities for extensions of the conceptual frames of refer-
ence within which psychoanalysts work. I summarise them as follows
under four headings:
9. 'In My End is My Brginning' - TS.Eiot
1. The understanding of the intrapsychic importance of object rela-
tions arising from the work of Klein (Klein, 1948, 1957) and her
colleagues (Klein et al., 1952, 1955), and also the work of Rickman
(1957), Winnicott (1956, 1965), Jacobson (1965), Balint (1957) and
Fairbairn (1952) who focused on the fate and function of internal
objects in normal and pathological development within the context of
two-person relationships.
2. The understanding of the self and the development of the ego
and autonomous ego functions arising from the work of Hartmann
(1958, 1964) and his colleagues. and the concept of developmental
lines formulated by Anna Freud (1965).
3. The understanding of the importance of the mother-child matrix
from which the young child emerges, the infant being seen as part of
an inter-dependent unit with the mother, whose actual personality
contributes to the situation, arising from the work of Winnicott (1956,
1960a), Balint (1968), Greenacre (1953), Spitz (1950), and Escalona
(1953). Bowlby (1969) following ethological concepts emphasised the
importance of critic31 periods in relation to the developmental
processes in the context of the child's attachment to the mother and
the et'fect of separation at different ages.
4. Arising from the epigenetic approach OF Erikson (1959) (see also
Rapaport, 1959), the understanding of the importance of the capacity
of the maturational processes of the child to fit appropriate cultural
requirements and vice-versa, and thus the significance of these bring
appropriate to the child's phase of development.
These significant advances in psychoanalytic thinking and research,
have increased our understanding oC devrlopmenal processes in the
area of ego functions and object relations, and the affective implica-
tions of these for mental health. They have provided additions to our
conceptual frame of reference and this has encouraged some analysts
to reconsider the possibility of analysing patients in older age groups.
During the last 40 years, psychoanalysts in Boston, Chicago and
London, among others, have done pioneer work exploring the prob-
lems, limitations and possibilities of treating the neurotic illnesses of
elderly patients.
You will notice that all these extensions of psychoanalytic theory
were concerned in some way with developmental processes, the devel-
opment of ego functions and of object relationships.
C o m m e n t o n Four of the Above Contributions

I would now like to comment on the contributions of some analysts
whose work throws light on the psychodynamics of patients in the
second half of life - especially between the ages of 45 and 65 years.
1 . Martin Gmtjahn
Martin Grotjahn was one of the few people working with old patients
who treated them by psychoanalysis as well as by psychotherapy, and
his work indicates a more optimistic approach in that he sees some of
the changing faculties and experiences of ageing as a possible thera-
peutic asset. In two papers published in 1951 and 1955 (Grotjahn,
1951, 1955) he makes a number of valuable points. He lists three dif-
ferent potential reactions to ageing: 1)the normal reaction which aims
at integration and acceptance of life as it has been lived; 2) an
increased conservatism and rigidity of the ego, a trying to hold the line
of defences according to the pattern of previous more or less neurotic
adjustments; 3) neurotic and frequently psychotic regression.
He believes that the prospects of treatment are better for those who
are not psychotic, and that some aspects of ageing even seem to facil-
itate psychotherapy. The demands of reality, which may have appeared
to a younger person as narcissistic threats, may finally become accept-
able to the older person. As a result, he feels that resistances were
more or less gradually weakened, and insight occurred because it was
'high time'. The attitude of introspection in old age he felt could be
turned into an attitude of retrospection which may constitute a basis
for therapy.
According to Grotjahn, as growing old is often felt as a narcissistic
trauma it represents and repeats the castration threat. The neuroses of
old age are, therefore, he feels, defences against castration anxiety. In
old age the integrative function of the ego is decreased, but the infan-
tile wishes are waiting to return. Genital impulses may decrease, but
anal and oral strivings may remain or gain in strength. Grotjahn is one
of the first psychoanalysts to consider reassessing the function of psy-
chic processes as ageing proceeds (Grotjahn, 1955).
Erikson was one of the first psychoanalysts to attempt to integrate

human growth and development with psycho-social development. He
adopted what he called an epigenetic approach and he formulated
eight phases in the life cycle when the growing individual is con-
fronted with new phase-specific, developmental tasks which can either
be surmounted in a healthy self-integrative way that is ego syntonic
with mastery of phase appropriate physical, psychological and social
tasks and relationships, or can be reacted to in a negative, rejecting and
self alienating way (Erikson, 1951, 1959).
His model covered the whole life cycle and he was the first psy-
choanalyst, according to David Rapaport, to include those later phases
9. 'In My End is My Beginning1- TS.ELot
of the life cycle which are referred to under the concept of genital
maturity. How an individual meets the challenges and anxieties posed
by the current developmental phase he maintained will influence how
he is able to meet old age and death. This being so, it is very impor-
tant to understand more about how to help people in the decades
before old age and death.
3. Melanie Klein
Klein and those influenced by her work have played a considerable
part in creating a wider conceptual frame of reference from which to
view developmental processes. Her formulation of the paranoid-
schizoid and depressive positions as developmental phases with which
certain definable psychological tasks are associated if healthy develop-
ment to maturity is to result, has been both clinically and descriptively
useful. They both define modes of relating to and perceiving objects
(people) whether they are experienced as part of the internal or
external world of the person (Klein, 1948, 1957).
In her summary of Klein's work Segal writes as follows: I...Klein
chose the term "positionn to emphasise the fact that the phenomenon
she was describing was not simply a passing "stage" or a "phase" such
as, for example, the oral phase; her term implies a specific configura-
tion of object relations, anxieties, and defences which persist
throughout life. The depressive position never fully supersedes the
paranoid-schizoid position; the integration achieved is never complete
and defences against the depressive conflict bring about regression to
paranoid-schizoid phenomena, so that the individual at all times may
oscillate between the two. Any problem met with in later stages, as, for
instance, the Oedipus complex, can be tackled with a paranoid-
schizoid or a depressive pattern of relationships, anxiety and defences
...' (xii) (Segal, 1964). 'Problems' can now be seen to include ageing
and death.
The relevance of Klein's work for understanding the vicissitudes of
emotional responses in the course of ageing must be obvious. But more
important, in my opinion, is her work on the integrative processes that
result from the acceptance of destructive impulses, as well as loving
ones, towards those people (objects) whom we consciously love and
value, which enables us to see and experience them as whole individ-
uals (objects), i.e. not split into good and bad objects, with their own
separate existence, feelings and points of view, etc., and not as exten-
sions of ourselves.
If this stage has not been satisfactorily reached in the course of life
up to adulthood, individuals find it very difficult to accept and inte-
grate (without falling ill) the sequence of losses and depletions that
ageing and death inevitably confront them with. It offers the possi-
bility of working through the guilt and bitterness of life's failures and
gaining enrichment thereby, and not just, as Fenichel put it, giving '...
the insight that life has been a failure without offering any opportunity
to make up for it' (Fenichel, 1945).
However, despite the help offered by this new way of conceptual-
ising certain developmental processes and mechanisms, only two
papers have been published in this country, reporting the use of this
approach to the analysis of patients in the context of ageing. One
paper, which I referred to earlier was by Segal (Segal, 1958) and is
entitled 'Fear of death: notes on the analysis of an old man'. It is a very
good example of the use of Klein's concepts in relation to the prob-
lems of ageing and death. The other paper was by Elliot Jaques and is
entitled 'Death and the mid-life crisis' Uaques, 1965). He deals with
the crises that occur around the age of 35 which he calls 'the mid-life
crises', and his patients are therefore within the 'acceptable' age range
of 15 to 40.
But Jaques does more than illustrate the usefulness of Kleinian con-
cepts in the analysis of patients concerned with ageing. He puts
forward and delineates a new concept which integrates psychological
processes with developmental and maturational ones and relates both
to the socio-cultural activities of the individual. He sees the mid-life
crisis as the first sign of middle age when the individual is confronted
not only with discrepancies between the demands of his ego-ideal and
his reality achievements, but also with the fact of his eventual death.
This confrontation, he feels, can lead either to a depressive breakdown
or to a reappraisal of the appropriateness of the individual's current
life pattern and system of values. It is, perhaps, during this process of
reappraisal that individuals may become aware of the 'senselessness
and aimlessness of their lives' which Jung described many of his
patients as suffering from in the second half of life Uung, 1929, p. 41).
4. Winnicott
Another development which I found helpful in dealing with patients
in the second half of life stems from the work of Winnicott (1960b). I
am referring to his concept of the true and the false self, which paral-
leled the approach of the existentialist philosophers and was also
employed by Laing (1960, 1961). Winnicott found that the type of
patients who were coming to analysis often suffered from feelings of
futility and unreality in spite of their apparent success in life. In a
paper on 'Alienation and the individual' (King, 1968) I summarised his
use of these concepts as follows and obtained his agreement on my for-
mulation.
... According to Winnicott, the truc sclf is that pan of the sclf thar con-
tains the inherited of the individual. It appears as soon as therc
is any mental organisation in the individual at all, and at the beginning it
means lidc more than the summation of the sensorimotor aliveness of
the baby, before the concept of an individual or the inner reality of
objects develops. The truc self comes from the aliveness of the body ris-
sues and the working of the body functions, and it is linked with the idea
of primary processes and primary experiences, not re-aaive ones ...
Wlnnicort describes the falsc self as follows: 'The falsc self is built up
on the basis of compliance. It can have a defensive function, which is the
protccrion of the truc sclf'. He stares thar only the tmc sclf can feel real
but it must never be forced to comply with external reality. It is the falsc
sclf which adapts or alters itself in response to forced environmental
pressures, but h e individual retains some awareness of the 'not-me'
quality of this compliance. But 'when the falsc sclf becomes exploited'
- either by the individual himself or the environment - 'and treated as
real, there is 3 growing sense in the individual of futility and despair'. In
cliniul work one comes across a11 degrees of this process ... Thus 'only
the truc sclf can be analyscd', as the false sclf is ;In internaliscd environ-
ment, unlinked with what is felt to be the core of the person. The
defences, in these cases, are like a facade of a building unlinked to the
building itself. These defences may be massive and u n be carried out
with considerable social success. These patients come for analysis
bcuusc of a continued feeling of futility and unrealncss. in spite of the
apparent success of the life and their defence - the hlse sclf system
(W~nnicott,1959-64).
Where there is a high degree of split beween the true sclf and the
false sclf which hides the true sclf, there is found a poor capacity for
using symbols. and a poverty of cultural living.' For hedth 'is closely
bound up with the capacity of the individual to live in an area that is
intenncdiatc between the dream and the reality, that which is called cul-
turd life'. 'Instead of cultural pursuits', he stares. 'one observes in such
persons extreme restlessness, an inability to concentrare, and a need to
collea impingements from external reality, so that the living-rime of the
individual can be filled by reactions to these impingements. (Winnicocr,
1960b)
While patients of all ages may have symptoms linked with 'false self'
personalities, I do think that it becomes a more serious problem when
patients approach the second haif of their lives and face the possibility
of retirement. When such patients have relied on their jobs to provide
these impingements, and they then have to face life in retirement or
unemployment, these symptoms tend to appear, even if they had not
been apparent before.
While working with middle aged and elderly patients I have found
the contributions of the psychoanalytic writers I have just discussed to
be useful in understanding the special difficulties these patients were
experiencing. In different ways their formulations illumined the ratio-
nale of their symptoms, their special defences and their fear of psychic
awareness, change and death - the final change.
Pressures Which Bring Older Patients to Seek Psychoanalysis

My experience of working with Middle Aged and Elderly paaents has
led me to the conclusion that they can benefit a great deal from
analysis, although because there is a persistence of the belief that
psychoanalysis u n be of l i d e help to a pauent over 45, only a limited
number of such people find their way into analysis. As I mentioned
urlier, Elliot Jaques (1965) has drawn arcention to the imporrance of
mid-life crises and the potentialities for change that thcx crises open up
in patients during their urly middle age. This links up with Freud's
comments, referred to earlier, when he suggested the possibility that
later crises in the developmend processes, related to sexual changes
in the individual may lead to neurotic breakdowns at key phves in
the life cycle and 'may be manifested in periodicities that are still
unknown' (Freud, 1912). As Erikson points out, at each s q in their
life cycle, individuals are ficed with crises and possible changa, which
threaten their assumptions about themselves and their relations to their
objms and objmivcs, often involving awareness of the need to alter
their image of ehemxlvcs and the of facing old narcissistic
wounds.
Some of the Middle Aged and Elderly patients I have analysed had
problems in early adulthood that led me to classify them as narcissistic
personalities. They exhibited narcissistic over-valuation of the self,
inability to cathect their sexual partners with object-libido, and
omnipotent needs to control their objects which were cathectcd with
narcissistic libido and treated. as extensions of themselves, so that the
needs of their objects were treated with indifference.
I had the feeling that unless they had needed analysis for profes-
sional purposes, they would have been unlikely to seek treatment
earlier, as they were not aware of their illness (to them what I would
call illness was their way of life). If anyone needed help it was their
objects who were narcissistically unsatisfactory to them. They them-
selves had not experienced, then, sufficient discomfort to be able to
face the pain of changing.
Some of these patients, however, eventually came to analysis as,
although they had achieved a reasonably satisfactory position in their
professional life, they had come to feel that their relationships were
9. 'In My End is My Bqanning' - 73.Eliot
artificial and devoid of meaning, they suffered from feelings of futility,
lack of satisfaction in their achievements, and an increasing feeling of
alienation from themselves and others. (King, 1968)
I asked myself what had changed in their situation that made it
now possible for them to seek treatment. It seemed to me that an
important reason for this change was their increasing awareness of
the reality of the physical, psychological and social effects of ageing
on themselves, and this was a reality which they could no longer deny,
and which in turn was undermining the effectiveness of their narcis-
sistic equilibrium. The prospect of ageing was felt to threaten them
with disintegration, and they had little notion of being able to adjust
progressively to the changes demanded of them by the process of
ageing.
I would now like to consider some of the pressures which operate
as sources of anxiety and concern during the second half of the life
cycle and lead some neurotic individuals to seek psychotherapeutic
help, when they either have managed without it up to that time, or
their neurosis has been inadequately or partially helped at a younger
age. I will summarise them:
(1) The fear of the diminution or loss of sexual potency and the
impact this would have on relationships.
(2) The threat of redundancy or displaccrnent in work roles by
younger people and awareness of the possible failure of the effectiveness
of their professional skills. linked with the fear that they would not be
able to cope with retirement, and would lose their sense of identity and
worth when they lost their professional or work role.
(3) Anxieties arising in marital relationships aiter children have left
home, and parents can no longer use their children to mask problems
arising in their relationship with each other.
(4) The awareness of their own ageing, possible illness, and conse-
quent dependence on others, and the anxiety this arouses in them.
( 5 ) The inevitability of their own death and the realisation that they
may not now be able to achieve the goals they set for themselves, and
that what they can achieve and enjoy in life may be limited, with con-
sequent feelings of depression or deprivation.
Psychoanalytic Work With a Middle-Aged Woman

The impact of these pressures on the analysis of a patient became clear
to me early in my analytic career when I started to analyse a woman
of 63 (already referred to above), whom I will call Miss A, who was
suffering from an acute anxiety state prior to retirement. She had been
in charge of a children's home for many years and her job had become
the main source of her own sense of worth, self-esteem and identity,
so that her ego had become parasitical on this role due to her exces-
sive narcissistic investment of the latter. She had no adequate image of
herself apart from her role, and therefore no appropriate sense of
ontological security. As one could predict she had developed severe
psychosomatic symptoms linked with her body boundary. (She was
losing her hair and had developed a serious skin condition.) She had
had some analysis thirty years earlier, and she was no stranger to the
meaning of her condition, and she suffered much shame as a result. As
I mentioned earlier, she was very grateful, at first, that I had agreed to
help her, and was aware that many psychoanalysts would have refused
to do so.
She was the youngest of a large family and was brought up mainly
by nannies and governesses. Her mother was unable to show any emo-
tion or to respond to affection from her children. When her father was
at home he was distant and aloof, but he spent much time away on
business. The whole family treated her as 'the Baby', and while some
elder siblings 'mothered' her, she nevertheless felt isolated and of little
worth, except when she was gaining the 'perks' that went with her role
as the family's baby. In fact, she looked young for her age and she still
had a capacity for openness and excitement in discovering new things
that one associates with young children, and this must have helped her
to be good at her job.
In her analysis it became clear that she suffered intense jealousy
and envy of her older siblings, whom she felt had had a bemer time,
and this was also experienced in relation to her younger colleagues
(who would cake over her job - she had been a pioneer in her field).
These feelings were soon experienced towards me, as she felt me to
be different figures from her put. She became resentful and angry at
my youth, that I was an analyst, and yet afnid that I would give her
up, not being able to stand either her physical condition, which was
rather unpleasant, or her paranoid anxieties and resentful feelings.
She was very aware that this w u her last chance. During the early
stages of the analysis much m re-genital material emerged and she
developed an intense transference relationshi to me. But as time
P
went on, and we could work through her de ensive stance of being
the 'Baby' we came to her feelings of shame and depression that she
had been a spinster all her life. and had never had children of her
own. At first she tried to defend herself from awareness of her x x d
deprivation and ageing by self-denigrating fantasies, but gradually
they gave way to an acceptance of herself as she was and the depres-
sion changed to sadness about what she had missed in her life, and
to a consideration of what was still possible for her. It was during
9. 'In My End is MyBeginning'- ZS. Eliot
this period that her psychosomatic symptoms cleared up and it
seemed to me that considerable ego growth had taken place. She also
managed to make plans for her retirement. She brought a cottage in
the country and started exploring contacts in that area. When she
retired she moved away from London and we had to terminate her
analysis. She kept in touch with me and sent me occasional reports on
how she was progressing. She has now died, but not before she had
had over 30 years of creative and contented life since she came to me
for analysis. When she left me I was unsure how she would manage.
In retrospect, I realise that she had re-experienced during her
analysis many of her adolescent problems that had made it difficult for
her to pass from childhood to adulthood, but that with the analysis of
her paranoid and depressive anxieties related to that stage of her life
cycle, ego growth and phase appropriate sublimation could take place.
Parallels Between the Problems Faced by Middle-Aged

Adults and Adolescents
Since then I have analysed a number of middle-aged and elderly
patients, and I have noticed the parallels between the developmental
and psychological tasks posed during adolescence and middle age, as
well as the importance of working through early pregenital anxieties
and defences, which other writers have referred to.
It has become progressively clear to me that for analysis to be suc-
cessful for middle-aged and elderly patients, the traumas and
psychopathology of puberty and adolescence must be re-experienced
and worked through in the transference, whatever early infantile mate-
rial is also dealt with. One reason for this may be that the middle-aged
individual is having to face many of the same problems as he did in his
adolescence, but this time in reverse, for it is a period of involution. At
both phases of the life cycle he has to adjust to sexual and biological
changes in himself; awareness of these changes can arouse anxiety as
basic sources of security are threatened. These arc exacerbated by role
changes and their socio-economic consequences, for example, possible
lack of money following retirement, leading to conflias about depen-
dency and independence, which are also experienced during
adolescence. During both periods he will probably have to face a
change from a two generational home to a one generational household
and the consequent need to make new relationships; old defences may
break down as socio-biological and psychological pressures shift, often
precipitating an identity crisis, in terms of self-perception and percep-
tion of the self by others, and necessitating changes in his self-image,
accompanied by possible narcissistic trauma and wounds to self-esteem.
I think that it is the existence of these parallels that often exacer-
bate the conflicts between parents and their adolescent children, and
lead to their mutual scapegoating.
What Can Be Achieved in the Psychoanalysis of

Ageing Patients
It has been my experience that the gradual awareness of the changes
in the life situation of my middle-aged patients, not only brings them
into analysis, but the pressures arising from these changes tend to
introduce a new dynamic and sense of urgency into their analysis, thus
facilitating a more productive therapeutic alliance than one often man-
ages to establish with similar younger adult patients. They are usually
conscious of the fact that this is their last chance t o effect an alteration
in their lives and relationships, before being faced with the reality of
the physical, psychological and social effects of ageing to themselves.
The immediacy of their actual losses and depletions makes it less easy
for them to deny paranoid and depressive anxieties, so that a process
of mourning can more easily be initiated and blaming others can give
way t o sadness and forgiveness of themselves and others, and the
prospect of their own death becomes less persecutory.
The lessening of instinctual drives and impulses that occurs with
ageing may reduce the need for the rigidity of the defences, so that
there can be a diminution of the severity of the super-ego, and sexual
inhibitions and symptoms can also shift, even in later years, giving
patients renewed access to their sexuality. One of the hazards may be
that this sometimes precipitates adolescent acting-out, which could
endanger further analysis, or a previous good marital relationship.
With the analysis of infantile anxieties and the diminution of the
power of archaic parental images, these patients become able to assim-
ilate new object representations into their psychic structure, thus
facilitating ego growth, the development of new sublimations and the
modification of their ego-ideal and therefore of their own self-image.
Thus, as splits in their ego are lessened and the feeling of alienation
from themselves and others decreases, they begin to experience a new
sense of their own identity and the value of their own achievements
and worth. This is not unduly threatened by loneliness and increasing
incapacity, for they can retain contact with an inner source of aliveness
and goodness, without the need for constant reassurances from others,
which so often ruins the relationships of older people.
This rediscovery of their own identity I link with a shift from living
through their false self to living through their true self, which often
runs parallel to and is perhaps mediated by the development of new
forms of creativity and new ways of perceiving people, perceiving time
and the world around them. With some it is as though they have to
9. 'In My End is My Beginning1- TS.E h r
learn to exist in a new key or dimension of being, which they feel is
very different from how they have lived before. It is as if the centre of
their gravity moves from the edge of themselves to their own inner
centre. They begin to experience a new sense of tranquillity which is
not dependent on the continuity of an intact body, or of family rela-
tionships, or of a role in the community, although it may be enriched
by these, but which is based on a sense of identity and of their own
value and purpose in life. When elderly patients have achieved this, I
find that they are then often able to get access to new forms of cre-
ativeness within themselves, which result in experiences of satisfaction
quite different from any experiences during the first half of their lives.
Hazards Whcn Working With Older Patients

Of course, psychoanalysis cannot always achieve such changes in older
patients, as it is also unable to do so in younger ones. Many things may
go wrong or be unsatisfactory in the analysis of older patients. An
older patient is more likely to develop some terminal illness, which
does not mean that psychoanalysis has to be stopped, but it may
change the goals of the analysis and it certainly puts special pressures
on the analyst about accepting his own possible illness and death.
Another patient may feel that analysis keeps him alive, and that to stop
analysis means that he will die or develop a terminal illness, and this
can lead to an interminable analysis which the analyst may be afraid or
unable to terminate. Sometimes the analyst can be faced with a nega-
tive therapeutic reacrion in a patient arising, for example from envy of
the analyst's youth and capacities, which is expressed by continued
attacks on the analysis and resentment about any analytic successes. Or
again, neurotic symptoms may be so rigidly entrenched by obsessional
defences that psychoanalysis can be incorporated as part of the obses-
sional ritual and the psychoanalytic process can be hijacked by the
patient's illness, unless the analyst is aware that the very continuity and
security offered by the analytic serting has been taken over in this way.
What Are the Special Problems for Psychoanalysts Working
with Elderly Patients?
In aslung that psychoanalysts reconsider the implications of ageing and
the particular problems of patients in the second half of life, one is
really suggesting that they look at themselves and what is happening
to them as people. Most of the psychoanalysts who write papers, how-
ever, are middle-aged, beween 45 and 65, and I think that writing
about patients of this age group confronts them with their own prob-
lems in accepting ageing, and the reappraisal of the satisfactoriness of
their own lives as people.
These issues become particularly acute when they have to deal with
transference and countertransference problems that can be encoun-
tered by psychoanalysts during the analysis of middle-aged and elderly
patients. The transference itself may take various forms, and whatever
is being re-experienced in the transference, eroticised or psychotic
affects may be superimposed on it as a result of the impact of uncon-
scious phantasies. But the affects, whether positive or negative, that
may accompany transference phenomena are often very intense with
older patients, and they may arouse unacceptable feelings in the ana-
lyst towards his own ageing parents. It is therefore necessary for those
undertaking the psychoanalysis of such patients to have come to terms
with their own feelings about their own parents and to have accepted
in a healthy, self-integrative way, their own stage in their life cycle and
their own ageing process. They are then more able to make use of their
affective responses to their patient's communications to illumine the
vicissitudes of his transference. (King, 1978)
There are, however, certain reality problems which can influence
the analyst's emotional responses to his middle-aged and elderly
patients. He will be aware that there may be time limits within which
he and his patient have to work, and this may impose both a strain on
the work as well as an incentive. One such time-limit may be set by
financial considerations, when a patient is unable to continue analysis
after retirement. But patients may behave as if they had the same span
of time before them that they had in their adolescence, leaving their
analyst to carry the urgency of their situation, and denying their actual
position in their life cycle. This belief may be reinforced by acting out
and behaviour more reminiscent of adolescence than middle age,
which can endanger the continuation of treatment and the health of
the patient. But while it is not easy to keep adolescents in psycho-
analysis, it is often the opposite for middle-aged and elderly patients.
It is difficult to terminate their analyses. They may, for example,
develop a negative therapeutic reaction which is linked with the fan-
tasy that by avoiding change or therapeutic improvement, they will
exist outside time and therefore avoid ageing and death.
Unconsciously, they link mental health with being alive, and if they can
manage not to be part of life, they will not die. This reaction from the
middle-aged patient can be difficult for the analyst to deal with emo-
tionally, because these patients also manage to convey the impression
that analysis is keeping them alive. It is sometimes possible to work
through this phase, when, for example, through the patient's transfer-
ence it can be understood that the analyst is being made to carry his
patient's guilt for having (as he felt) left his own parents to die.
When 1 have discussed the analysis of elderly patients with younger
colleagues, they have sometimes expressed the opinion that they
9. r(n M
y End is My Beginning'- TS.Eliot
would be unable to treat patients older than themselves, as they
thought the patients would be unwilling to trust someone obviously
younger than themselves. But patients may well experience them-
selves, in terms of a psychological time-scale, as quite small and even
helpless and the analyst as older than he is. Thus I find it important to
remember that middle-aged and elderly patients may be functioning
within a number of different time-scales. These may include a chrono-
logical time-scale, a psychological one, and a biological one, alongside
the time-scale of unconscious processes, which are paradoxically, time-
less. An understanding of the time-scale within which an elderly
patient is currently functioning in the analytic session gives the analyst
an important key to the understanding of transference phenomena in
such patients. The analyst can be experienced in the transference as
any significant figure from the elderly patient's past, sometimes cov-
ering a span of five generations, and for any of these transference
figures the roles may be reversed, so that the patient behaves to the
analyst as he experienced them behaving to him, and he treats the ana-
lyst as he felt he was treated by them (King, 1978).
. Postscript
In 1979 I took part in a Symposium which was concerned with the dif-
ferent forms of transference met with in the analysis of Children,
Adolescents and Elderly patients. This took place at the fine Congress
of the International Psychoanalytical Association to be held in the
United Scares and it took place in New York. It was the first time that
the analysis of older aticnts had been induded in the main programme
of such Congr-. h e n e g l a of this topic was, I suspect, one result
of the negative attitude towards the possibility of Psychoanalytic
work with older patients, the history of which I have described earlier.
I should rnenaon that Psychotherapy was permissible with older patients,
and in fia the members of the Boston Society for Gerontologic Psy-
chiatry had undertaken and published reports of such work (Berczin and
Cath, 1965).
Erik Erikson gave the opening paper and the paper that I read was
entitled 'The Life Cycle as indicated by the nature of the Transference
in the middle-aged and Elderly' (King, 1980). I was particularly aware
of the support of Segal during the final plenary discussion of this topic.
I challenged my American colleagues to reconsider their negative atti-
tude to the acceptance of elderly patients for Psychoanalytic treatment.
I understood that it was not then easy to get patients for psycho-
analysis in New York, and yet Psychoanalysts turned down the chance
of helping middle-aged and elderly patients, who came for psychoan-
alytic help, just when they were in a position to earn enough money to
pay for it. It was unfair to these potential patients and also sad for the
psychoanalysts themselves. My comments were met with wide
applause from the audience which Hanna encouraged from her seat in
the balcony.
At the end of the Congress I was asked, secretly, to meet a very
senior and elderly American psychoanalyst, who was keen to let me
know that she was getting good results from her work with a 70 year
old patient. She said that she was grateful to me for breaking the taboo
which seemed to have existed among her colleagues.
Since then, many colleagues have told me that they have changed
their opinions about the ages of patients that they arc prepared to
accept for Psychoanalysis, and they were impressed with the results
that they were getting and some have published papers on their work.
Also, I have been informed recently that a number of Psychoanalysts
in the United States have organised groups to discuss Psychoanalytic
work with elderly patients. Such groups make it possible to share
experiences among those doing psychoanalytical work with older
patients, in the exploration of which Segal was a pioneer.
I will close by quoting lines by T.S. Eliot from his poem 'East Coker'
which seem to me to bring together some of the ideas I have been dis-
cussing.
Home is where one stam from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the panern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated. with no before and afier,
Buc a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
Bur of old scones that cannot be deciphered . . .
Love is most nearly iuclf
When here and now ceve to marter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensicy . . .
In my end is my beginning.
(Eliot. 1963)
A Psychoanalyst's Look at a Hypnotist
A Study of Folie ri deux
A.A.Ma~on
Folie a deux has been described many times in psychiatric and other
literature. I believe that Klein's (1946) concept of projective identifi-
cation illuminates how and why this syndrome arises, and while
projective identification has been described extensively since Klein, I
cannot recall that it has been described as occurring simultaneously
between two persons with similar fantasies. This is the main thrust of
this paper.
When I was three years old, I observed the doctor from the Mission
examine my mother, which, doubtless, influenced my choice of pro-
fession. I devoured stories about medical heroes, while devouring the
heroes too. My parents seemed to be always ill or suffering and anaes-
thesiology became my first choice of medicine (to anacsthetise my
internal objects?).
IVY fascination with Mesmer and Bernheim led me to experiment
with hypnosis and in my first papers (1954 and 1955), I used hypno-
tism for major surgery, apparently for the first time since the days of
Esdaile in 1846, and I was soon in demand for the treatment of
hypochondriacal, psychological, and psychosomatic disorders. These
are conditions in which there is both a high spontaneous recovery rate
and frequent conversion to other conditions, so that any practitioner
of suggestion, however bizarre, has 'success' in a fair proportion of
cases.
The startling phenomenon of wart removal by hypnotic suggestion
was aruemely impressive (Muon, 1960a), for while the abolition of pain
is dramatic, the removal of growths that can be a d y s e n appears to
be a more significant demonstration of power. The unilateral removal of
multiple w m , which I also did, demonstrates that the curative stimulus
is transmitted directly from the centnl nervous system and cannot be
systemic A national rugby player, whose multiple warm had recurred
several times following diathermy and who was prevented from playing
for his country by this disability, was cured in two weeks. This was heady
wine indeed.
Following this I saw a fifteen-year-old boy whose arms were liter-
ally covered, as I then believed, by thousands of hard black warts. A
surgeon was attempting to graft the palms of the patient's hands with
skin from his chest, as the hands were virtually useless as working
tools. This was an even more severe case than the rugby player, and
more of a challenge, so I asked if I could attempt treatment with hyp-
nosis. Later I learned that I had failed to differentiate between the
common wart - a viral tumour - and what was, in fact, a totally dif-
ferent condition.
The surgeon told me I could try anything I pleased. He had finally
decided, I later learned, to abandon the attempt at surgery. The next
day I hypnotised the patient and told him that the warts on his right
arm would shrivel up and die, leaving normal skin underneath. I told
the patient to return in a week. When he did, he showed me his right
arm, which was about 80% cleared (Mason, 1952). I was pleased, and
in the folly of ignorance, not totally surprised to see the improvement.
The surgeon, on the other hand, was literally struck dumb. On recov-
ering, he informed me with some exasperation that his patient was not
suffering from warts at all, but had a congenital deformity known as
congenital ichthyosiform erythrodermia of Brocq. It was structural
and organic, sometimes with a genetic basis, and had never in fact been
affected by any treatment previously, organic or psychiatric. As I
learned later, it remains the only properly recorded case of a congen-
ital-structural deformity improving in the history of medicine.
The case was presented the very next day at the Royal Society of
Medicine to some sixty dermatologists, where the diagnosis was con-
firmed. Later, a skin section performed by Professor Magnus of King's
College Hospital confirmed the diagnosis histologically as ichthyosis
congenita.
Over the next six weeks, I treated the rest of the patient with the
result that approximately 70% of the condition disappeared and the
case and photographs were published (Mason, 1952).
Three years later I published a follow-up of the case (Mason,
1955a). The 70% improvement had been maintained, but when I
attempted to re-hypnotise the boy in the hope of clearing up the
remainder of his skin condition, he was resistant to going into a trance
state. This, I found out later, was because of his fear that I might cause
a reversal of his illness to his original condition.
Following the original report, Dr T. Ray Bettley (1952, p. 996),
President of the Dermatological Society, RSM, summarised everyone's
bewilderment at this extraordinary event by writing: 'That improve-
ment occurred in a case of this nature demands revision of current
concepts of the relation between mind and body'. And, 'The improve-
ment was as incomprehensible as if a club foot had, in fact, improved'.
10. A Psychoanalyst's Look a t a Hypnotist
The intense interest stimulated by this case encouraged me to
pursue further research on the effects of hypnotism and I next
attempted, together with K. Cohen, M.D., to treat a series of mixed
skin disorders selected on the basis of their chronicity at the
Department of Dermatology at St. George's Hospital, London. These
cases had a history of at least five years' treatment with various classic
remedies. There were over one hundred patients in all treated by
straightforward hypnotic suggestion. Approximately 70% of these
cases showed marked improvement, and this series was presented at
the International Dermatological Congress in London (Gordon et al.,
1952). I later discussed the results of this work with Clifford Scott,
who pointed out that my cases had been seen for close t o an hour for
each treatment, compared with the five t o ten minutes per treatment
given in the skin clinics. 'So', said Scott, 'what you may have demon-
strated is that the more time and trouble you spend on each patient,
the better the results you produce!' At one stroke I had lost a paper
demonstrating the value of hypnosis alone in the treatment of chronic
skin disorders, but I had gained an important lesson in thinking. I also
discussed my congenital ichthyotic case with Ernest Jones who told me
not to be too impressed with therapeutic success! A consequence of my
wish to understand what I was doing was that I undertook a training
in the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. At that time I had no idea
that it would take thirty-five years for a few glimmers of light to occur.
In the period 1958-1964, I produced two papers related to allergic
phenomena. In one (Mason et al., 1964)' I treated forty-seven patients
who suffered from various allergic conditions such as asthma, hay
fever, and skin rashes, and found that hypnotism did measurably
diminish the symptomatology in over thirty of the patients. In another
paper (Mason and Black, 1958), one case was investigated in a more
detailed way, with weekly skin tests during the treatment. In this case,
the allergic skin response gradually diminished and finally totally dis-
appeared. When, however, the serum from the patient was injected
subcutaneously into a nonallergic volunteer, a positive skin reaction
was obtained from this volunteer at the site of the injection and
nowhere else on the volunteer's body. This is known as a positive
Prausnitz-Kiistner reaction. Thus, the symptoms of the physical illness,
as well as the skin response, had been removed by psychological treat-
ment, even though the patient's blood still contained the serological
basis of her hypersensitivity in the form of passively transferable anti-
bodies. Therefore, by direct suggestion under hypnosis, it had been
possible to establish an overriding psychic system of control which not
only kept the patient symptom-free but could also inhibit selectively
the allergic reaction in the skin.
If one assumes that there are at least three factors in the production
of allergic asthma and hay fever - 1) foreign proteins; 2) sensitised
tissue; 3) some state of mind - then presumably the allergic attack can
be influenced by any of these factors. What I had demonstrated was
how an altered state of mind could override the other two factors in
this particular case. Thus states of mind can raise or diminish skin or
tissue sensitivity to allergens.
In my publication of 1964 (Mason et al.? 1964), I demonstrated the
effect of hypnosis on skin sensitivity tests In forty-seven subjects who
were divided into an experimental group and a control group. A sta-
tistically significant diminution of the skin reaction of the group that
was hypnotised was demonstrated.
I also took part in an investigation on three more groups (Maher-
Loughnan et al., 1962). One group was told under hypnosis that one
arm would not respond to skin testing. Another group was told that
both arms would not respond, and a third group was merely hypno-
tised, and no direct suggestion was made regarding the skin response.
All three groups experienced diminished skin weals and the diminu-
tion was unrelated to the suggestions made. It was clear that the
relationship to the hypnotist alone produced a significant response
heedless of the specificity of the suggestions. The result I had obtained
in the first case I published (Mason and Black, 1958), where skin weals
were totally abolished along with the physical symptomatology, was
not duplicated in this much larger series, where the skin responses
were diminished but not totally abolished. This was probably due to
the fact that in this larger series, the experimental measurements were
obtained by different physicians from those performing the hypnosis.
In the first Lancet case (Mason and Black, 1958) I personally con-
ducted both parts of the experiment and, in fact, developed a much
closer relationship with the subject than with any of the subjects of the
larger groups in the 1962 (Maher-Loughnan et al.) and 1964 (Mason
et al.) papers. It was evident that 'better' results occurred when the
emotional relationship between hypnotist and patient was more
intense.
In the 1962 series (Maher-Loughnan et al.), the treatment was con-
ducted by three groups of physicians, and in all three groups
hypnotism was shown to be superior to other symptomatic proce-
dures. However, one other important point emerged. The results of
the two groups in which the hypnotism was performed by the patient's
physician were superior to the third group in which the hypnotist did
not have any contact with the patients other than that of doing hyp-
notism. It was once again evident that in the groups which had the
superior results, the patients and physicians had a more intimate rela-
tionship and were therefore more heavily involved and more
emotionally invested in the outcome. The relationship between patient
10. A Psychoanalyst's Look at a Hypnotist
and doctor clearly plays an enormous part in the production (and
probably even the evaluation) of results.
I would like to quote a letter I wrote to the British Medical]ournal
(Mason, 1963), as it raises certain points which I believe are still
important:
In my own research, I found I was using a small group of subjects over

and over again because of the excellence of their responses. The original
case reported by Black and myself in 1958 was one of these; and a
second use, in which I inhibited a Mantoux test, was another. It took
some time for me to rcalise that the subjects' responses got better all the
time, and they had unconsciously, and at times, consciously learned and
could produce what was required of them.(p. 1675)
I now believe that the deep trance is a somewhat uncommon and

unusual psychical state which occurs only in fairly abnormal personal-
ities, and that the phenomena which occur are due entirely to the
special unconscious relationship which exists between the hypnotist
and the subject, and are not properties inherent to the hypnotic state.
In his preface to a book I wrote on hypnosis (Mason, 1960a),
Professor Alexander Kennedy (1960) said of hypnotism, 'In that a
physical response can occur to a purely sensory experience, the phe-
nomena of hypnotism resemble those of the conditioned reflex' (p. 9).
I used to believe the same as Kennedy, but am now aware that 'purely
sensory' experiences cannot exist in human beings. The mind will
always add its quota to every experience. In fact, it was becoming clear
to me that like all human phenomena, the state of hypnosis was
extremely complex and differed greatly from subject to subject.
In 1964, Halliday and I (Mason and Halliday, 1964a, 1964b) inves-
tigated the effect of hypnotic anaesthesia on cortical responses
following Dawson's (1958) suggestion that anaesthesia produced by
hypnosis might be associated with blocking or gross attenuation of the
afferent sensory volley before it reached the cortex. In fact, Dawson's
idea was compatible with all the current beliefs about hypnotic anaes-
thesia, i.e. that hypnotic suggestions actually diminish or prevent pain
impulses from reaching the brain.
Nine subjects were investigated, and their cortical-evoked poten-
tials were observed before and after hypnosis and while the subjects
reported that they could not perceive the stimulus following sugges-
tions of anaesthesia during the hypnotic state. The cortical-evoked
potentials are the actual quantitative record of pain impulses reaching
the brain.
In five subjects, the average responses to electrical stimulation of
the contralateral hand showed no reduction in amplitude despite the
subjects' reporting that they could not feel the stimulus. The same
result was obtained in three other subjects in whom mechanical taps
were the stimulus in place of electric shock. In four subjects, the non-
specific response to auditory stimuli (clicks) was recorded from a
surface electrode over the vertex, and an attempt was made to induce
deafness under hypnosis. At a time when the clicks were reported as
unheard or very faint and far away, normal nonspecific responses were
being evoked by them at the cortex.
These results suggest that no part of the loss of sensation in a hyp-
notic anaesthesia can be attributed to attenuation of the sensory
messages in the afferent pathways on their way to the cortex.
It was confusing to see that hypnotism was effective in removing
certain symptoms and pathological phenomena - pain, warts, congen-
ital ichthyosis, and allergic symptoms such as weals, rhinitis, and
bronchospasm, and while certain symptoms such as pain and weals
could be ablated, the pain was still being recorded and presumably
experienced at cortical sites. In addition, certain symptoms were being
denied while still physically demonstrably present. It had also become
clear that hypnotic phenomena were not just a concomitant of the
hypnotic state, but were also tied up with the interpersonal relation-
ship between hypnotist and subject. Hypnotism was not, as I had first
believed, similar to chemical anaesthesia, which did have a clearly
defined phenomenology.
It was not easy to dismiss the phenomenon of certain asthmatic
patients assuring me gratefully, after treatment with hypnotism, that
they were now healthy and their asthma hadgone, when vital capacity
testing showed their illness to be unchanged and bronchospasm was
still present. Even three out of four cardiac asthmatics treated by hyp-
nosis claimed to be improved, including one who went into cardiac
failure. These patients all acted as though they were better in order to
fulfil some unconscious fantasy that they had about the therapist or the
therapy. There were also significant disparities in positive results
between different practitioners, and it was evident that unconscious
wishes could colour the observations both of doctors and patients. I
often seriously wondered whether it was patient or doctor who was
hypnotised, and was convinced at times that it was both. Medical prac-
titioners can need the compliance and success of their patients as much
as the patients need relief of their symptoms. And while this may be
the case in many forms of therapy, I believe that this need is even
greater after one has performed hypnosis on the patient.
Omnipotence is, of course, not confined to hypnotists, and can be
detected in all the healing arts: the link which has always been present
between medicine and religion is not fortuitous.
My questions concerning the nature of hypnotism and my growing
conviction that it had little to d o with physiology and lots to do with
transference, has been paralleled by my belief that some so-called psy-
choanalyses are in fact really exercises in suggestion, and that in fact
all psychoanalysis is a mixture of the two. One hopes that the analyst
is aware of this and will gradually analyse the element of suggestion
present, so that it diminishes and finally disappears as the analysis pro-
ceeds. It is certainly important to ask ourselves why the patient has to
lie on the couch. Why for fifty minutes? Why five times weekly? Are
these really valuable tools, or are they religious rituals that we are all
caught up in, helping our converts by the comfort and security we give
them because they are in analysis whether they are being analysed or
not. We, the analysts, are also comforted and reassured by being fol-
lowers of Freud or Klein. The patients are being looked after by us,
and we are being looked after by our theories and institutes of psy-
choanalysis.
There are serious observers who say that all the different theories
produce similar results and that, in effect, it hardly matters what you
say to the patient. These critics, with whom I totally disagree, are
clearly talking about suggestion and not differentiating it from psy-
choanalysis. But they are cautioning us to observe what we believe we
do; and at times we may have to acknowledge that despite our sophis-
tication, we may be performing sophisticated hypnotism.
What was still clear was that I did not understand the nature of sug-
gestion, let alone hypnotism.
In the midst of my confusional state, a group of phenomena con-
tinuously intrigued, puzzled, and fascinated me. What could make a
human being give up his or her body, mind or pain to another. What
produces the phenomenon of 'possession' by the devil, vampires,
voodoo, or by other human beings? What, at times, enables one part
of our mind (our internal objects) to take possession of the whole?
What are these forces that exist between two or more human beings
that seem at times so powerful that they appear more than human?
Remember I had had proof that even a congenital illness can yield to
Svengali if only he knows the magic word.
Some understanding came from a young patient previously diag-
nosed as a catatonic schizophrenic, who brought me a dream of being
raped. This was an anxiety she suffered from frequently. The startling
feature of the rape was that there were eight girls in a row raped by an
intruder, one after the other. They stood transfixed and powerless to
resist even though they numbered eight, and the rapist was slight and
weaponless. My patient said 'He had baby blue eyes which rendered
me powerless. They were the same colour as my own'.
This patient had a sister four years her senior who had been insti-
tutionalised for spastic cerebral paresis ever since my patient was a
child of three or four. My patient's so-called 'catatonia' occurred the
day following her first sexual intercourse, which she found extremely
exciting. She recalled having the painful thought the same night that
her sister would never be able to have sex, or any other relationship
for that matter. It later became clear that the so-called 'catatonia' was
in fact a state of identification with the stiffness of her spastic elder
sister. The patient had many feelings of hate and jealousy toward this
sister for the inordinate love she believed the Darents had for her. and
for the comparisons they made between thesimpaired sister's '&on-
derful' nature and the patient who complained ungratefully and yet
'had everything'. The 'catatonic' identification with the spastic sister
was an expression of unconscious guilt and an attempt to omnipo-
tently repair the sister by taking into herself her sister's illness, the
spasticity. A dream the patient had illustrated the unconscious process.
'There were two trees side by side - one alive and one dead. The dead
tree began to sprout a few leaves.' Now the patient knew that the live
tree would die in its turn as the dead one returned to life. Her so-
called catatonia was her 'dying' to save her sister.
It now seemed clear to me why this patient feared and felt she could
not resist rape. She herself wished, believed, and unconsciously
'insisted' that she could magically invade her objects - sister, mother,
and later, me, in the transference. The motives for the intrusion dif-
fered and included possession, destruction, or repair. In addition, the
patient had the fervent conviction, again omnipotent, that nothing
could stop her. If one has this omnipotent conviction about one's own
power, one has of necessity to believe, and therefore fear, that others
possess similar power and will be able to penetrate one's own body or
mind and take ~ossessionof these in their turn. Invasive omni~otent
fantasies are always accompanied by ideas of reference as a mirror
image consequence. In fact, acting out this fantasy and permitting
someone to take possession of oneself, supports one's own omnipotent
wishes that it is bossible to do the same and to bossess others. The reli-
gious disciple p;ays for God to enter and take possession of him or her
and then pursues the conversion of others just as ardently.
Following Klein's (1932) ideas, I believe that the wish to possess
begins initially with the infant's wish to possess the body and breast of
the mother for many reasons. This fantasy is frequently accompanied
by the use in reverse of an organ of perception (i.e. introjection) as an
organ of proiection (looking daggers!). I have described this mecha-
nism in greater detail in my paper 'The Suffocating Superego' (Mason,
1981). This patient used her 'baby blue' eyes as projective organs, and
voyeurism accompanied by omniscient fantasies was one of her promi-
nent symptoms. The mother's body originally is the source of all the
infant's needs and security, and possessing it is therefore the most
powerful defence against total helplessness. Little 'Count Dracula'
who sinks his teeth into the soft female body and sucks her life-giving
fluids, now takes total possession of her and forces her to follow him
as a living food store forever. Surely this is every child's fantasy wish
fulfilment, about its mother.
This fantasy, labelled by Klein 'projective identification', was first
described by her in 1946. It consists of projecting in fantasy parts of
the self into an object for the purpose usually of ridding the self of
some unwanted aspect, say infantile characteristics, and simultane-
ously taking possession in fantasy of some envied and desirable quality
of the object, say wisdom or strength. It is frequently used to defend
against the terror and despair of helplessness. Realistic modification of
this terror through trust in one's good object and dependency on it,
leading to growth and development through normal introjective
processes, takes time and work, while the relief that projective identi-
fication produces is immediate. Under healthy conditions, this
universal defence is gradually given up and replaced by less omnipo-
tent procedures.
The most dramatic and powerful effects of this fantasy are pro-
duced when it exists in its most primitive, i.e. magical or omnipotent,
form in a patient, and when the patient meets a therapist in whom this
fantasy is also powerfully present. Then, 'I wish to possess' and the
corollary and mirror image of this wish, i.e. 'I can be possessed', has
found a practitioner who also wishes and believes he or she can pos-
sess another human being. A duet such as this is what I believe to be
the basis of the hypnotic state. This highly charged folie d deux takes
many forms in medicine, religion, and politics, for messiahs will
always find devoted disciples. I believe that some fantasies of invasive
possessiveness are universal and part of normal development, but
when the fantasies are extreme and are colluded with by a parent with
similar fantasies, then a folie d deux can result between mother and
child. It may be seen in an extreme form when a little boy's envy of
girls is excessive and he coincidentally has a mother who also wishes
strongly that he were a girl and behaves accordingly, such as dressing
him in girls' clothing; then a delusional state like transsexualism may
be produced. The transvestite is less delusional than the transsexual,
and perhaps this may be due to the identification with the opposite sex
not receiving support and collusion from a parental figure. Also less
flagrant but still damaging fantasies of the 'entitled prince' or
'princess' type are extremely common when the omnipotent fantasies
of the child are met with equally omnipotent fantasies for the child by
its parent. I believe that a less flagrant form of folie d deux exists when
a narcissistic object relationship is 'welcomed' unconsciously by both
partners. The 'dominant' partner uses the apparently less dominant
one as a 'thing', a possession or a pan of itself. However, when the
'thing' willingly gives up its individuality and gladly accepts being used
or possessed, a folie exists, and the duet - sometimes in love and some-
times in hate - becomes of one mind. (Enter into me 0 Lord, - I am
your devoted vessel.)
Projective identification which occurs throughout normal develop-
ment enables the infint to deal with early overwhelming anxieties either
of a persecutory or depressive nature, by producing narcissistic or manic
defences which are essential transitional aids to development. The
thumbsucking child with the h t a s y that the thumb is the mother's
nipple that he or she possesses and controls is temporarily successful in
avoiding anxiety which otherwise could be overwhelming were the child
ro hce the total separateness and uncontrollability of his or her primary
object, the breast or mother. Similarly, when hypnotism is used to treat
acute anxiety states, the hypnotist replaces some malfunctioning part of
the mind of the atient, and actually fosters a state of projective identi-
fication between Kim/herself and the patient. This state, like d l 'transfer-
ence cures', may help stabilise a srate of decompensation, breakdown, or
instability (just as narcissistic or manic states can be stabilisers in normal
dcvelopmenr). However, this method of 'curing' anxicry, be it in stages of
development or in therapy, is basically unstable, and subsequent break-
down or interminable truunent usually follows. It is in effect a state of
permanent infantile dependency on an object, a group, or some other
aternll structure.
Freud's (1905) first statement on hypnosis was in 'Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality', in which he stated that the credulous sub-
missiveness of the hypnotised subject 'lies in the unconscious fixation
of the subject's libido to the figure of the hypnotist, through the
medium of the masochist components of the sexual instinct' (p. 150).
Ferenni (1909), in 'Introjection and Transference', stated the hyp-
notic state is an expression of the early child-parent relationship, with
the subject being the small child and the hypnotist unconsciously
regarded as either its mother or father. He felt that love and fear were
the basic motivating factors in the compliance of the child.
Freud later (1921), in 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego', compared hypnosis with being in love without sexual satisfac-
tion. He felt the hypnotist represented the patient's ego ideal.
Jones' (1923) 'The Nature of Auto-Suggestion' indicated that the
subject projected his or her superego onto the hypnotist.
Paul Schilder (1922) wrote about the subject surrendering h i d h e r -
self to the hypnotist because of the wish to share in the latter's
'greatness'. Schilder defined this greatness as resembling the power of
a 'magician' and 'sorcerer'. He described the subject as wishing to
posses these powers after having projected magic qualities onto the
hypnotist. He-wrote also about the desire for omnipotence first pro-
jected onto another person and then absorbed into one's own
personality by way of identification. Thus, although Schilder did not
tease out the details of the unconscious fantasies of projective identifi-
cation in the elaborate way Klein and her followers did, and did not
appreciate the universality of the mechanism, he certainly arrived at
the same basic idea.
Gill and Brenman (1958; Brenman, Gill, and Knight, 1952) have
also written extensively on hypnotism, but like Freud, Ferenczi, Jones,
and Schilder, they did not really investigate the part played by the hyp-
notist in the hypnotic state - the emphasis being largely on the
patient's fantasies. In fact, there is no real differentiation between hyp-
nosis and suggestion by any of these authors.
Stewart (1992) seems to be the only one who has considered the
part the hypnotist plays in the state of hypnosis. One of his observa-
tions is that the hypnotic state can exist only as long as the hostile
feelings of the subject toward the hypnotist are not made explicit. He
summarised his views by saying that the hypnotic state represents a
collusive manic denial of an omnipotent, controlling hostile attack on
the hypnotist, together with the denial of anxieties of retaliation and
guilt associated with it.
I believe that Stewart makes the same error I made initially when
investigating the state of hypnosis, which is to attribute to it specific
phenomena and dynamics. For example, in considering his initial
point, I have seen numerous examples in which the patient remained
in a deep trance despite expressing extremely hostile and paranoid
fantasies about me. In fact, envy, which always contains hostility, is a
frequent underlying motive of the hypnotic state. Since I believe that
mutual projective identification is the central dynamic of the hypnotic
state, then I would expect that all the phenomena which accompany
this state can be present at different times.
Projective identification can be used in the service of love or hate,
or even Bion's K (the epistemophilic instinct). It can be a defence
against separation anxiety, loss, or merely separateness. It defends
against all the pains and anxieties of the infantile and dependent state,
whether these pains originate realistically from the outside, or in fan-
tasy from the inside. So while I do not doubt that Stewart's ideas were
valid for the cases he described, they are much too narrow to be used
as a general theory, and while in some cases hypnosis represents
mutual mania, in others it is a defence against persecutory anxiety. Still
others would fit well into what Steiner (1993) might call a 'patholog-
ical structure', i.e. a defensive organisation which is somewhere in
between the paranoid-schizoid organisation and the depressive organ-
isation.
How d o I view the value of hypnosis today in the light of my belief
that it is a dyadic version of the mechanism of projective identifica-
tion? As a research tool, it has some value, as one can investigate
certain mental phenomena under laboratory conditions; but as always,
one must beware of idealising the process for this opens the door to
what then becomes essentially magical beliefs, however scientifically
they are disguised. We must be especially careful to set up good con-
trols and to leave the evaluation of results to independent and
uninvolved observers, as the unconscious meaning of hypnosis in par-
ticular, and its link to magical wishes and fantasies in us, may cause us
unknowingly to distort our findings.
As a therapeutic tool, hypnosis occupies a complex position. Since
I believe that hypnotism is identical with fostered projective identifi-
cation, I believe it is parallel to any powerful defensive process and is
similar in many ways to a religious conversion. Projective identifica-
tion produces a confusion between self and object (often idealised) and
removes in fantasy the disparities between infantile and adult qualities
and capacities. Thus it can be used as 1) defence against separation
anxiety; 2) a method of omnipotent control of objects; 3) a defence
against envy; 4) a defence against jealousy; 5) a defence against perse-
cutory anxiety, both internal, as in hypochondriasis, and external, as
in phobic and paranoid states.
Numbers 3 and 4 are also clearly defences against oedipal conflicts
and the concomitant pain of guilt, loss, and depression. These defen-
sive manoeuvres may diminish conscious anxiety and alter behaviour,
but of course character development is sacrificed. Anxieties are not
worked through but suppressed and therefore liable to break through,
and infantile misperceptions and delusions remain - in fact, are fos-
tered. This process is parallel to the modification of anxiety produced
by projective identification developmentally. However, the projective
identification produced in the hypnotic state does differ from that
occurring during normal development, as it has been fostered by the
hypnotist who is reinforcing and colluding with the patient's uncon-
scious omnipotent fantasies, and therefore the effects are given the
additional charge and power of this duet. In addition, I believe this to
be the essential difference between hypnosis and suggestion.
Suggestion is a state of mind produced by a subject who then invests
the therapist with various fantasies which are projected into him or
her, and responds to these fantasies as if they were reality. Moreover,
these fantasies d o not even need a living object, for they may be
attached to the procedure being practised, be it psychoanalysis, chiro-
practic, or acupuncture; to the building, whether a hospital or a place
of worship; to a drug - the so-called placebo effect; to a pendulum,
magnet, or needle that is twiddled or a joint that is cracked. The recep-
tacles for these omnipotent fantasy expectations are endless.
The fantasies themselves are variations of omnipotence brought
about by splitting and idealisation, and produce awe, wonder, and
worship on the one hand, which are the accompaniment of idealisa-
tion; and fear and terror on the other hand, since the idcalised object is
very powerfil and thus dangerous. All of these responses may produce
'healing if the unconscious wish invested in by the patient is sufficiently
strong.
Suggestion, then, is little different from transference as seen by
Freud originally, which also arises from the fantasies the patient invests
the therapist with; and in most therapies, use is made of suggestion
knowingly or unknowingly for its unconscious effect. In contrast,
during psychoanalysis, suggestion is analysed and its unconscious
meaning, which is always some need of the patient being satisfied delu-
sionally, is made clear. Dissolution of suggestion, I believe, is
synonymous with the depressive position of Klein (1935). It is a devel-
opmental position which is not easy to achieve. So-called 'transference
cure' is really cure by suggestion alone.
While Freud did equate suggestion with transference originally, he
confused the picture somewhat by using the term suggestion, both for
the suggestibility of the subject and for the suggestions or exhortations
coming from the therapist.
Hypnotism, in contrast, is a fostering of and collusion with the
patient's suggestibility by the hypnotist, who has fantasies similar to
those of the subject, which he is enacting simultaneously. When the
patient thinks unconsciously that the therapist is a god and reacts
accordingly, that is suggestion. When the therapist agrees uncon-
sciously with the patient that he is a god, that is hypnosis.
Under normal circumstances, if a child believes he or she is the most
desired person in the life of one parent, this unconsciously means that
the child is in a state of projective identification with the other parent.
This fantasy, which is similar to an oedipal victory, will result in some-
thing like hypomania or some other grandiose condition, which, one
hopes, will be dispelled by the reality confrontations of life and par-
ents. However, if the parent does desire the child more than his or her
mate and colludes with the child's fantasy consciously or uncon-
sciously, this has an impact and a durability far greater than when the
fantasy exists alone or is actively contradicted by the parent. This kind
of collusion concretises the fantasy and will produce delusional states
of grandiosity. A delusional duet of this nature is what I believe
brought about the startling organic change in my ichthyotic case. I also
suspect that delusional duets between parents and children, husbands
and wives, patients and therapists, are far more common than is
realised and that the hypnotic state is a crude and dramatic version of
a process that is fairly common and frequently goes unnoticed because
the 'trance states produced is so much more subtle.
I am not suggesting that therapy that depends to a large extent on
suggestion or even 'hypnosiss has no value, for while there may be
relapse after symptom removal or the symptom may be converted into
another symptom, at times for complex reasons substantial therapeutic
results occur, some of which I have outlined. Moreover, since psycho-
analysis or even dynamic psychotherapy is available only to the
fortune few, hypnosis, suggestion, medication, behaviour modifica-
tion, religion, and all the therapies that depend on the modulation of
anxiety will continue to be the treatments for the vast majority of
patients. The modification of psychic structure by the modification of
unconscious fantasy and anxieties, i.e. psychoanalytic change, is
clearly a different order of change, however intimately mixed and con-
fused the two processes frequently become.
Case Number 1
This patient came to me at the age of sixty-two for severe agoraphobia
which had been present some thirty-five years. Her need for treatment
had become acute following the death of her husband one month
before. She was unable to go anywhere alone; her husband had paid
all the bills, signed the cheques, and even bought her clothing. She had
been unable to travel except when accompanied by her husband or
other close acquaintances. For the first year, she had to be accompa-
nied to treatment. Her husband had left his estate in trust, which paid
the patient a monthly stipend. She had two sons, who were both mar-
ried, one living in Canada and the other in New York.
The patient's husband was an autocratic man whose own father and
elder brother were killed when he was eleven years old, leaving him
the virtual head of a family of four children and his mother, who took
over the dead husband's small store. Even as a child, he carried the
family money in a purse around his neck. He and my patient had an
arranged marriage after he had married off his younger sister and
brothers. My patient's marriage to this man, who literally ran every-
thing, fitted her psychopathology admirably. Her function was
confined to having children and supervising the kitchen.
This extreme dependency on the husband had been preceded by a
similar total dependency on her mother who was also autocratic, dom-
inating, and controlling. She virtually ran her only child's life,
including arranging her marriage when the patient was about twenty-
three. The patient had been brought up in Prague. She had been taken
to and from school, never allowed out on her own, and never allowed
to play with other children. She would sit in a chair in the corner while
the mother baked and cooked and was instructed not to touch the
walls of the room with her elbows or she would mark the paint, and
she never did. She was told that she could not understand maths, and
so she didn't; that she could never dance, so she didn't. Once when
attacked by another child in the park, she was admonished for raising
her hand and was told that she must never strike back - and she never
did again. At present, she was obese and had been so since she was a
child of seven or eight. She ate what she was given, and what she was
given was always too much.
The father was passive, a clerk, and the patient had little to d o with
or say to him. The mother treated the patient as a companion, dis-
cussed everything with her, including intimate details of her life with
the father. He was consistently devalued, and apparently the parents'
sexual relationship had ceased after producing this child. She was to
be the mother's passport and ticket to wealth, survival, and freedom
from the virtual ghetto they lived in. The patient was taught to sing
and play the piano and was a good linguist. The mother's goal in life
for her was to make a good marriage and to produce children for a
wealthy, elder, successful man - which she accomplished.
The patient's fantasies of being joined as an appendage t o the
mother, who did all her thinking for her, were paralleled by the
mother's own need for an appendage who would give her the life that
she had not been able to obtain for herself. The patient first became
aware that the mother had something wrong with her on the night
before her wedding, when the mother fainted and was seized with an
attack of shivering and teeth-chattering as though she were severely ill.
Following the marriage, the husband had a serious row with the
patient's mother: he had ejected her from the house because when he
returned from work for an afternoon nap, he found the mother in his
bed for her afternoon nap. They had an estranged relationship from
that moment on. The mother became depressed when she found that
she was not welcome in the patient's house. She developed a 'brain
tumour' which postoperatively resulted in her becoming somewhat
paralysed and having to be confined to bed in a nursing home for the
remaining forty years of her life. She died at the age of ninety-three.
The patient did not see her mother for the last twenty-odd years of her
life. She had come to the United States and never went back to visit
the mother (since she could not travel and her husband would not
accompany her). She did see her mother just before her death; this was
after the patient had had two years of psychoanalysis. She travelled
alone to Israel on that occasion, and has done so at least six times
since.
The patient's analysis focused on her fusion, first with her mother,
and subsequently with her husband. Her agoraphobia began suddenly
during her first pregnancy. The patient's mother-in-law wished to
name the baby after her father, but the patient wanted to name it after
her own grandfather. The mother-in-law cursed the baby in the
patient's womb. This precipitated an acute attack of dizziness which
persisted whenever the patient tried to go out alone. On analysis, the
dizziness was connected to her feeling of hate toward the mother-in-
law. This was also a displacement from her mother (and later, her
husband) for trying to control her life and even the life of her unborn
child. Conflict between herself and mother or mother-in-law, or hus-
band, was too frightening to think about and instead produced
dizziness and dissociation. These phenomena were related to separa-
tion from her loved object, and occurred whenever she left home.
They were relatively absent while she was at home, which seemed in
fantasy to stand for being inside her object and thus in a conflict-free
relationship, i.e. identified with and part of her object.
It became clear as the analysis progressed that the patient needed to
be an appendage of mother and husband, and this was paralleled by
the mother's need for an appendage child to supply everything she
needed. This caused the subsequent collapse of the mother when the
child got married and was pried away from her. The patient's husband
continued the dynamic, for while he too was autocratic and ruled the
patient, he hardly went anywhere without her. He had no friends, and
apart from conducting his business, was a reclusive and depressed
man. In this patient's analysis she attempted to convert me into a
motherlhusband who would be a controller and instructor who would
tell her what to d o and how to d o it. The analysis also revealed her
fantasies that I was totally dependent on patients (herself) and had no
friends and family. At present the patient can travel by herself. She
now shops for herself, writes cheques, and even takes charge of some
of the husband's business. At the age of sixty-nine, she is becoming an
individual person for the first time in her life.
A dream late in her analysis illustrates the patient's dynamic fairly
clearly.
Dream: The patient's cousin G (with whom the patient is totally
identified and who is always referred to as 'another me - maybe
worse') was being physically assaulted and raped by Cossacks. The
reason for the rape and assault was that G had a diamond in her
brassiere. The diamond had been sewn in by G's mother so that she
would always have this precious thing to fall back on and support her
in a time of need.
I interpreted that the diamond was the mother's brain which had
been firmly sewn into the patient's heart, so that in times of need, she
could fall back on her mother's mind and presence to look after and
think for her. Having no brain of her own, she now became a victim,
and everybody (the Cossacks) could use her and exploit her as she had
no weapons to defend herself with. The patient accepted this inter-
pretation with great emotionality and added 'You are saying that the
Cossacks and my mother both raped me in their own way'.
A dream six weeks later: She was supposed to go on a transport to
Finland. Her mother was terrified that she would be 'chupped'.
The patient's associations. (1) Finland, a small country which stood
up to and finally revailed against Russia which wanted to engulf her and
P
make her part o the Russian Empire. (2) 'Chuppcd' (Jewish slang - to
grab). In 1760 King Nicholas captured Jewish boys and inducted them
into the army and converted them to Catholicism. They were lost to
their families forever. (3) G was a cousin the patient identified with who
e
went on a trans on to England before the war. She served as a maid in
a house which ad a cook This cook used ro work for an analyst. G
learned things from this cook, and when she told my patient's mother
what the cook had taught her, the mother told my patient that these
things were dangerous and could result in her getting lost.
The patient's internal mother struggles against the patient's
(Finland) attempts to free herself from domination by her internal
objects (mother and husband - Russia). She warns the patient she will
be lost forever. However, it is clear that it is the sayings of the analyst-
cook (from England, as my accent makes clear) which are feared by the
mother, as they will lead to her getting 'chupped' into my army and
lost to her family forever. In other words, her internal rnother fears
that psychoanalysis will liberate the patient from her domination. This
'mother' projects her domination into the psychoanalytic process (the
British analysts) and says that analysis is like King Nicholas and will
capture her and convert her to a new religion.
A dream some weeks later: This was described as very terrifying.
Her husband appeared, and he covered her up to protect her (she wept
here). Then he gave her money as he always did when he was alive.
Then he realised that the currency would not be honoured in this
counuy, and so he took it back, saying to the patient that she would
soon join him and then could use the money.
So both mother and husband continue to exert their control over
her, even from the grave, and fight against her liberation from them by
the analysis. To g v e up these fantasies and accept responsibility for her
life, limited though her future is, is still a terribly difficult step for her
to take after all this time.
Case Number 2
This was the case of a thirty-four-year-old pathologist who suffered' a
schizoaffective breakdown. She had depressive and severe paranoid
features, believing that she was being watched and laughed at by col-
leagues and that in the street people would stare at her and have
mocking thoughts about her hair, face, and body. She felt they were
saying that she was ugly and deformed. She believed they knew what
she was thinking, particularly her shameful sexual thoughts and her
preoccupation with men's penises. She felt God watched her and knew
all her shameful thoughts and deeds. She had a voice in her head
which was scornful, devaluating; it called her a 'slut' and 'whore', and
said that she should be crucified, burned, and tortured, that death was
too good for her.
Her external paranoia was precisely paralleled by her internal per-
secution. She had always been perfectionist and obsessional about her
work, and had already impressed her senior colleagues with its care
and excellence. She had, in fact, produced several papers of impor-
tance. When she had been well, she took considerable pride in her
promiscuity and felt she could get any man. Indeed, she had had con-
siderable success, particularly with married senior colleagues, for she
was witty, seductive, and pretty in a country-girl, fresh way. This was
in marked contrast to her unconscious feelings of worthlessness which
broke through with her illness. Sin and God played a large part in her
ruminations. Today (for this was many years ago), she would undoubt-
edly have been medicated, which would have been a pity, for she
rapidly improved with analysis, particularly with the relief of anxiety
which came from understanding the superego components of her per-
secution and its projected equivalents that led to her paranoia.
The analysis proceeded as might be anticipated, with transference
manifestations of seduction, voyeurism, and cruel and harsh criticism.
I became a handsome priest one day, and a lascivious fraud the next.
Her most frequent attitude I described as 'micro-pulping'. She looked
at me through a microscope to discern my failings, blackheads, and
inadequacies, and then squashed me like a bug with a steam hammer,
so that only a faint smear remained where once there was a human
being. Cruelty does not quite describe it; vengeance from Jehovah
would be more like it.
The one feature which was atypical was the extreme rapidity of her
restoration to high quality functioning. What normally took months,
took weeks, and what normally could be expected in years, took
months. The factor which I believe was responsible for this emerged
after some months' treatment and took both of us by surprise. The
patient had heard my voice when she was in the waiting room (which
was in my home) speaking, as she wrongly surmised, to my wife. The
patient's fantasy was that I was obsequious and placatory, because I did
not want to annoy my wife; otherwise, she would never have sex with
me. It was clear that the patient's view of my sexual relationship was
that it was carnal and hypocritical, as I interpreted, and this devalued
view was a defence against the patient's envy and jealousy, particularly
as I had not responded to her attempted seductions of me. Her most
recent attempt had taken the form of her offering to increase her fees,
which at the time she could not afford. I pointed out her delusional
overestimation of her stools (the fees), and the effects she fantasised
they would have on me as mother in the transference. Her fantasied
hope was that I would find them (the money) preferable t o the father's
penis. Taking the suggested raise would have confirmed her grandiose
anal delusion of penis-stool confusion.
Following the analysis of this, she produced a memory of being
awakened at night by her sister, who was six years her senior. The
sister would take the patient's hand and lead her to the door of the
parents' bedroom, where the sister would look through the keyhole,
which the patient was too small to reach, to see, in the sister's words,
'the dirty beasts doing it'. 'They're doing it, they're doing it, the dirty
beasts are doing it', she would whisper to my patient in tones of glee
and disgust. These episodes occurred several times a week, and on one
occasion several times during the night, over a period of two to three
years. My patient was three to five years old, and her sister was nine
to eleven years old.
When I commented that her father sounded rather potent, she
exclaimed in disgust 'He's an animal. H e was always drunk, and he
forced himself onto my mother. He would take me on his lap, slob-
bering, and I could feel his thing through his trousers'. When her
anger and disgust had cooled, I asked her if her sister put the lights on
in the parents' bedroom. The patient exploded with anger and con-
tempt. How could she? The parents would know, then, that the
children were watching. 'So your sister can see in the dark', I said. The
silence that followed the implication that dawned on her was powerful
and moving. I interpreted that the sister must have been deluded. The
patient could only say that the sister was a CEO of a large public com-
pany.
An extraordinary sequel to this story was that the sister was
admitted to a hospital three months after the episode I have described,
with her first psychotic break. The sisters lived five hundred miles
apart, and their contact was restricted to an occasional telephone call;
so I think the sister's breakdown was coincidental, but it is difficult to
know. The tragic outcome was that the sister died of a perforated
oesophagus due to either tube feeding or eating glass or metal. The
patient's recovery was rapid, her analysis taking some three years, and
has been maintained until the present with no further treatment. I
have seen her on half a dozen occasions since the termination of her
treatment, spanning a period of some seventeen years. She married,
has three children, lives in the third world, and has written several
important papers on the mechanisms of viral replication. She told me
the last time we spoke 'I'm still watching the dirty beasts doing it, but
they're real now'.
I believe her infantile, envious, voyeuristic attacks on the parental
couple were given delusional force by the projections from a psychotic
elder sister, and that when this factor could be analysed, the patient's
own personality, which was not basically psychotic, could maintain the
difference between fantasy and reality.
Projective identification with the Mission doctor originally, and
later with Charcot and Freud, was my personal history and experi-
ence, and my childhood heroes were always doctors, such as Ehrlich
and Semmelweiss, and never sportsmen; my dreams were the oper-
ating theatre, not the playing field. The Mission doctor cured my
mother, who looked after and fed me, and in my fantasy, no doubt, he
controlled and possessed her. When I saw them together, I must have
possessed him by sight to take over his power and position. Later,
becoming a hypnotist was a more sophisticated version of the same
infantile fantasy.
Freud extrapolated from his analysis of his own dreams and fan-
tasies a general theory called the Oedipus complex and gave us all the
courage and the example to extrapolate from our own dreams and
fantasies. Mine are connected to earlier anxieties than Freud's and are
related to wishes to become big through omnipotent fantasies, using
projective identification and later hypnosis to implement these fan-
tasies. I also have little doubt that my mother supported my fantasies
enthusiastically - to have a 'doctor-son' was even better than Oedipus.
I also believe that this type of fantasy is common, perhaps, like the
Oedipus complex, even universal. I think that the phenomenon of
hypnotism is a temporary delusional state, but that it can have more
permanent versions, even psychosis, when mutual projective identifi-
cation occurs between any two people, particularly when one is in a
position of power and authority, such as parent and child, doctor and
patient, priest and disciple, political leader and followers, etc., etc. I
believe that these delusional states are different from and less
intractable than the psychosis which can occur without the assistance
and support of these external hypnotists.
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'Interpretation and primitive psychic processes: a Kleinian view' with
Britton, R., Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 1: 267-268.
'Early infantile development as reflected in the psychoanalytic
process: steps in integration', International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis, 63: 15-22.
'Clinical implications of Melanie Klein's work: emergence from nar-
cissism', International J o u m l of Psycho-Analysis, 64: 269-276.
'Joseph Conrad and the mid-life crisis', International Rnn'ew of
Psychoanalysis, 11: 3-10.
'Silence is the real crime', International Review of Aychoanalysis,
14: 3-12.
Select Bibliography of the Work of Hanna &gal
'Sweating it out', PsychoanalyticalStudy of Children, 43: 167-178.
'Some comments on the Alcxandcr technique', Psychoanalytical
Inquiry, 10: 409-414.
'How theory shapes tcchniquc: a Klcinian view', with Roth. P,
~choanalyticalInquiry, 10: 541-549.
'El complex d'cdipavui', Revista catohm & psiumalasi, 7(2) : 273-
280.
'Psychoanalyse ct thcrapcutiquc', Revue @npise de psychoanalyse,
2: 366-376.
'Thc achicvcmcnt of ambivalcncc', Common K n o w e e , 1: 92-104.
On thc clinical uscfulncss of thc concept of thc dcath instinct',
International Journal of Aycho-Analysis, 74: 55-62.
'A nansfcrcncia na psicanalise da crianca' with O'Shaugncssy, E.,
Rcvistcr brasieliera & psicanalirs, 27: 141-158.
'Salman Rushdic and thc sea of stories', Internatioml Jovnrrrl of
Aycho-Analysis, 75: 611-618.
'Phantasy and reality', Internutiowl journal of psrCho-Analysis, 75:
359-401.
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to thank the following for kind permission to
republish text in their copy-right: the Rilke Estate concerning The
Notebooh of Malte Lauds Briggs, The Selected h e t r y of Rainer Rilke
(ed. Stephen Mitchell); from LGttm of Ruiner Maria Rilke: 1910-1926
by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, translation copy-
right 1947,1948 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed Q 1975
by M.D. Herter Norton. Reprinted by permission of U!N Norton &
Company, Inc.; The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter, published by
Faber and Faber Ltd; Everyman for quoting from Flaubcn's Mdurne
Bovary translated by F. Steegmuller); the Intnnationul Journal of
Rychwnulysis for permission to republish 'Turning a Blind Eye; The
Cover Up for Oedipus'; the Psychwnulytic Quarterly for republishing
in a revised form A
! Psychoanalyst Looks at a Hypnotist: A Studie of
Folic A Deux'.
Index
Subjects
Adam and Eve, 154 fantasy, 2,63,64, 65,67,68,73,
aesthetic experience, 8,9, 12, 13 74,76,78,82, 83, 84, 156,
aesthetics, 1,2, 12 186, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199,
agoraphobia, 202, 203 200,201,202,204,206,208
Armageddon, 18 folie A deux, 21, 197
arms race, 17 formation, 11, 23, 125
arrogance, 21,22, 140, 141, 143,
147,152 good breast, 32
autism, 118 grief, 43
group mind, 4
catastrophic change, 167 group psychology, 139
container-contained, 167 guilt, 4, 10, 12,46,67, 68, 69, 70,
containment, 39 76, 77,78, 79, 81, 97, 98, 99,
125,126,139,143, 144, 145,
146, 147, 148, 158, 162, 178,
daydreaming, 14, 16,49,62 186,196,199,200
daydreams, 49,50,54, 56,61, 123 Gulf War, 107, 118
death instinct, 13, 22, 27,46
delusion, 4, 14, 16, 49, 207 idealism, 113
depressive anxiety, 115, 143 identification, 2, 15, 63, 67, 70, 73,
depressive position, 9, 10, 11, 12, 79, 85, 86, 114, 115, 128,
13, 14, 15,23,27,31,43,46, 135, 147, 148, 156, 159, 161,
63, 70,76, 78, 82, 85, 97, 164, 189, 196, 197, 198, 199,
115,162,177,201 200,201,208
Dracula, 197 imagination, 8, 11, 14, 16, 22,30,
48,49, 50,62, 67, 80, 123,
Enlightenment, 20, 119 124
envy,5, 125,129, 130, 131, 132, internal object, 10, 141, 150
134, 135, 147, 150, 157, IPPW, 17,23
168, 182, 185, 197, 199,
200,207 life instinct, 22, 27, 32
epistemic fallacy, 6
epistemology, 20,21, 113 mania, 139, 143, 199
epistemophilic instinct, 6, 199 manic triumphalism, 19
ISychoanalysis and Culturc
melancholia, 162 152,153,158,206
mend disposition, 123, 134 projective identification, 189, 197,
migration myth, 21 198,199,200,208
modernism, 20, 105, 106, 108, 109, psychic annihilation, 128
113,117,119,120,121 psychic retreat, 21, 70
mournin& 9,10, 13,46,97, 142,
154, 16l, 162% 168s 169, realism, 1, 14, 28, 37
184 realist, 6, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121
reality principle, 7, 119
narcissism, 14,20 relativism, 6
negation, 84 religion, 2,4,48, 96, 105, 107, 109,
nuclear war, 16, 17, 18 110,194,197,202,205
nuclear weapons, 100, 107 reparation, 10, 12, 77, 97, 140,
141,143,150, 151
ochnophilia, 156
omnipaenc~38.69.82.99.143, sotel, 116
146,150,199,201
omniscience, 7 self-respect, 22, 136, 140, 150
ontological, 6, 182 sublimation, 10,27,29, 183
ontology, 6, 113 symbol formation, 11,29,97
Orestcia, the 15 symbolic equation, 14,29
symbolism, 12, 13
paranoid-schizoid position, 3 1, 177
pathological organisation, 34 tower of Babel, 155
philobatism, 156 transcendental, 6, 169
pleasure principle, 29 transference, 3, 5, 6, 69, 88, 101,
poctic math, 28 115, 182, 183, 186, 187, 195,
Potter, 64, 65,68, 70, 74, 75, 82, 196,198,201,206,207
83,84 true and false self, 34
PPNW, 17 truth, 1,5,6,7, 16,22,23,28,34,
pride, 21, 22, 136, 137, 138, 139, 40,67, 74, 79, 86, 89,90, 91,
140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 93,95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101,
146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 102,110,129,142,158
Names
Abraham 1, 166 Bell, 1, 14, 16, 20, 24, 64, 79
Anderson, 109,120,121 Bcrezin, 187
Anzieu, 164 Bcrman, 121
Auerbach, 52 Bcnley, 190
Bhaskar, 6
Balint, 156, 175 Bick, 164
Barnes, 52 Bion,7, 19,22,23,30,39,41,45,
Baumnn, 120 86,87, 105, 115, 136, 137,
Beck, 111,112, 116,120 140,141,147,167,199
Beckett, 40 Black, 191, 192, 193
Index
Bowlby, 175 Grccnacrc, 175
Brcnman, 199 Grinberg, 21, 154, 157, 163
Britton, 8, 16, 17,20, 27, 74 Griinbaum, 6
Calvo, 165 Halliday, 193

Caper, 14 Hamnann, 175
Castells 111, 112, 116, 120
Collicr, 6 Jacobson, 175
Jamcson, 108, 110, 113, 118, 120
Damasio, 121 Jaqucs, 170, 178, 180
Dawson, 193 Jones, 37, 191, 198, 199
Dckkcr, 141, 142, 143, 147, 150,
151 Kennedy, 193
Drydcn, 153 King, 21, 58, 89, 90, 93, 94, 141,
151, 170, 172, 178, 181, 186,
Edclman, 121 187,190,205
Eliot, 170, 188 Klcin,6,8,9, 10,11, 12,14,15,
Engcls, 24 29, 30,31, 32,41, 63, 70, 76,
Erikson, 175,176, 180,187 97,101,105,115, 129,130,
Escalona, 175 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139,
Esdailc, 189 140, 143, 152, 156, 160, 162,
165, 170, 171, 175, 177, 178,
Fairbairn, 175 189,195,196,197,199,201
Fcnichcl, 173, 174, 178
Fcrcnui, 198, 199
Fitzpatrick Hanly, 22
Flaubcrt, 16,48, 49, SO, 51,52, 53,
54,55,58, 60, 61, 62, 63 Macncicc, 28, 29.30
Frcud, 1, 2, 3,4,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Mahcr-Loughnan, 192
12, 13,27, 28, 29,34, 37,41, Mandclstam, 18
45,46,49, 83, 84, 91, 97, Marx, 117,118,121
101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, Mason, 14, 21, 82, 189, 190, 191,
109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 192,193,196
120, 122,123,132,133,135, Maycr, 109, 120
136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 170, Milton, 142, 147, 150, 152
172, 173
Frcud, A., 175, 180, 195, 198, 199, Nabokov, 52
201,208 Norris, 23
Fuller, 68
Pcddcr, 14
Gana-Gucrrcro, 159 Potter, 64, 65, 68, 70, 74, 75, 82,
Gcklc, 4S 83,84
Gcllncr, 120
Gcras, 121 Rapaport, 175, 176
Giddcns, 111, 112, 116, 120, 121 Rcnik, 22
Gill, 199 Rcy, 152
Gordon, 191 Riclunan, 171, 175
Rikc, 12, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 171,177,178, 187,188
32,33, 34, 35,36,37, 38,39, Stewart, 199
40,41,42, 43, 44,45,46,47 Strcngcr, 22
Rivi*rc, 79, 152
Roscnfcld, 31,79, 81, 84, 135, 148, Tanner, 56,57
150,152 Thucydidcs, 137, 138, 140, 141,
Rustin, 6, 20, 83, 105, 114, 120, 142,143,147,150,151
121 Ticho, 159
Schildcr, 198, 199 Watson, 121
Scgal, 1,7,9, 11, 12,13, 14, 15, W111, 6, 121
16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,23, W~nnicott,34, 156, 175, 178, 179
27,29,46,49,64, 77, 84, Wollhcirn, 8, 20, 122, 135
105, 107, 115, 118, 122, 132, Wordsworth, 27,28,29,30,3 1,32,
133, 134, 135, 140, 160, 170, 33,37, 44

(Tavistock Clinic Series.) Klein, Melanie - Bell, David - Psychoanalysis and Culture - A Kleinian Perspective-Karnac (1999)

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Psychoanalysis and Culture

Tavistock Clinic Seria

Other tides in the Tavistock Clinic Seria:

Arsesnent in Child Psychotherapy

Facing it Out: Clinical Pmpectives on Adohcent Disturbance

Insidr Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Pmonaliiy

l n t m l Ladcapes and Foreign Bodies: Eating Disordm and Othrr Pathologies

Minor w Nature: Drama. Psychoana&~ and Socieiy

M&p& Voices: Narrative in Systemic Family Psychotherapy

Surviving Spare: Infint Obsmation and Other Papm

Therapeutic Carefir %gees: No P h Like Home

Undmtanding Trauma: A Psychoanalyh;c Approach

All righrs reserved. No part of this publication

A catalogue record for h i s book is available

Printed and bound in G m t Britain

Art and Literature

Mind and Society

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time,

Since it was founded in 1920, the Tavistock Clinic has developed a

Hanna Segal is the leading clinician and theoretician representing

Ron Britton is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Michael Fcldman is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Albert Mason is a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He

Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East

Ignts SodrC is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical

Richard Wollheim is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

This book is dedicated to Hanna Segal's contribution to the psycho-

A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found in my own

It is often considered that 'the line of division' falls in a different place,

In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a

Like all good caricatures something that is essential to their object is

The divergence [between neurotic symptoms and cultural achievements]

So, psychoanalysis is first and foremost a body of knowledge about the

It was impossible to treat a patient without learning something new; it

P"fr tic question. Psychoanalytic concepts arc from this perspective,

The 'pragmatic' version of truth of psychoanalytic interpretations

Psychoanalysis and Art

The Depressive Position4

Segal puts the capacity to mourn, now enriched by Klein's elucidation

The contrast between Jocelin and Roger Mason is one between

The theme of the distinction berwccn defensive daydreaming and real

A Note on Psychoanalysis and Literature

Hanna Segal's Contribution to Sociopolitical Understanding

In her seminal paper A ' Psychoanalytic Approach t o Aesthetics'

N o w Rilke, on seeing n o t a rainbow but the exposed remnant of a

The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor;

The satisfaction imparted to the poet is of gaining or regaining knowl-

This brings to my mind another psychoanalyst whose work underlies

To write poems, he continued,

If we can think of Wordsworth as anticipating certain themes of

In describing Rilke as the poet of the paranoid-schizoid position I am

The story Rilke tells corresponds to Klein's description of the infantile

Babies who constantly need attention and cannot be happily on their

H e goes on to say that what is left of his everyday self is completely

As I said earlier the beginning of his search for himself is recounted in

The Duino Elegies were written in spasms, in groups which do not

But we when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we

Wasn't he a hero inside you, mother? didn't

This is from a letter to Lou of June 8th 1914; in it he accuses himself

In this poem he acknowledges that he must learn to love those internal

Oh, misery, my mother tears me down.

Birds overhead more lightly fill my space.

Then comes Rilke's point: that by acknowledging the presence of nul-