This is a fictional novel based on experiences of working in therapeutic communities which follows the lives of various characters who are brought together by the extraordinary appearance of the visitors. The novel challenges commonly held assumptions and unconscious motivations by the unusual meetings between those who hold power and those whose lives are on the fringes of society.
‘The only possible view from which to assess scientific theory is its creative potential.’
S.H. Foulkes
‘The centre of gravity does not start of in the individual. It is in the total set-up.’
D.W. Winnicott
ISBN: 978-1-8381369-1-8 RRP £25
9 7 8 1 838 136918
the V isitors
the Visitors
Mike Tait & Marcus Price
A Journey of Questions in Words and Paintings
Marcus Price
Mike Tait
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the Visitors
‘The paintings have both abstract and figurative possibilities. Each abstract area gains total attention , from minimal to serene with monochrome impasto and jewel- like areas or bursts of energy, movement and exuberance… In the figurative we are taken (if we choose to) into vivid emotions.. an unusual gift of freedom offered to the viewer… abstract, multicultural, movement and much more… it is impossible to be a passive observer of his work.’
‘This book takes time but it’s thought provoking and opens windows in the mind. ... ‘The Visitors’ is a refuge from the peripheral world and yet is painfully authentic....
‘reading profound material both comforting and disturbing at the same time…Human bonds that form or fracture early in life provide a force that shapes humanity…’
It is a journey which you wish never comes to a closure....
‘The placing and depth of the character was initially difficult to grasp. As we continued, I was amazed at how the concepts were embedded within the dialogues and interplay of characters.’
‘... paintings fearless and detailed, each offering a mirror.... The more you look, the more you will see, of the painting and of yourself. Like emotions that we avoid, the paintings seem clear when far away but blurry close up when the mind is forced to fill in the ambiguous parts with stories and inputs to make sense of it all - this makes them strangely familiar.’
'We did a week's readings online during the first Covid lock down, a special time of hearing voices from around the world. ‘Our reading sessions of 'The Visitors' were extremely interesting,’ … ‘I only wish I could have been there more....’ ‘Reading the Visitors with different people at different times helped reexperience many things I have observed in many settings……’
'I'm intrigued and moved by the story, further reflections and the exploration of koinonia…'
‘.... echoes of Confucian harmony, relaxation, transforming the hate and aggression to think together, agreeing to disagree, creating a vibrant community and world….'
‘..... opportunity for a mind expanding and thought provoking journey, where trains of thought melt together like the London underground, except here collisions are frequent and desirable.....
‘A terrorist sat by the fire wondering how he got there and whether he could ever imagine being given a chance to change his life...‘There’s a lot to life that makes me feel like an imposter. I enjoyed being able to play the role in ‘The Visitors…..’
‘.... an experience that can be shared with others through reading aloud, getting into characters and associated conversations. I enjoyed meeting all the characters and the parts of myself that I met within them.’
Written
and illustrated by
Marcus Price & Mike Tait
Published in the UK by EPI Community Publications August 2025
All rights to the content of the book belong to EPI Community Publications and cannot be reproduced or copied without permission of EPI Community Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Disclaimer: All characters portrayed in this book are fictional and do not represent, or have any connection with specific people.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Formatted, printed and bound by www.beamreachuk.co.uk
the Visitors
A Journey of Questions in Words and Paintings
Mike Tait
Marcus Price
Introduction
The Location of Evil
Talking with Intolerable People
Biographies
List of paintings
‘In wider settings, the distinction between people and their environment can be repeatedly seen in the anomaly of the brutal cultures created by kindly people .... People who are personally good, kind and warm live in, and presumably help to create, the most violent cultural contexts.’
De Mare et al, 'Koinonia, 'From Hate through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group', Karnac, 1991. p. 77.
introduCtion
The writing of ‘The Visitors’ was fuelled by frustration, sadness, incredulity and disappointment at the contemporary undermining of initiatives attempting to respond to human difficulties creatively and thoughtfully. The development of affiliative, lateral, on-the-level authority [explored by S.H. Foulkes and P. De Mare] alongside viewing behaviour as a communication, facilitating development and valuing internal discoveries [emphasised by D.W. Winnicott] were being extinguished by the louder sounds being made by hierarchical formulators of policy.
Projects were being closed or moving away from working with clients perceived as exposing the organisation to risk - despite previous successes. The Visitors' questions became a tool to interrogate priorities, practice and developmental possibilities. Zoom readings of the evolving script of 'The Visitors' with participants from different countries began. Questions emerging out of institutional practice in one country seemed to resonate internationally. The evolution continues.
Mike Tait
Having had the honour of joining Mike Tait in various groups over the past decade, we have developed a habitual exchange of ideas, including dreams, poems, and the struggles we have both faced in our work with institutions. The novel and paintings, therefore, land naturally together as responses to our journeys. The pictures will provide a landscape, with figurative images that resonate with the interactions and conflicts of the various characters.
Marcus Price
‘The Group Matrix Is The Operational Basis Of All Relationships And Communications. Inside This Network The Individual Is Conceived As A Nodal Point.’
S.H. Foulkes
Prologue
Attempting to meet Humanity
If they’d had heads they would have scratched them. Questions formed within and between the Visitors before they reached the ears of local people. They knew that: questions elicited anxiety, enquiries were likely to be viewed suspiciously and the selection of conversationalists would shape discoveries.
‘Who should they speak to?' They considered the options.
'Experts?’ ‘How was an expert selected?’ ‘How was expertise arrived at?’ ‘By open and inclusive explorations - or by more restrictive social processes, particular forms of education, social priorities, academically acceptable enquiries, selective research parameters, commercial motivations?’
‘With random people on the street?’ ‘Were all people allowed on the street?’
‘With respected citizens?’ ‘How was respect allocated?’
‘Where might the included and the excluded be brought together?’
‘A prison perhaps?’
This suggestion met an overwhelmingly negative response when their questions were laid before the people they were studying. A prison setting would give undeserved status to criminals and highlight the least pleasant aspects of humanity. [As a preemptive gesture, plans were made to empty a potential prison location of its worst criminals].
The Visitors asked about connecting up the teeth, stomachs, eyes and ears of a body which created confusion and raised anxieties.
‘Why turn a well intentioned explanation into questions?’
Metaphors had their place but not when concrete plans were being drawn up.
‘Was this normal where they came from?’
‘As guests, might they not respect the customs of their hosts?’
Curiosity and fear vied for ascendance: the latter dominated the headlines.
Efforts were made to persuade them to meet in a laboratory where they might be studied scientifically, or alternatively - a military establishment where security measures could contain unforeseen dangers. Who was being studied and what was being secured remained unclear. When they asked whether the conversation would be more inclusive if held at the location to which the most intransigent criminals would be moved, the plans were shelved. ‘How did they know?’ Another plan to flood the location with military personnel was dropped lest such behaviour be seen as provocative. Whilst the Visitors had no obvious weapons, it was surmised that their intergalactic origins indicated an unimaginably advanced level of technology.
Once the turmoil had settled, curiosity narrowly outweighed fear. Caution was advised
‘The individual... is not conceived as a closed but as an open system.’
S.H. Foulkes
‘An analogy can be made with the neuron in anatomy and physiology, the neuron being the nodal point in the total network of the nervous system which always reacts and responds as a whole (Goldstein).’
S.H. Foulkes
Chapter I Badness
A boy grew up in a 'happy' middle class home - in a family who ‘knew how to enjoy themselves’. Celebrations were major events and 'no expense was spared'. The family went on holidays abroad and the children 'wanted for nothing'. The children learnt quickly the facial expressions that matched this experience. When smiles didn’t resonate internally, medication and expensive toys were never far away.
Another had never met his mother or father, spent his life in different institutions and was expelled - or 'gone walkabout' - from the schools that had attempted to educate him. He spent hours walking the streets, retreating into libraries when the weather was hostile.
Scars became certificates of achievement, badges of honour, for a boy who did his best to take care of his mother by provoking his drunk father to hit himself rather than his wife. His skin was his trophy cabinet..
A post boy delivered parcels for his step father to big, clean houses and small, dirty flats. The small dirty flats often had snarling dogs behind the door so a swift exit followed the collection. The big houses sometimes had long drives and, once, when a guard dog bounded across the lawn, the only retreat was up a tree. The boy spent hours up the tree before the owner arrived to collect the package. He learnt to watch what he said and never to ask questions.
Then there was a small, thin, black-haired toddler who rarely smiled or replied when he was spoken to. On one occasion, fearing that his mother was being hurt he slipped through the open door to where she was groaning. Inside his skull the world was heavy, dark, harsh and wordless – rending and crushing: outside, a cacophony
of inexplicable movement, sounds and cruel bright light – glaring and shredding. Mamma had a flushed look on her face. A red faced man was with her. The man shouted. The boy divided into two: one attached to a rod that ran through his body and froze in his throat; the other, all disembodied eyes watching. Her eyes were glazed and she looked through him but the man glared. Adult bodies seemed so large. He walked back through the door, cut up his teddy bear and tried to flush it down the toilet. A few days later, when his mother asked where the bear had gone, he shrugged.
Twenty years later, the Visitors arrived at the institution that had become the home of these ex-children. The overwhelming curiosity of the Visitors concerning the nature of the adulthood that children achieved would be an abiding memory for those who participated in the ensuing exchanges.
Guests arrived at the complex of metal and concrete. Their worst fears were realised. The Visitors had somehow opened the cell doors of some of the most unpleasant individuals, undermining the plans of prison authorities who’d briefed staff on hastily improvised enhanced security measures. Staff tasked with law enforcement wished they’d been issued with riot gear. Some prisoners were scornful, others profoundly uneasy, in response to the removal of familiar routines and clear battle lines. ‘Whose side were the Visitors on: those who upheld the law or those who ignored it?’
Dignitaries had a variety of motives for attending: overtly representing interest groups, areas of expertise or electorates, but it had crossed the minds of many that they might be etched into history for their part in this
historic moment. Crime barons, prison warders, police superintendents and criminologists, intent on representing their interests persuasively, began internal rehearsals - but it was difficult to imagine how best to explain a facet of human life to an alien audience. The Visitors’ expressions, being unfamiliar, were impossible to read.
The introductions went on forever. The Visitors were less interested in 'justice' than in life stories. The questions they asked were likely to draw out similarities between individuals despite attempts by citizens to draw distinctions between themselves and their criminal hosts. The Visitors were puzzled that some forms of ruthless gratification resulted in imprisonment whilst others led to wealth and social validation – despite explanations concerning how these things were organised. They asked about the evolution of the thinking which defined criminality and whether interventions were less effective when focused on codification rather than causation - on legality rather than meaning.
They asked how morality, with its emotional rhetoric, connected with such an abstract concept as 'justice'. They asked why condemnation changed its focus so dramatically between cultures and eras. They observed that this shifting focus applied to every area of criminality including: political crimes such as rebellion and treason, religious activities, violence, speech, sexual activities and commercial transactions. They noted occasions when the moral certainties that attached themselves to crimes were reversed - with some convicted criminals later becoming viewed as heroes, legends, saints, founding fathers of nations or manifestations of the divine.
"Are judicial responses fuelled by rational thought, emotional discharge or ritualistic attempts to ward off evil? How often is legislation a substitute for conversation and comprehension?”
Was this an attempt to diminish thousands of years of legislative evolution?’ thought a respected Judge.
“Are criminal acts selected as a focus from individual and social histories whilst less sensational causative events are minimised or ignored?”
‘Were they suggesting that criminals were not responsible for their actions?’ wondered a local councillor
“Why does rage grow? How do impulses develop? When do love, hate, aggression, greed, fear, control and eroticism get mixed up? Might judicial responses be designed to help understand and remedy this confusion?”
“Confusion! Did they have no concept of wrong-doing?” muttered a police superintendent to a chorus of nods.
“Why focus on emotional development?” asked a barrister to the criminologist sitting next to him.
Replies to the questions concerning criminality and the penal system were offered by a variety of experts and citizens who explained such concepts as guilt, stability, order and the reduction of harm. Pragmatic explanations the Visitors listened to quietly. When ‘justice’ or morality entered the explanation they looked bewildered, the questions intensified and the answers lengthened, exacerbating a cycle of explanatory frustration.
A professor of jurisprudence attempted to outline legal practice but the Visitors became diverted by anecdotes. Several individuals disappeared into their own thoughts. Others had no wish to revisit memories.
“Space cadets!” sneered the prisoner currently controlling the drugs trade in the north wing. Explanations were what losers gave! Remembering was only useful in the service of power - although he did remember the hours he spent up the tree as a child with a vicious dog at the base. He didn’t expect to ever speak about it - or to live a long life. He didn’t forgive or look for forgiveness. He’d come to respect his step father’s uncompromising approach to wealth acquisition.
A journalist noticed the ambiguous nature of the insult although he doubted whether its author did. The representatives of humanity wanted information about outer space - if this was indeed where the Visitors came from - but enquiries were being directed at what happened in human development, to inner space. If these strange beings were unable to comprehend civilised practices, were they indeed sophisticated life forms – or naive, extraterrestrial students doing some kind of research project?
"I lost it," muttered a murderer – also the child who twenty years previously had decimated his teddy bear. He
‘Physical care is affected by the child's or the parents' ability to receive care, and we see that all around the edge of the area that we call physical care there is the complex territory of emotional disorder in the individual, or in groups of individuals or in society.’
D.W. Winnicott, 'The Child in Health and Crisis', in 'The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.' p.65
hadn’t intended to kill his wife but his life was littered with the havoc that followed each time the metal rod that ran through his body melted. He couldn’t fault the logic of a government minister explaining why people like him deserved to be in prison. But some questions reached in through logic
“What was the nature of the tension that built up inside? How does it come to permeate being? Why was behaviour which ensured unwelcome incarceration repeated?”
‘Why had they selected him to answer their questions?’ He looked to his cellmate to re-establish his disappearing scorn - but he seemed preoccupied. Everyone was preoccupied. ‘Were they answering similar questions?’ ‘Were they coming from inside or outside?’ ‘Were the Visitors’ mouths moving?’
A politician, who recognised the confused criminal from a tabloid photo, insisted that individuals were responsible for their actions and the consequences which followed. The murderer shook himself out of his reverie and glared at the speaker he recognised as the Minister of Police. There was respite in anger. The Minister looked away only to become troubled by other thoughts. ‘What was ‘responsibility’?’ ‘How much responsibility did 'he' take for his actions?’ ‘Would he have had the affair with his secretary if he'd known how nasty the divorce which followed it would be - or the impact on his daughter?’ ‘Could he choose who he was attracted to?’
“What fuelled attraction? Was attraction shaped: culturally, biologically, by early relationships, by other life experiences? Could thoughts change chemistry, divert impulse or arrest action? How was a choice between thoughts made? How often was a thought a rationalised impulse”
‘Were they reading his thoughts?’ ‘Where was this interrogation coming from?’ He couldn’t see the Visitors’ mouths moving. And… there was no comparison between his acts and those of this criminal. He’d probably marry his secretary. Unlike these criminals, he respected the law. He was a responsible citizen. His daughter was on antidepressants: but that was just a stage she was going through. He’d paid for everything: schools, hospitals, sports trips. She said that he’d never been there! ‘What would he have said if he was there?’ ‘What would it
have meant to be available?’ [This must be some sort of mind control. He didn’t normally ask himself this kind of question!] He shut out uninvited thoughts which he told himself were being triggered by alien questions in unwelcome company. He shrugged off this distorted logic apparently aimed at redistributing guilt and refocused on criminality. He’d earned everything he owned or inherited it - which he explained to the Visitors.
“What is ownership?”
This time a property lawyer replied. The politician felt a wave of relief. He wasn’t alone in hearing these questions, his sanity not in doubt!
“If sharing is normal at the beginning of life, is the vehement defence of individual ownership an indication of early difficulties?”
"My mother was mine," blurted out the murderer - not fully understanding the question and before wondering if she was - but 'sharing' felt depleting. Several of his tattoos screamed out her name.
The fraudster who 'had wanted for nothing' - and felt entitled to everything - had the fleeting thought that owning, sharing and fraud were mixed up together in some incomprehensible manner. He knew that any judge would react against such a rationalisation of criminal activity. He'd never thought about what was normal at, nor how he'd been shaped by, the beginning of life. Looking forward was the only direction of travel.
Nor had the politician thought about ‘owning’ his parents or what they ‘shared’ with him. They were busy people. “People grow up,” he declared. Adulthood, ownership, responsibility: surely the connections were obvious. The murderer nodded his agreement. The fraudster shrugged his assent. The politician looked away. Unwelcome alliances troubled him.
"Does growing up involve developing a greater or lesser capacity to share?" inquired the Visitors.
"Family is where sharing begins," said the politician quickly - too quickly! Unsought questions passed through his head concerning exactly what that applied to - and how
his daughter would view his reply. "Community groups share resources allocated by the local government," added a city councillor. "With people in your gang," inserted a young gang member to the disquiet of the two politicians, discomfited by the continuing ease with which disparate social groups could be connected.
“Can anything be ‘owned’ given that lifetimes are so short? What would be the implications of thinking of all possessions as being held in trust for others?”
The murderer felt confused - the fraudster, lost, but only momentarily. The learnt smile quickly returned.
“Are you advocating communism?” queried the politician. “It’s failed in every state where it has been tried,” he added confidently.
But the Visitors were expanding sharing, caring, owning and responsibility across time.
The politician tried to link ownership with freedom but lost his train of thought looking at empty eyes set into gaunt, incarcerated faces who owned little or nothing.
“What states of mind have led to human beings being viewed economically: as customers, targets of marketing campaigns, human resources, disposable assets or property?”
‘Property?’ ‘Were they referring to slavery - a long time ago?’ Someone could give them a history lesson – but they were using contemporary business terminology!
The fraudster tried to organise his thoughts. ‘Did they have a moral code?’ ‘Were they supporting or criticising him?’ He didn’t see himself as a criminal: certainly not violent. Tax evasion was complex. He’d pushed it a bit far – technically fraud but what anyone who was clever enough to see the loop holes might have done He should have hired a different lawyer. Strangely, the Visitors didn’t show interest in justification. They didn’t question his morality. He was perplexed by the way that they asked about ‘states of mind’? Okay, he’d been greedy ... but he was entitled to make a good living - which included expensive foreign holidays. ‘Why suggest another motivation?’ He couldn’t blame his parents. He was the only member of his family, possibly in his affluent neighbourhood, who’d
been to prison. He shrugged off this unfamiliar musing –and revisited a familiar question.
'Might there be an angle in this to reduce his sentence?'
“What does a shrug communicate?”
Anxiety seeped through the cell block. Those who shrugged habitually felt self-conscious. Those shrugging at the time of the question wondered whether they were being watched. Shrugs were not intended to communicate anything. ‘Wasn’t that the point of a shrug?’ Not everything could be understood. The boy with the metal rod and the staring eyes remembered the shrug from more than two decades previously. His back remembered.
A warder watched the back straighten and the eyes sharpen. He moved closer to preempt any outburst.
The drugs baron from the north wing also noticed the back straighten - but then he noticed everything. It was what had kept him alive. Generally he avoided the murderer; nothing to do with his crime - that was everyday - but unpredictability had to be watched!
Several academics tried to steer the Visitors towards more ‘objective’ matters but the Visitors couldn’t comprehend 'objectivity' and its companion, 'statistical verification'. They asked whether being objective involved paying attention to the personal and social context in which behaviour evolved
They looked puzzled when the development away from informal policing with familiar faces who tried to interact with, rather than prosecuting offensive individuals, was described as professionalism and viewed as progress. Such aspirations as: citizens reporting crime, courts charging offenders, a high prosecution rate and the meticulous recording of crime perplexed them.
“How do exhortations to support the forces of law and order – or indeed any exhortations - develop thinking? Why is the residence of anybody in prison perceived as a form of success? Are personalities and social groups perceived as criminal, capable of modifying that perception if social structures are sufficiently responsive and generative? Are sustained periods of incarceration damaging to more creative social imagining?”
‘The analyst would be inclined to look at the criminal rather as a symptom of a disease or malfunction of society....’
S.H. Foulkes.
‘It follows that society and not the criminal has to be treated in the first instance.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Psychoanalysis and Crime. General Observations on Criminality from a Psychoanalytic Point of View,’ 1944, in ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis’, Karnac, 1990. p.121
‘Possibly if society’s revenge feelings were fully conscious, society could stand the treatment of the offender as ill, but so much of the revenge is unconscious that allowance must be made all the time for the need for punishment to be kept up to some extent even when it is not useful in the treatment of the offender.’
D.W. Winnicott, Comments on the Report of the Committee on Punishment in Prisons and Borstals,1961, Deprivation and Delinquency’; Tavistock/Routledge, 1985, D.W. Winnicott,, p.203
“What planet ---?” muttered the gnarled inmate whose first scars had been deflected from his mother onto his own body. Despite himself, he was becoming interested.
What most provoked the Visitors curiosity was the lack of intensity that human beings devoted to understanding compared to the energy they channelled into litigation.
“Why is investigating, prosecuting and punishing considered to be a more serious response than seeking to comprehend the personal and social origins of hurtful behaviour? Are punitive responses psychologically similar to delinquent behaviour in that action bypasses understanding?
Why is thinking, embodied in committees or reports, followed up by an impulse to ‘bring the offenders to justice’ rather than by a more introspective form of social learning?"
“Over thinking,” the only audible words of the police superintendent amidst the hubbub. “Dangerously permissive… ” the words from a local politician.
“Go the aliens!” murmured an old lag. [Prisons were the only institutions that had never expelled him - at least not for long].
“Fuckin’ retards,” rasped the gnarled criminal reverting to a more familiar mode of discourse. “Understanding changes nothing,” insisted a denizen representing a local citizens’ group. He noticed that his statement had attracted nods from dignitaries - and even inmates - and thought about going into politics. He could sell the photos he was taking of the Visitors to a magazine.
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” The old lag had memorised the words from a tattered paperback by a 'freedom fighter' who, after a long struggle, became a president - long since consigned to toilet paper by an unappreciative cellmate.
The denizen looked outraged; the local politician bemused; the police superintendent dismissive. The old lag viewed them all through weary eyelids. The rasp wavered whilst witnessing this meeting of the bizarre and the wise. ‘Was all of this a flashback to a psychedelic memory or had some new chemical been slipped into his breakfast?’
The police superintendent doubted whether a career criminal had the right to quote anyone.
The denizen grimaced. The local politician glared. The gnarled convict returned from the waiver and glowered back at the voices of society: this was his territory even if the conversation was unfamiliar.
But he was in competition with the police superintendent who regularly gave seminars on crime and considered himself an expert in law enforcement. The guillotine blade that fell on any semblance of excuse-making had long been in place.
A young gang member began muttering under his breath. Repeating himself stopped him feeling weirded out. A warder noticed how the scar above his mouth danced when he spoke.
“Is there an historical development from judicial systems involving execution and direct forms of physical pain evolving through periods of incarceration towards long and difficult conversations? Why is thinking which involves a physical organ, the brain, alongside dialogue which involves the tongue, eyes, often arms and particularly the mind – not considered as a substantial response to offending behaviour?”
The Minister of Police shook his head.
The warder, who’d wondered whether the Visitors were naive extra-terrestrial students, wondered why they failed to comprehend definitions [however carefully explained] of justice, crime and sentencing. They were interested in how values developed in relation to a changing sense of self within an intimate and social context - which made sense of resulting behaviour - but they couldn’t understand why anyone would be punished for the results of their own evolution.
“It’s not ‘evolution’ that people are punished for but the anti-social actions that they choose to perform,” explained the warder. The Visitors appeared unable to understand ‘choice’ - or why an action would be removed from its context and condemned or praised. They would trace the sequence of events leading to a particular act and ask at what point the notion of ‘responsibility’ began.
“Why does chronological rather than developmental age dictate the judicial response to offending behaviour when early relationships shape the ways that impulse is expressed and development proceeds? How are early identifications loosened? How are internalised conversations modified? How are maturational processes rekindled? How does the capacity to choose develop throughout life? Is responsibility always in a state of becoming?”
They expanded definitions until they lost their reassuring familiarity and dissolved as moral markers.
The relief felt in his moment of revenge by the man who’d killed his wife defined him. He’d rather be hated than seen as vulnerable. Society was entitled to its revenge. He tried to dismiss intrusive thoughts of his futile attempts to flush away the decimated teddy bear. But the judicial balance was being chipped away by questions which focused on understanding reactions and responses - placing even murder within the context of lifelong patterns of emotional development. The warder felt frustrated by the questions. He didn’t kill people who hurt him. He put the lid on his feelings. That’s how civilization worked. He could see by their scowls that most – on both sides of the law - agreed with him. ‘Was it possible to have a legal system if everyone was considered to be a vulnerable victim of life?’ He exchanged glances with the murderer and for a moment their thoughts conjoined.
The questions concerning the evolution of impulse infuriated those who felt that the Visitors were excusing criminal behaviour. Journalists, dignitaries and hard men found themselves in an uncomfortable allianceconcurring that crimes against children 'were the lowest of the low'- in response to the Visitors who seemed to view them all as children who harmed each other in a variety of ways - as much through neglect as violence. Those who had thought that they might be the Visitor’s natural allies, found themselves wondering about this apparent lack of any appreciation of the need to protect victims. Sometimes, in more unguarded moments, memories from children’s comics returned in which aliens were pictured as monsters.
“How often does protecting involve avoiding introspection?” the Visitors inquired.
“Law-abiding members of society need to be protected from dangerous people,” said a social services representative.
“Some crimes are unforgivable,” asserted the police superintendent.
“There is no justification for the abuse of vulnerable people,” added the representative of social services.
“Fuckin’ nonces,” the scar danced again.
“What is emotional adulthood?” asked the Visitors.
The ‘protection of the vulnerable’ seemed to be regarded by these visitors as to have become a form of protection against ‘thinking together’ – a phrase they kept returning to whenever they noticed a desire to isolate those defined as ‘perpetrators’. The Visitors acknowledged the impulse to seek retribution and define ill doing - but appeared to see giving judicial expression to such impulses as equivalent to punishing a baby. They were as puzzled by the absence of interest in protecting ‘psychologically young’ prisoners in ‘chronologically old’ bodies from the cruelties of prison life and social exclusion as they were by the media vilification of infant-adults by those who claimed to be protecting children.
As the life story of a despicable criminal unfolded, there was often a disturbing moment in which the child within the adult became visible – chaotic and vulnerable. ‘Was this some kind of alien psychology trick - corrupting the morality of those present by the seduction of empathy?’ Lines were at risk of being irretrievably blurred by further questions concerning the desire to stigmatise and why only criminal, rather than kindly, acts were kept on record.
“Pull yourself together mate,” muttered the gnarled criminal to himself. He’d hardened himself to feel nothing - whatever blows rained down upon him. His trophy cabinet was at risk.
Some of those present insisted upon the importance of the responsibility of prisoners even as childhood traumas emerged which seemed directly linked to later offending. Others found the culpability of prisoners more difficult to
‘First I must try to define the term psychopathy. I am using the term here… to describe an adult condition which is an uncured delinquency. A delinquent is an uncured antisocial boy or girl. An uncured anti-social boy or girl is a deprived child.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Classification’ [1959 – 64] in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.’ p.134-5
‘in the psychopath and the delinquent and the antisocial child there is a logic in the implied attitude ‘the environment owes me something.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Classification’ [1959 – 64] in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.’ p.134
‘I said, ‘Why not tell him that you know that when he steals he is not wanting the things that he steals but he is looking for something that he has a right to; that he is making a claim on his mother and father because he feels deprived of their love.’ I told her (the mother) to use a language which he (the son) could understand.’
relinquish when there were no overt formative traumas. Only a few professionals dared to remain in conversation with the Visitors when they asked about the psychological impact of unremarkable experiences.
“What is being stolen and from whom?” was to all but a few child psychotherapists a ridiculous opening gambit to a line of enquiry evoked by curiosity concerning the fraudster’s crimes.
“It was tax money stolen from the public,” said the police superintendent.
“What motivates activity? How much criminality involves striving towards a conscious goal and how much is in reaction to a previous experience? When an experience is unsatisfactory, is there an impulse to reach back and correct it?” followed, despite the incredulity of most of those present.
“These questions risk minimising the crimes of the wealthy and colluding with – or excusing – corruption and larceny,” said a left-wing councillor.
“Too much understanding would lead to disorder and chaos,” said the politician with the unhappy daughter, thinking about the crimes of the poor.
"Far out," said the old lag. This was a trip he was in no hurry to wake up from.
The fraudster felt perplexed. The Visitors were not putting familiar words together in a way that led to familiar ideas.
Even child psychotherapists could not see how a philosophy developed in relation to difficult children in psychotherapy could be applied throughout the adult criminal system.
Confusion barely settled on the newspaper editor, police superintendent, drugs baron or righteous citizen before being converted into intense irritation - followed by a search for a dismissive phrase with which this experience could be reported to others.
“Should all events which have an impact on emotional development, even when there are no obvious culprits, victims or headlines to publish, be approached thoughtfully? Is there a
range of behaviours permeating interactions and institutions which interrupt the development of empathy?”
Both left and right wings flapped before prolonged sighs of exasperation gave momentum for coordinated moral lift off.
“Deterrence is necessary,” reiterated a judge.
“There is 'only so much' anyone can do,” said a voice.
“The suggestion that we are all equally culpable for harm if we don’t pay attention to ‘normal behaviour’, denies the existence of evil in the world,” said another voice.
Do attempts to separate good and evil promote understanding?”
”There are real victims of crime who need to see retribution exacted and justice done,” explained the representative of a victims’ rights organisation. The Visitors questioned the cultural shaping of such needs noting the insistence on torture and execution as a proportionate response to crime in some cultures and eras
“Can reparation be more effectively made by a society mobilised to respond to harm for which it takes responsibility?”
“Social introspection has never formed the basis of any judicial system,” explained the professor of jurisprudence. The Visitors raised some part of their anatomies which was thought to have a similar function to eyebrows.
“Might judicial impulses be mediated thoughtfully – lest they become as much a problem as the original criminal behaviour? Might retribution be seen as primitive by more advanced civilisations if humanity ever reaches deeper into the universe? Is the notion of crime and consequence a primitive form of linear thinking? To retain historical, social and developmental perspective, is it necessary to let go of the seduction of punishment?”
They showed interest in such alternatives as: family courts, conciliation, reconciliation, group explorations - in any conversations motivated by an impulse to re-connect and comprehend. When the value of emotional objectivity in the legal system was highlighted, they questioned the
possibility of objectivity separated from the social history of those engaged in the judicial process.
They asked about the involvement of extended families and neighbours in reparative opportunities.
“Not sure I’d want my missus deciding my sentence,” muttered the gnarled convict.
The drug baron thought his girlfriend would be happy if he was still stuck up that tree above vicious dogs. ‘Had he behaved like a snarling dog to her - and left her up a tree, after his latest conviction?’ He didn't know whether his mother or step father were still alive. It had been a long time….
The fraudster’s family had not attended the court case –but nor had they returned the gifts he’d lavished at the height of his wealth.
The murderer didn’t have an extended family.
A warder felt the deprivation and emptiness as a gnawing in his stomach. Sometimes the work got inside youespecially when you did overtime. Maybe he was just hungry.
The recidivist said something about the look in his grandmother’s eyes when his mother returned to heroin, but his mother - and grandmother - had died long ago …
A flicker of recognition rippled through the warder. He remembered conversations with his own grandmother with whom, at one time, he’d had a special bond. She’d seemed somehow less caught up in familial expectations. She’d been genuinely interested in his ideas.
When the sense of grievance was overwhelming, the Visitors broadened the discussion. Their interest in societies in which 'truth and reconciliation' had been practised stimulated, the warder noticed, by the old lag's quote, was met by the explanation that these measures occurred when historical and violent polarisation between large groups had meant that, in the interests of social cohesion, effective punishment of all perpetrators was impossible.
“Truth and reconciliation only applied to a limited number of crimes. Societies that implemented such practices usually returned to previous definitions of, and responses to, crime and punishment once the crisis was over,” explained a professor of international law.
A journalist watched anxiety ease, even among criminals whose crimes the Visitors were deciphering, when normality was reasserted.
The Visitors noticed this too - before raising anxiety again.
Their interrogative attempts to undermine familiar thoughts and interactive habits passed volts of confusion, disorientation, panic, frustration, anger and fear through citizens, warders and prisoners alike. Hatred of uncertainty continuously sought a target, a place to settle, but the questions allowed no refuge.
“Does ‘reality testing’ look both backward [into individual and social histories] and forward [into individual and social possibilities] and is this exploration an indication of the level of ‘civilization’?”
A liberal politician found himself enjoying the thrust of these questions but couldn’t imagine what judicial system they imagined might be possible.
“When individual cruelty is met by social cruelty – does this entrench empathic failure?”
‘Quite likely,’ thought a warder. ‘But what’s the alternative?’
“What are the developmental processes that enable concern to develop – individually and socially? How is concern lost? How is it regained? Is it possible to be concerned for the hurt and the hurtful, the known and the strange? Would a helpful notion of ‘capacity’ include concern for hostile strangers?”
‘What, people you hate?’ Alarm bells jangled in a number of heads. ‘Did the Visitors think that any human being had ‘capacity’?’
“Why is there reluctance - including among inmates,” (who they observed had their own hierarchies) “to let go of moral
‘Whilst psychoanalysis faces inward reality and is intrinsic in that sense, denying context in favour of a total focus on relationship, the larger group looks out extrinsically at the surrounding culture and society.... Koinonia, citizenship, impersonal fellowship, is not an instinctual by-product of sublimated Eros; on the contrary it has to be learned as a sociogenic process of civics, and, if it is a sublimation of anything, it is a transformation of hate.’
Patrick De Mare et al, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’, Karnacs, p.33
positioning? Do narrowing eyes and hardening jaws indicate a reluctance to explore thoughts and sensations?”
“What the fuck..?” mumbled one of the lifers from the east wing.
‘Back to the shrug,’ thought the murderer and fraudster simultaneously.
Several people grimaced despite their determination not to give the Visitors evidence that might encourage questions of this nature.
Others felt quiet satisfaction concerning their moral positioning. Sometimes they caught each other’s eyes and, feeling validated, made a mental note to follow up this meeting of minds.
The focus fluctuated unpredictably between the individual and social origins of offending.
“What social groups or minorities are represented disproportionately in the prison system? How is this understood and how is social policy adapted as a consequence?”
A professor of Jurisprudence tried to put humanity in a less negative light by outlining creative outreach programs that reached into disadvantaged minority communitiesbut soon found himself trying to defend how frequently these were vulnerable to changes in political priorities and resource allocation. The Minister of Police shook his head in bewilderment as they moved from an agenda he considered absurdly liberal - in which individual responsibility had become inconceivable - to a surreal scenario.
“As individuals grow in a social system with interacting parts, could rewards and punishments be shared equitably so that the contribution of all was recognised to both success and failure? Might criminals be given awards alongside successful business people, professionals, dignitaries? When the need for retribution is overwhelming, might a variety of representatives of that culture be imprisoned together, even in the same cell, and then released together when they have sorted things out and redistributed such resources as: wealth, education, emotional articulacy and resilience?”
Many of the incarcerated hosts were thrilled at the idea of wealth being re-distributed but less enthusiastic at the prospect of hours of reflection, exploring the ways that impulse evolved – let alone how more ‘creative’ and ‘compassionate’ relationships might be sustained.
Law abiding citizens were horrified at the idea that they had as much to learn about impulses and social interactions as thugs.
How resilience might be shared was beyond everyone –although the Visitors asked whether continuing to develop these intolerable conversations might be a first step.
Academics retreated into assertions concerning the necessity of ‘independent verifiability’ - or escape clauses concerning the specialised and unrelated nature of their own areas of study.
The Visitors honed in on largely forgotten theories that emerged. They spent days exploring the implications of an ancient Athenian concept that litigation damages the soul of the litigator - an idea not unfamiliar to the old lag who had spent years in numerous prison libraries teaching himself to read and consuming whatever well-thumbed books came his way. When they heard that psychoanalysis focused on self-reflection - modifying both impulsivity and harshly judgemental aspects of self - the Visitors made extensive enquiries concerning the difficulties in creating social structures that gave shape to those ideas. They then teased out destabilising ideas which had informed practice in ‘therapeutic communities’ with delinquent clientele –closed or modified when ‘the free market’, ‘health and safety’ or retribution had been prioritised.
These theories had never been popular and the questions that they generated were frustratingly naive. The fraudster baulked when the Visitors asked, "Are criminal acts in search of a social response to ‘mend an experience of deprivation’, to ‘discover a human attitude’ that ‘could stand the strain’?"
‘What did they mean by deprivation?’ He’d ‘wanted for nothing’!
‘Punishment has a double face. It is directed towards the individual offender, but at the same time towards the non-criminal member of society, to threaten and deter him and also to satisfy his demand for revenge. This function, the treatment of the delinquent inside the ordinary member of society, is by far the most important from a practical as well as from a psychological point of view....’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Psychoanalysis and Crime. General Observations on Criminality from a Psychoanalytic Point of View,’ 1944, in ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis’, Karnac, 1990. p.121
‘There are always two trends in the antisocial tendency…. one trend is represented typically in stealing and the other in destructiveness. By one trend the child is looking for something somewhere, and failing to find it, seeks it elsewhere when hopeful. By the other, the child is seeking that amount of environmental stability which will stand the strain resulting from impulsive behaviour.’
D.W. Winnicott
‘It is particularly because of the second of these trends that the child provokes a total environmental reaction, as if seeking an ever-widening frame, a circle which had, as its first example, the mother’s arms or the mother’s body. One can discern a series – the mother’s body, the mother’s arms, the parental relationship, the home, the family including cousins and near relations, the school, the locality with its police stations, the country with its laws …’
D.W. Winnicott
"They are not children," reiterated the government minister glaring at the tattooed thugs across the room.
Some professionals who were interested in State registration [and being seen as scientific] became apologetic when asked to clarify such theories. Those most familiar with these ideas tended to remain silent: out of a sense of disillusionment with life, because they remembered just how difficult it had been to ‘stand the strain’ – especially in an increasingly non-supportive and litigious social context, because they had accepted forms of promotion which had led to such ideas retreating into the recesses of their minds, or out of anxiety with regard to being seen as allied to the Visitors. After all, given the speed at which security could become prioritised within previously liberal social climates, might those who helped the Visitors not become defined as treasonous if, when the Visitors left, they – and their ideas - became viewed as a security threat? The fact that the Visitors had only drawn out human ideas which were already in existence might be quickly forgotten.
“There were no randomised control groups,” explained the head of a psychology department in a respected University. “Such projects emerged at a time of social exploration after a world war when idealistic notions were more likely to be funded and risk-taking more acceptable.”
Most of his students had not read these theories, out of kilter as they were with current social, commercial and professional priorities.
Many psychologists present were more familiar with increasingly brief interventions which defined a problem, located dysfunctions, provided strategies and targeted interventions - and there was a general feeling that this approach was less threatening to the social order than the apparent direction in which the conversation was heading.
The Visitors clarified the notion that, within some understandings of development, protest and aggression might be understood, as psychological steps forward from withdrawal and despair. They then returned to their enquiries as to whether this meant that burglary and even violence – in fact any crime that engaged others - might be understood as developmentally hopeful and could be responded to accordingly.
A warder, remembering the hours he had sat in the prison hospital, sometimes on suicide watch, felt a growing sense of intrigue amidst the sea of social outrage when they asked,
“Could judicial responses be designed to facilitate development?”
The murderer remembered living in an adolescent ‘therapeutic community’ for a few months before it had been closed by a combination of government policy, funding cuts and public disquiet that bad children were being rewarded rather than punished for their crimes. Subsequently his social worker had reiterated local government policy that, “Children should be in families.” But serial foster families couldn’t cope and secure units had hardened him. Hope died.
His moods had always fluctuated unpredictably. His mother had told him that he was his own worst enemy. Now he felt contemptuous, dismissive, bewildered and recognised – alternating and sometimes overlapping – in response to such questions as: ‘Is destructive action a form of communication? Might all forms of communication be taken seriously?’
The Visitors questions continued to link adult criminal activities to angry toddlers – both exhibiting behaviour in search of a calming, thoughtful response.
Most dignitaries were bewildered.
“How can violence be hopeful?”
“Are you suggesting that murder is hopeful?”
“The idea that illegal behaviour is a cry for help rather than a choice undermines both freedom and responsibility,” reiterated the government minister irritably. Did the Visitors think he was stupid?’ ‘Was he missing something?’ Surely they wouldn't have travelled all this way just for this!
“Who’s going to fund these reforms?” boomed the citizens’ representative frustrated by the failure of his attempt at free enterprise. The Visitors couldn’t be captured by his high tech, scientifically tested, quality controlled lens. ‘Could questions be captured before they multiplied?’ A strange thought!
‘The antisocial tendency implies hope...Over and over again one sees the moment of hope wasted or withered because of mismanagement or intolerance. The treatment of the antisocial tendency is…. a going to meet and match the moment of hope.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Anti-social tendency [1956]’ in ‘Deprivation and Delinquency’, Tavi/Routledge, 1984
‘Trauma means the breaking of the continuity of the line of the individual’s existence. It is only on a continuity of existing that the sense of self, of feeling real, and of being, can eventually be established as a feature of the individual personality.’
D. W. Winnicott ‘Home is Where we Start from,’ Pelican, 1987 p.22
‘Punishment is only valuable when it brings alive a strong and loved reliable father figure for an individual who has lost just exactly that. All other punishment can be said to be a blind expression of the unconscious revenge of society’…..’the individual being ill is not in a state to derive benefit from punishment, and indeed is most likely to have to develop pathological trends, masochistic and other, for dealing with the punishment as it comes.’
D.W. Winnicott, Do Progressive Schools give too much Freedom to the Child?, 1965., Deprivation and Delinquency’; Tavistock/Routledge, 1985. p. 208.
The drug baron from the north wing made masturbatory gestures with his hand. It was unclear who these were aimed at and no-one liked to ask.
The warder who’d spent so much time in the prison hospital realised that most of the conversations returned to a single question, ‘Why does caring stop and punishment become emphasised according to age when individuals have not moved forward developmentally?’ He was not habitually a demonstrative man but the frown on his forehead was deepening. ‘Did the Visitors have an unrealistically optimistic view of human potential, imagining that logical prisons would offer remedial parenting rather than recycling hurt?’ ‘ What would a prison designed in accord with developmental needs look like?’
‘Had they insisted upon meeting in his workplace to make that obvious?’ ‘But what did that make him?’ He wasn’t a cruel man. ‘Did the Visitors ever answer questions?’
“What would you do in my position?” he murmured at a volume that he doubted whether anyone could hear. But he was heard by children of long ago whose lives had depended on watching and listening. He tried to follow a line of questioning that was then emerging out of a geological metaphor.
The Visitors inquired whether human beings studied the forces that powered volcanoes or only responded to eruptions – having observed the reactive quality in much of the thinking. They heard that volcanic soil could be fertile which led to a further expansion of the metaphor. ‘Were they imagining that crime performed a creative function?’
Some politicians tried to bring the conversation back to the reality of what the electorate would tolerate reminding the visitors that they operated within the constraints of a democracy. The Visitors inquired as to the shaping of what the electorate would tolerate and the ways in which public communication facilitated or impeded thought.
“When do headlines discourage more complex consideration? Does journalism portray thoughtful accounts of painful events? How often are interviewers following an agenda driven by current outrage rather than seeking understanding?
Why is destructiveness portrayed as being external to the reporters of crime and their readers’?”
“People make up their own minds,” said the owner of an on-line news feed.
“People choose which paper they buy,” said a newspaper editor.
“Never read that shit anyway,” said the drug baron from the north wing.
The fraudster who read the financial pages in detail before flicking through the rest of the paper didn’t say anything in case he found himself confirming the Visitors’ view of humanity.
“Was this more communism – this time with control on journalistic freedom?” said the newspaper editor who regularly vetoed editorial comment inconsistent with his own political views.
“Were restrictions on a free economy being advocated?” asked a politician.
The Visitors looked at the walls in the venue they had chosen and questioned the reiteration of ‘free’. ‘Was a market motivated by ‘thought’ rather than ‘sales’ possible?’
‘Was everyone expected to take responsibility for everyone else in some as yet unclear way?’
The criminal who had killed his wife stared at a therapist as she tried to speak about client selection.
The warder, who’d been thinking about volcanic soil, sat with his hand on the shoulder of the staring man who was hearing yet another woman making excuses for rejecting him.
She lost her train of thought. This was intimidation. ‘Why were the Visitors allowing this?’ She would have been able to give a much more reasoned account of her practice if the Visitors had agreed to meet separately with professionals. It was as if they regarded her discomfort, as she tried to explain ‘realistic limitations’ to a criminal that
‘The difficulty that arises in the live situation is that ‘the child does not know what the original deprivation was’ and ‘society is not willing to allow for the positive element in the anti-social activity’... both because of annoyance at being hurt and because of unawareness.’
D.W. Winnicott, Dissociation Revealed in Therapeutic Consultation, 1965 in ‘Deprivation and Delinquency’; Tavistock/ Routledge, 1985. p.260.
she would exclude from her practice, as a helpful form of reality testing.
The warder quietly enjoyed her discomfort. Impossible people had been placed in the centre of these discussions. Everyone was becoming responsible for the difficulties he faced every day.
“How well do ‘realistic limitations’ hold the disowned parts of a community in mind? Does exclusion ensure the continuity of relationships with which alienated individuals are already familiar? If an act or state of mind is unthinkable, is it not important to puzzle away until it becomes thinkable?”
The Visitors’ focus on the links between all parts of society suggested a lifestyle that would involve communicating with, living with and managing people who were cruel, anti-social, impossible to like and better locked away. Freedom of association, who you chose to interact with, was surely an important freedom. ‘Representatives might be willing to tolerate these meetings occasionally – but as a way of life?’
The Visitors continued to misunderstand the importance of ‘choice’ and, as they seemed to do with so many words, expanded it - this time to the way that decent citizens were ‘choosing’ to deem the incarcerated hosts of these fractious exchanges as the source of social and psychological discomfort. They failed to recognise that this was a ‘reality’ not a ‘choice’.
The noise was often excruciating, particularly for those who had imagined that humanity might be able to present its better side to extra-terrestrial visitors. Thugs swore at judges, politicians and journalists - many of whom alternated between icy silences and righteous dismissals - whilst notorious criminals justified shocking behaviour.
Academics lost patience with journalists looking to reduce the complicated explanations they were offering the Visitors to snappy headlines. Politicians and journalists became outraged by academics - some of whom seemed to be excusing the inexcusable as a way of conversing with the Visitors.
“Is there a lower rate of criminality in countries that have a more rehabilitative approach to crime? Does an intensive educational and artistic program within prisons alongside creative outreach programs reduce crime rates?” asked the Visitors when a politician returned to the theme of consequences and responsibility.
The politician knew the answer to both questions but he also knew that the truth did not win votes - and therefore was not party policy.
During visiting times the conversations were interrupted by the arrival of prisoners’ families who found themselves ushered in by the Visitors. Sometimes the behaviour of the prisoners’ children was frenetic and led to reprimands from a variety of adults.
“Why is there eagerness to correct the children’s behaviour – or the behaviour of their offending parents - whilst accompanying states of mind, elicit so much less curiosity?”
Again they were asking about states of mind rather than behaviour!
“The attention that calms agitation…”
The prison hall was crowded and the liberal politician craned his neck to see where the phrase came from. ‘Was it a fragment of a Visitors’ question or of the reply of some psychologist or liberal academic?’
It was becoming difficult to follow any train of thought.
The Visitors rarely said anything that could be remembered. The only knowledge they seemed to value was to be discovered in interaction - even between warring factions. Context was everything. During the pauses they inquired about the evolution of the subjects under discussion and the language that was being used. Legal, psychological, political and moral formulations which were used to conclude arguments left them looking puzzled.
They seemed captivated by metaphor. “Which words acted as windows? Which ideas acted as doorways through which creative thoughts could walk and meet other ideas? Which
‘The
nature of the culture at any particular juncture is a central issue…’
Patrick De Mare
‘the predominant culture may be one of bickering and blocking, cliché ridden with destructive comments, and this may have to be pointed out…’
Patrick De Mare
‘The question is how to foster a culture that enables and promotes thoughtfulness and creativity and helps to transform hate into a more negotiable currency.’
Patrick De Mare, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group’, de Mare et al, Karnac. p.89
‘Social structure moulds, canalises, exerts pressure, and structures mental energy; culture as a manifestation of group mind converts this matter-energy into information. The major conceptual shift from matter-energy to information flow, previously confused, marks a breakthrough in the history of science: a parallel shift must also take place in psycho-social thinking where the biological, the psychological, the social and the politico-economic must be handled operationally in a unified cultural field.’
Patrick De Mare, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group’, de Mare et al, Karnac, p.92.
policy statements were more like walls – solid but unlikely to progress possibilities?” They made no attempts to bring the meeting to order. And yet, there were periods in which one conversation was being listened to. There were even periods of silence.
Suspicions began to harden that, if the Visitors viewed human beings as children, they saw themselves as adults who should change things. When politicians reported back these conversations to parliamentary colleagues, an increasing disquiet developed as to the direction in which the exchanges were heading. As long as the Visitors were equating ordinary humanity with criminality they would be unlikely to share their scientific advances. Their thinking had to be shifted. ‘What would they be willing to trade?’
A ripple of hope passed through the representatives of society when, after a period that had seemed interminable to many, the Visitors announced that they were thinking of moving to a new location. Universities consulted with one another to think of an appropriate venue. Politicians made consultations with a variety of government departments. Business leaders met to discuss how the public interest in the Visitors could be best taken advantage of. A large conference centre or business centre would welcome the Visitors. What brands might be developed? If only the Visitors were photogenic!
The Visitors again inquired as to where both the included and the excluded might be most likely to reflect together. After listening to the various suggestions for a suitable venue, they decided against all the proposals laid out in front of them - some elaborated by multimedia presentations - and suggested a large psychiatric hospital.
After initial indignation that they were not consulted on the new location, some of the representatives of humanity regained their equilibrium. At least now they would be in the realm of illness and treatment, of scientific rather than judicial intervention. Politicians felt relieved that there was less danger of the electorate seeing them as becoming soft on crime - after all, even the most punitive voters had a measure of sympathy for the mentally ill - especially if they suffered quietly.
‘An infant I know, who was born with a lower incisor already cut, and so could have torn the nipple badly, actually suffered partial starvation himself through protecting the breast from damage. Instead of biting the breast the baby chewed on the inside of his lower lip, causing a sore.’
D.W. Winnicott, 'Aggression and its Roots,' 'Deprivation and Delinquency', Routledge, 1990, p. 87.
‘When there is hope in regard to the inside things, instinctual life is active, and the individual can enjoy using instinctual urges, including aggressive ones, in making good in real life what has been hurt in fantasy. This forms the basis for both play and work.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Aggression and its Roots,’ in ‘Deprivation and Delinquency’, Routledge, 1990, p. 89.
Chapter II Madness
Whilst the small boy, who would become known as a murderer, was raising his wordless shoulders, elsewhere small bodies made similar gestures in reaction to uninvited incursions. Children learnt to preempt intrusions and shrugs fended off unwelcome engagement. Weight: slid away, no longer registered - or continued to cling to young shoulders.
Two sets of shoulders continued to carry weight, their owners too preoccupied to develop friendships - or to notice each other - despite attending the same school. One set of shoulders meticulously tidied her bedroom, whilst insisting she was sick and refusing to go to school, which threw the plans of her self absorbed mother into disarray. The other set of shoulders belonged to the daughter of a psychology professor. She knew that she was from a privileged background and educational failure was inconceivable. There was nothing in the family narrative that explained her feelings of emptiness and self-hatred which began soon after she entered her teens. Such thoughts, hidden behind a disarming smile, could only be her fault.
A teenager who shrugged off weight, knew that teachers and fellow pupils, unnerved by her volatile behaviour, were relieved when she did not arrive at class. She shrugged when, after being sent home from school for an outburst, she found her mother sleeping off the after-effects of a hard night out. Then she polished off any remaining alcohol. During those years, she was hospitalised three times after large overdoses for which she had no explanation, although two had occurred after long conversations with sympathetic professionals. The professionals had felt angry and impotent, the young woman - calm and no longer intent on ending it all.
A pale faced girl, with shoulders too insubstantial to carry weight, had ceased showing signs of reaction to external or internal voices. Gestures would involve a response to a world from which she had retreated. She had no idea how to relate to rough peers. ‘Fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘stink’… ‘father didn’t care enough to stay’ and ‘no-one will ever love you’ became arrows that met no resistance as they sped inwards - accompanied by pursuing professionals who introduced her to diagnostic categorisation and treatment pathways. Resignation became a way of life and a shrug seemed superfluous. There was something wrong with her which required medical intervention. The ‘inner resources ’ mentioned by a worker who wanted to help her to become more positive were difficult to imagine. Liveliness grew in other bodies..
Twenty years later, in a large urban psychiatric hospital, the girls - now in women’s bodies - contemplated whether they had enough ‘capacity’ [a word they learnt early in their psychiatric careers] to meet strange beings who they were told would ask lots of questions.
The set of shoulders who’d meticulously tidied a bedroom decided that they would be too ill to participate. The Professor’s daughter expected to employ the disarming smile if her ingratitude or growing list of secretive behaviours became evident. The daughter who’d polished off her mother’s alcohol raised a well-practiced sceptical eye brow lift in the mirror. The effect was undermined by the glimmers of curiosity that intermittently appeared in the glass. The girl-woman with shoulders too insubstantial to carry weight wondered if the visitors would punish her for the evil she had done and whether the cast of professionals, familiar despite their changing faces, would be able to rescue her.
Most of the delegates from the prison and a whole new range of professionals made preparation for what, they hoped, would be a completely different conversation - only to have their enthusiasm checked by the Visitors evading security measures and bringing with them some of the ‘hosts’ from the previous venue. The Visitors’ justification for this dangerous behaviour was that they had no wish to create artificial distinctions which might push their enquiries towards predetermined conclusions. Then, as if performing an introductory ritual connecting the venues, they began asking questions.
“Which classes, genders, races or cultures are more likely to find themselves in psychiatric or judicial institutions? Do these factors impact on the crimes committed and the sentence given - or alternatively on the diagnoses made and the treatment offered? How is this understood and how are social policies developed to respond to any imbalances?”
The Minister of Police flinched - a barely modified version of a question asked in the prison! ‘Were they expected to endure a repeat?’ Despite his better judgement, he’d found himself accompanying the Visitors, explaining [to anyone who asked] that his ministerial duties included responsibility for security. The authority that this role suggested dissipated when the Visitors ignored safety procedures or failed to understand his explanations concerning the distinctions between these institutions. ‘Why ask about crimes in a hospital?’ Prisons were a response to the anti-social behaviour and psychiatric hospitals the mental illness of ‘identified individuals’. ‘Did they not understand the concept of individual identity?’ His attempts at replying to the now familiar wideranging questions had just led to humanity appearing thoughtless. He needed to adopt a new strategy! [He had once directed a successful advertising business - but the Visitors didn’t appear open to carefully constructed presentations, however professionally presented, informed by organisational psychology and interwoven with subconscious positivist messages.]
“Specialisation has led to huge advances in knowledge,” explained a professor of research methodology, attempting to channel thinking into areas in which he had recognised expertise. “Mixing everything together, as in alchemy, or attributing things to divine intervention, happened in a pre-scientific era, in the dark ages.” [He murmured the
latter sentence quietly to the Minister of Police. To share it more publicly might have aroused religious sensitivities.]
The once small girl, with shoulders too insubstantial to carry weight, and for whom a shrug would have been an ineffective defence against internal enemies, caught the eye of the once small boy whose habitual shrugs had begun in response to a question about a teddy bear, and whose behaviour had created a steady supply of external enemies. He felt something ripple down his spine. She felt something shudder in her shoulders. Definitely an energy: something that was not there before! Bodies were resonating before sounds could be gathered together. He moved into the doorway of an office near her. She looked up and noticed other rough looking men amongst the crowd. ‘Who could they be?’ Perhaps they were even more evil than she was and would draw any disapproval away from herself. She felt relief at this evidence of visible enemies.
The formal procedure, intent on giving a coherent shape to events, began in a large hall; walls scrubbed clean, hand sanitiser at every entrance, medical practitioners greeting representatives as they arrived. ‘Did the Visitors ignore the hand sanitiser because of the shape of their anatomy or were they making a point?’ ‘Why had the Visitors started asking questions before the introductions?’ ‘Was this their normal mode of greeting?’
Representatives of political and social bodies felt relieved that this time they were not met by a barrage of hostility and cat-calls. Even when shouting was heard, it was probably the symptom of an illness rather than aimed at anyone for their views or policies. Patients, anxiety sedated by the medication issued shortly before the meeting, spoke in hushed tones to each other whilst identifying experts or politicians they had seen on television. Some stood alone, others beside a nurse. The manager noticed the service user with the insubstantial shoulders looking flushed and standing near a criminal in a doorway. She sent nurses to stand on either side of the unprotected woman. Risk assessment followed by appropriate action gave her a sense of a job well done.
The ‘vulnerable service user’ barely noticed the safeguarding actions taking shape around her. She was too struck by how different the ward was today. ‘Was the
‘The mind that is usually called intra-psychic is a property of the group, and the processes that take place are due to the dynamic interactions in this communicational matrix....
Correspondingly, we cannot make the conventional sharp differentiation between inside and outside, or between phantasy and reality. What is inside is always outside, what is outside is inside as well.’
S.H. Foulkes, My Philosophy in Psychotherapy, 1974, in ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis,’ Karnacs, 1990, p.277 -8.
‘Goldstein’s presentation starts with man. The organism is seen as one whole, not as a conglomeration of parts. He sees no point in research that is based on artificially specific parts of an animal ... it is only through external influences, themselves subject to change, that the normal can be distinguished as something particular.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Biology in the Light of the Work of Kurt Goldstein’, in ‘Selected Papers, Psycho-analysis and Group Analysis,’ Karnac, 1990, p.42.
‘The participant observer ...tries to view his data without a preconceived bias. That is, he is prepared to learn something new from his findings and not only something old. ‘The open mind’ is the prerequisite for research.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Some Technical and Practical Aspects of the Group Analytic Situation,’ in ‘Group Psychotherapy, the Group Analytic Approach.’ Karnac, 1990, p.61.
‘What about statistics? Is this science? Statistics can be used to prove that some answer to a question is right, but whose question is it, and whose answer?’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Home is where we Start From.’ Pelican, 1986, p. 17.
‘We use the words normal and healthy when we talk about people and we probably know what we mean. From time to time we may profit by trying to state what we mean, at risk of saying what is obvious and at risk of finding that we do not know the answer. In any case our standpoint moves with the decades…’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Home is where we Start From.’Pelican, 1986, p.21
recent injection of political energy, with the ward smelling of fresh white paint plus well-dressed managers and clinicians she’d never seen speaking as if they were there every day, linked to a royal visit - or in preparation for the divine judgement in which her evil would be exposed?’ She braced herself.
A Medical Trust representative welcomed the dignitaries and the Visitors. A psychiatric consultant suggested a format with which he was familiar. Service users might be brought in individually and their pathology and progress assessed. The Visitors asked whether this might offer more balanced information if the procedure was applied to everyone in the room. A nurse who frequently found herself at odds with hospital authorities and medical experts smiled. There were too many high ranking medical dignitaries present to initiate a conversation with the Visitors but she liked the question. She’d trained as a nurse - after a period in psychotherapy as an adolescent, when she went ‘off the rails’ - and not infrequently felt as though she had more in common with patients than with colleagues.
The warder whose hand had steadied the murderer in the prison took a deep breath. He could imagine the challenge to established practice in the questions that would ensue. So could the old lag - who rarely missed a beat - although all his education, along with his medication, had been selfprescribed. The fraudster waited. There were advantages in taking nothing for granted.
Prisoners watched the doors swinging shut with a dull thud rather than a clang. Escape would be easy. The murderer had no wish to go anywhere. Where would he go? His dead wife and long-dead mother were still with him. Here the walls were clean and white. In the prison, even after a deep clean, the stains remained. The old lag and the fraudster were too intrigued to consider going elsewhere.
The psychiatric consultant ignored questions inviting selfreflection and began describing characteristics of diagnosed individuals. He explained: hallucinations, delusions, grandiose thinking, depressive symptomatology and persecutory anxiety – all characteristic of impaired reality testing - when medication and periods of hospitalisation might be required. He grouped these and other symptoms
into diagnostic categories. The explanations gave momentum to subsequent questions. “Does the focus on diagnostic categories make it difficult to explore the unique nature of an individual’s life experience - as well as the social factors that contribute to development?” “Why focus on multi-dimensional precipitating factors simultaneously? Why not do things sequentially and scientifically?” replied the psychiatric consultant, almost managing to disguise his irritation.
“Does human experience unfold sequentially and scientifically? Does dividing up experiences remove them from their context?”
The Professor of Research Methodology, in solidarity with his psychiatric colleague, began to explain experimental design but the Visitors’ curiosity as to whether it was ever possible to exclude social variables transformed attempts at explanation into an infinite existential scrutiny.
“It is important to focus research and establish clear methodology.” reiterated the Professor.
“Why do professionals locate expertise in themselves rather than discovering it in recipients of care?”
“Did they not value training?” [The psychiatric consultant’s muted response to the question was spoken quietly into the ear of his colleague.]
“Is categorisation ‘a rest’ from uncertainty, confusion or intolerable thoughts?”
“Did they not value clarity?”
“Is there value in accompanying a process rather than interposing a design?”
This time he didn’t try to disguise his annoyance: “Scientific study requires objectivity.”
“ When the communications of others are the subject of study, is objectivity possible?”
“The scientific method is an immeasurable advance on faith-based practices.”
‘Language... ‘ is what goes on inside his’ own’ mind but at the same time it is a shared property of the group and the individual is forced into it from the beginning by the surrounding culture.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘My Philosophy in Psychotherapy’, 1974 in ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis’, Karnac, 1990, p.277-8.
… ‘the regressive tendency in a psychotic case is part of the ill individual’s communication.’
D.W. Winnicott
‘The psychiatrist … recognises the symptom as an SOS call that justifies a full investigation of the history of the child’s emotional development, relative to the environment and to the culture. Treatment is directed towards relieving the child of the need to send out the SOS.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Symptom Tolerance in Pediatrics’, in ‘Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis’, Hogarth Press, 1977, p.102.
‘Then I came to the analysis of patients who proved to be borderline, or who came to have the mad part of themselves met and altered. It is work with border-line patients that has taken me (whether I liked it or not) to the early human condition, and here I mean to the early life of the individual rather than to the mental mechanisms of earliest infancy.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Psychiatric Disorder in Terms of Infantile Maturational Processes,’ in ‘Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,’ Karnac, 1990, p. 235.
“Do attempts to confirm an hypothesis involve adherence to a faith?”
“Not in a properly designed experiment. Clinical research is the forerunner of scientific knowledge.”
“Are hypotheses able to be held lightly? Does the scientific method involve valuing a state of mind which remains ‘creatively puzzled’?”
‘A recipe for confusion!’ muttered the psychiatric consultant.
“Does ‘grandiose thinking’ describe the state of mind of career minded academics when they are not in thoughtful interaction with the people studied? Are busy, senior clinicians who diagnose, without creating substantial periods of time to understand the perspectives of each patient and those who know them best, exhibiting an ‘absence of reality-testing’? Might all interactions and forms of expression be subject to curiosity in relation to past experiences, current events and future aspirations.?”
‘Objectivity’ … ‘control groups’ … ‘statistics’ … ‘measurement’ … ‘years of training,’ became barricades – sometimes more like empty prayers - built or offered up to resist the Visitors’ tsunami of questions concerning the value of scientific methodology when applied to psychological and emotional difficulties. It was becoming apparent that the Visitors regarded professional terminology as an attempt to: objectify the subjective, reduce complexity and avoid uncertainty.
“It’s important to have a method,” repeated the professor in research methodology – hunting for a life buoy. Uncertainty gave him a drowning sensation. “What is the social context in which these methods developed? Is the direction of research influenced by commercial interests or political manoeuvring within academic and professional bodies?”
They heard that several of those present had published in learned journals as well as academic books the results of their studies.
“How often are research projects influenced by sources of funding and framed in ways most likely to produce the desired
results? How often are symptoms organised and diagnoses attributed in accord with the author’s areas of publication? What is the nature of the energy fuelling this interest?”
They made enquiries concerning the contribution of all participants to the disturbances that emerged in the environment around some hospital residents. They were puzzled by the focus on the behaviours of a diagnosed individual to the exclusion of those with whom they interacted. They were curious, not only about what was said but the way that something was spoken about. “
Is there a change of tone at the introduction of such terms as ‘border-line’, ‘narcissistic’ and more particularly ‘perverse’ and ‘psychopathic’? Are they medical or moral categories? How are they understood developmentally? Is tone a diagnostic indicator in relation to the formulator as well as the recipient of the diagnosis?”
The individual who had felt calm after she took overdoses remained unclear what belonged where. She often challenged the relevance of the questions purported to assess her condition and was described in her notes as ‘uncooperative’ and as having ‘poor reality testing’ skills.
She knew that her psychiatric vocabulary outstripped most of the trainees who found themselves assigned to her. Years of admissions and a variety of medications had given her ‘a specialist knowledge base’. She responded to repetitive assessments enabling the ticking of outcomes boxes [which had multiplied since her early admissions] with a rhetorical flourish, a weary air or a shrug. Her mother had self-medicated with alcohol even before she was born - so perhaps she had ‘a genetic predisposition’ to chemicals! Hospital was as much home as anywhere else. [The old lag recognised a kindred spirit]. Occasional outbursts confirmed her border-line diagnosis. “I first selfharmed when I was 11,” she said, slipping a fork into her pocket. Winding up staff was one of the few entertainments available in this hospital. Reactions indicated life - even in an alcoholic stupor! Maternal memories gathered.…. She put the fork back... ‘Why had she done that?’
“I hate my body,” said the under-weight daughter of the psychology professor, recently re-admitted to hospital by her parents after she had stopped eating. ‘Why did she hate her body?’ She knew that her mother had disliked
interruptions to her career and stopped breastfeeding within a few weeks of her birth. Her father celebrated her exam results. ‘Did anyone like her body?’
“I hate hospitals,” said a middle-aged woman who repeatedly alarmed her community teams by rapid weight reductions after discharge – resulting in serial readmissions. She’d had numerous childhood accidents .... ensuring hospital visits from a father who refused to go anywhere near his ex-wife’s home.
“I hate life,” said the woman plagued by obsessional rituals who had found a source of stress more debilitating than the Visitors’ questions. During adolescence, her infantile battle for the attention of a volatile mother had turned towards revenge on a demoralized mother. In hospitals the battle was for the attention of consultants and the revenge on the exhausted nursing staff who dreaded having to prepare her to go out - or even to attend an appointment within the hospital. It could take hours. Time was a battleground. That morning, when she discovered that a junior nurse had been assigned to special her if she didn’t attend a meeting at which the important staff would all be present, she reversed her previous resolution - and arrived on time. ‘Why time?’ was an unexpected thought. She began reorganising her handbag.
The woman waiting for her evil to be exposed was preoccupied by her own thoughts. Royalty had not arrived. She had ‘schizophrenia’ - recently confirmed by the psychiatric consultant. Previously she’d had ‘borderline personality disorder with psychotic features’. When she was younger, she’d been told that she was on ‘the spectrum’. A ‘diagnosis’ explained who she was and helped other people know what to do with her. It also meant that she could have a ‘treatment pathway’ with the correct medication. [She’d first been prescribed medication when her Mum and Dad were fighting.] She’d been allocated lots of pathways amidst assessment fashions, transitory scientific certainties, departmental re-organisations and the promotions of professionals. Each of these institutional changes had been described in the hospital publicity as ‘professional development’ and accompanied by ‘in-service training.’
She knew that being ‘patient’ and managing frustration was a sign of health. But she had stopped being a ‘patient’
and become a ‘service user’. This must have been because her ‘patience’ had run out. She disliked being called a ‘user’ and knowing that people who talked to her were doing so, not because they wanted to, but as part of a ‘service’. Addicts were users. Hotel rooms and horses were serviced. This was all her fault because she had stopped being ‘patient’ and begun to show signs of reaction. But, with the medication, the voices were more distant - as was the rest of the world. Were these thoughts linked to the sensation in her shoulders? Everything was connected. She caught the eye of the politician - thinking about his daughter. The world was becoming awash with questions - even when the Visitors were silent.
A few months previously, she’d been given powerful medication. Around the same time, she’d had six sessions with an evidence-based therapist who gave her strategies. She’d preferred talking to an older woman who’d seen her for longer and got to know her better. But that therapy wasn’t ‘evidence based’ so they stopped it. Then they gave her ‘community care’. This involved different people visiting to ensure that she took the medication - which she sometimes washed down the sink as it made her put on weight and keep forgetting things. They didn’t talk about ‘evidence’ when they were too busy to visit.
The Visitors asked how often disparaging psychotic voices repeated familiar phrases. She liked the Visitors. They were more interested in landscapes than pathways. She told them that she recognised most of the criticisms the voices made: things that her Mum and Dad used to shout at each other or that the bullies had said to her before she refused to go to school. Sometimes they also included replies to criticisms that she had never articulated. She knew that, when you said words aloud, they didn’t always make sense to other people. It was better to take [or at least pretend to take] the medication.
She’d spent long days under her bed hoping that her mother, who’d stayed in her own bedroom for weeks after Dad left home, wouldn’t notice. Eventually, she’d been told that she was ‘school-refusing’, ‘worrying her mother’, ‘over-reacting’ and ‘attention-seeking’ - until medical diagnoses proved that her problems were real, that she wasn’t wasting people’s time. They meant that she was being taken seriously. “I like diagnoses,” said the woman who had ceased to show signs of reaction.
‘... the regression represents the psychotic individual’s hope that certain aspects of the environment which failed originally may be re-lived with the environment this time succeeding instead of failing in its function of facilitating the inherited tendency in the individual to develop and mature.’
D.W. Winnicott,‘Classification [1959 – 64] in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.Karnac, 1990, p. 128.
‘Neurotic suffering of any kind is the result of conflict - conflict between interacting personalities and within the interacting personalities - and represents a tentative solution of that conflict,’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Patients and their Background,’ in ‘Group Psychotherapy, the Psychoanalytic Approach.’ Foulkes and Anthony, Karnac, 1990, p.55.
‘In health the mother is able to delay her function of failing to adapt until the baby has become able to react with anger rather than be traumatised by her failures.’
D. W. Winnicott, ‘Home is Where we Start from,’ Pelican, 1987, p. 22.
‘The key word is integration which covers almost all the developmental tasks... carries the baby through to unit status… to the personal pronoun ‘I’, to the number one, this makes possible I AM, which makes sense of I DO… the adult does not stop developing emotionally.’
D. W. Winnicott, ‘Home is Where we Start from,’ Pelican, 1987, p.28.
“Are symptoms within or between people?” asked the Visitors. “Within people,” replied the woman who now ‘knew’ she had schizophrenia. Then she remembered what she’d said about hiding from her parents shouting - as well as the relentless sounds of the playground bullies. “Voices,” she said - which confirmed her diagnosis in several qualified minds.
“Between people,” said the border-line woman. ‘Was she still waiting for her mother to wake up?’ An unexpected question! It was a long time ago.
“Within people, it’s my obsessions that stop me doing things,” said the obsessional woman – who had difficulty thinking about what happened between people. ‘Was it in reaction to her mother’s unpredictable moods that she first began meticulously organising her toy jewellery box?’ ‘Wondering’ was to be avoided. It could go on forever. It could go anywhere. Repetitive activity provided control over time and space. It gave relief from uncertainty. She liked watching outcomes boxes being ticked.
“Between me and my body,” said the daughter of the psychology professor – who had read the notes in which she was described as coming from an ‘intact functional family.’ Her father was an ambitious man with a scientific mind, who looked to the hospital to teach her evidencebased techniques to control her symptoms. He ‘knew’ that illness was located within individuals. She respected her father’s expertise. Starving herself and self harm were private rituals. The buzz she got when she achieved a low weight was not something she told her family about.
The Visitors were curious as to how ‘symptom reduction’ had become equated with ‘science.’ They were intrigued by the nature of the logic that validated methods which removed a symptom, often for a short period - or left a sufferer with a different symptom - also treated in isolation, and called this an ‘evidence-based outcome.’ They asked whether bringing things together was considered less ‘scientific’.
Upon hearing about the prevalence of self-harm among their hosts, they asked questions which risked evoking eruptions from previously placid ‘service users’. They questioned the unwillingness of professionals to welcome these outbursts.
“Might aggressive impulses, however clumsy and misdirected, be hopeful?” The warder recognised this as a continuation of the conversation in the prison concerning the search for an environment ‘that could stand the strain.’
A psycho-therapist, previously part of a psychotherapy delegation to the prison where she’d been glared at by the murderer, and currently working out her redundancy notice from the hospital, repeated her understanding that personality was shaped by early experiences. The Visitors asked what interventions were provided as a consequence of this observation and were puzzled that this was rarely prioritized - indeed that treatment exploring development rather than focusing on symptom reduction was being steadily reduced.
The rod in the back of the murderer vibrated - although he understood little of the language being used. ‘Were they talking about him?’ He looked at the shoulders which shuddered when his back rippled as if for confirmation that he existed.
The fraudster felt engaged.... definitely a connection with the student with the high-achieving parents.... the buzz that she got when she achieved her targets. His buzz was when financial deals succeeded. Although nothing lasted! ‘Did early development really shape what happened years later?’
The old lag barely remembered his parents although he sometimes wondered if they’d ever thought about him. He knew that his mother had taken drugs when she was pregnant. ‘When he lost himself in drugs, was he searching for her?’ He’d read about preverbal memories stored in the body. ‘How could you know?’ Everything he knew about child development and therapy came from his reading. Self-taught! ‘Would he have learnt as much if it had been expected of him - or if he’d been examined about what he’d read?’ ‘Was he expelled from all those schools or did his soul drift away - until the eviction of his body merely confirmed the rupture?’ He’d liked the calm silences of the libraries he’d found himself in when he truanted - not always consistent in prison libraries but, after eruptions, things usually settled down again. He liked discovering things - and remembered the feel of a book as much as the words. Disconnected questions, phrases and memories were forming a kind of jigsaw….
In the absence of other common ground, relief was the dominant feeling when the Visitors appeared to understand any area of human thought, although these rarely included ideas that were considered mainstream. They made extensive enquiries with regards to the development of thinking, focusing on ancient philosophers who had prioritised dialogue over individual dissertations and inquired as to why contemporary academic papers, in which individuals invented new words for ideas which appeared to have been around for centuries, were considered an advance on cooperative ventures – let alone patented and advertised as scientific discoveries.
As in the prison, the interest of the Visitors was piqued by life stories rather than the categories offered to define individuals. When the long-winded stories arrived at the narrator’s admission to hospital, clinicians breathed a sigh of relief at finally entering areas of professional practice. The relief was short-lived. The attention paid to what was happening between people was unrelenting.
“Why do several of the nurses referred to most fondly by patients have to leave these meetings?”
“Permanent staff members are required to update: individual risk assessments, environmental risk assessments, health and safety checklists, care plans, restraint records, medication charts, daily notes, weekly notes, monthly notes, admission forms, discharge summaries and other professional reports. This is called ‘service delivery’ and ensuring these tasks are done is part of ‘quality control’,” explained a hospital manager. The Visitors looked baffled. They asked provocative questions which led to a group of elderly patients spending days reading their own files [often trolley loads of notes], selecting out the pages that would help others understand them - and shredding the rest. There was a murmur of disquiet and a gasp of incredulity as mountains of paperwork and generic forms disappeared into the mouth of the shredder. A similar procedure followed involving the delete button with electronic files. Then they asked whether, if only the remaining documents were attended to, members of staff most willing to communicate with patients might become available to do so. Several nurses began to enjoy the proceedings. Several managers developed headaches.
The Visitors remained puzzled by the language used to explain practice.
“Why do professionals use words which block intimacy?”
“These are scientific and technical concepts – used in a different context than personal language,” a professor of psychiatric medicine explained.
The Visitors seemed unimpressed by this distinction. “If psychological growth is dependent on sustaining attachments, why pass people around between professionals for assessments, referrals and short-term interventions?”
“This is a necessary consequence of specialised training,” continued the professor. “Do interactions understood to be developmentally helpful become less relevant in the face of this specialisation? Would these practices be viewed favourably in families?” “Caring organisations are not the same as families: they become necessary when families can’t cope,” intervened a psychiatric social worker.
But the Visitors seemed unconvinced by the way that things were fitted together.
“Are re-organisations, re-configurations and efficiency savings helpful developmentally?” “These are organisational, not psychological decisions,” explained a professor of business administration, pleased to be able to make a contribution from his area of expertise.
“Why are things so disconnected? When did communication break down?”
The professor of research methodology was thinking of a way to explain that things were not so difficult and indeed - that things were better than they had ever been - when he was preempted.
“At Secondary school,” said the psychologist’s daughter, “although it got worse at University.”
“Every year there are enormous advances in medical science. This is definitely the best time in history to be ill,” quickly inserted the professor of research methodology amidst a discordant symphony of nodding and shaking heads.
‘The point is: how far do psychiatrists feel it is a fair statement that the disorders they are dealing with are relative failures exactly where achievements characterise the life of every healthy infant?... I have made a point of getting innumerable mothers to describe their infant’s way of life in the early stages before the mother has got out of touch with these intimate things…’
D. W. Winnicott, ‘Psychiatric Disorder in Terms of Infantile Maturational Processes,’ in ‘Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,’ Karnac, 1990, p. 235.
‘Dialogue uses language and transforms it... dialogue builds... dialogue functions without final truths.....’
Patrick De Mare et al, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’, Karnacs, p.47.
‘At one extreme the False Self sets up as real and it is this that the observers tend to think is the real person. In living relationships, work relationships, and friendships however, the False Self begins to fail. In situations in which what is expected is a whole person the False Self has some essential lacking.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,’ in
‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,’ Karnac, 1990, p.142.
‘The process… can be directed towards increasing transformation from autistic neurotic symptom formation to articulate formulation of problems which can be shared and faced by all in common....This a very different proposition from what was first presented: a host of complaints for which one looked to a doctor for a cure.’
S.H. Foulkes
‘Meanwhile isolation is replaced by social contact, communication is possible even in such matters as were previously considered particularly intimate, private and secret and charged with anxiety, apprehension and guilt......rivalry and competition are replaced by co-operation, imagination about other people’s minds by genuine information based on testing in frank and mutual exploration. Individuality emerges as complementary to the group.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Therapeutic Group Analysis’ London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1964, p. 42.
“When I was five,” said the schizophrenic woman who’d spent much of her fifth birthday under her bed.
“It was always wrong,” said the woman who filled out assessment forms with a rhetorical flourish, a weary air or a shrug.
The Visitors acknowledged the utility of some medication in alleviating suffering but remained cautious in relation to enthusiasm for brain science. The questions and replies reminded the fraudster of a dance routine he had tried to learn in which he was always out of step.
“If psychological professionals design tools which best explain – and rectify – psychological development, are all children measured and diagnosed with a battery of tests before being placed on care pathways? Do parents measure their children in this way - or are these practices reserved for strangers?”
The University student wondered whether she had been battered by tests all her life. Academic success had only exacerbated the tension that defined her relationship with parents, peers and her own body. ?
“If mental illness is biochemical, and brain science is the key to treatment, why not bring up children in laboratories where their brains could be scientifically stimulated in a controlled manner?”
“Science has limitations,” explained the professor of research methodology – uncertain as to what those might be and quietly intrigued by this line of thinking.
“Do professionals show an interest in the part of a relative’s brain they are relating to during a disturbing encounter?” A psychologist smiled. She had tried this – but only once! “Do they tell the relative this and what is the impact on the relationship?” Her husband had retreated into his study.
“Do professionals give psychological tests to friends?” A nurse recalled a drunken hospital party.
“Does the logical extension of attempts to objectify interactions include evidence based parenting, evidence based friendships and evidence based partnerships?” Several clinicians wondered whether this might just be a matter of time.
“Where does ‘clinical’ meet relational? Is there a ‘clinical’ difficulty with making discoveries during ongoing conversations in the context of deepening relationships?” It was disconcerting when the Visitors asked whether psychological professionals were measurably happier than anyone else - before inquiring: “If a business model is relevant in determining the nature of care, why not bring up children as commercial ventures? Potential parents could be allocated on the basis of business plans.”
“The family is the core of our nation’s life,” said the government minister who barely knew his daughter.
“The core of what?” asked the borderline woman.
The old lag wondered what it would have been like to have a family.
The schizophrenic woman wondered what it would be like to have a core.
The psychiatric consultant tried to return the topic to pathology and pathways - but the Visitors failed to understand the logic of treatment, despite explanations by numerous professionals. ‘ Why otherwise would they ask:
“Do people get lost when symptoms are focused on?” “Definitely,” said the quiet, obsessional woman. “Although sometimes my anxiety is so bad I can’t even get out of bed – and strategies can help... for a while.” But she resonated with the woman who missed the elderly therapist – having herself once felt understood in an ongoing group in which she had shared more of her difficulties than with anyone previously.
The psychotherapist working out her notice had known the elderly therapist and guessed that the group had not been about strategies, goals and defined pathways so it disappeared when the hospital had ‘re-evaluated its treatment profile’.
“Is addressing a symptom with a defined strategy shaped by a social climate of short-term planning?”
‘Cost benefit analysis,’ ‘scientifically verifiable,’ ‘evidence base,’ ‘learning outcomes,’ : however many times these
‘Even to describe adequately and accurately the simplest case, we could almost say even to describe a single symptom, we have to refer to the interacting network of human relationships from which it grows.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Patients and their Background’, in ‘Group Psychotherapy, the Psychoanalytic Approach,’ Foulkes and Anthony, K arnac, 1973, p. 54.
‘I hope that I shall not fall into the error of thinking that an individual can be assessed apart from his or her place in society. Individual maturity implies a movement towards independence but there is no such thing as independence…’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Home is Where we Start from,’ Pelican, 1987, p.22.
‘I am suggesting that in a study of psychosis the attempt must be made to classify the environment and the types of environmental abnormality and the point in the development of the individual at which these abnormalities operate, and that to attempt to classify sick individuals on the basis of the clinical pictures that they present leads to no useful results.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Classification [1959 – 64] in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment’, Karnac, 1990, p. 136.
concepts were explained, the Visitors were unable to comprehend how they might apply to human interactions. The manager wondered whether repetition might clarify matters and included these phrases in as many sentences as she could. ‘Would repeating them in a lower voice add gravitas?’ ‘Why couldn’t they appreciate scientific and commercial practices?’ ‘Why were they so focused on what happened between people?’
“Has the impact of objectification and commodification on human suffering been risk assessed?” The old lag wondered if this was alien humour.
As he listened to experts repeating justifications for practices using a narrow band of self-promoting scientific and organisational language, the fraudster felt as if he was in familiar company.
The nurse, who had previously been a patient and enjoyed working with challenging clients, looked across at a hospital manager clearly discomfited by the tone of the questions and the direction of the conversation. She remembered the manager explaining to the staff how the changes she was introducing were ‘service improvements’ and how the next cost-cutting exercise was another ‘service improvement’ as it could be proved to ‘reduce institutionalisation’ - a phrase used to justify moving patients quickly into the community.
The woman with insubstantial shoulders wondered, as she listened to the lower tone of the manager’s voice, whether health professionals could also be infected by voices. Were such phrases as ‘evidence based’, used when getting rid of the therapist who made her feel less lonely, like the conversations in her head, voices with no home to go to?’
After she had been moved into the community, the changing faces of the professionals that knocked on the door of her flat did little to alleviate the hopeless feeling that they attributed to her ‘mood fluctuations.’ When they were too busy to even stay for a cup of tea they told her that increasing ‘independence’ was a sign of ‘recovery’. [She liked the way the Visitors were puzzled by the words they used. They didn’t think that her ‘confusion’ was a sign of ‘illness.’]
“How is value accorded and measured?” “Are interactions able to be prescribed?” “How is intimacy understood?” inquired the Visitors.
‘ Were they serious?’ ‘ Who were they speaking to?’ The tension became energy in the insubstantial shoulders. The rod beneath the staring eyes straightened and momentarily softened.
The nurse was intrigued. It was evident that the Visitors considered relationships to be more important than carefully measured interventions - or financial recognition of skills. Did they think that highly paid staff would forgo some salary for satisfying interactions, or even, with such an egalitarian emphasis, that prisoners and patients should be paid? ‘Why did she care so much?’
The fraudster had an uncanny feeling that the Visitors knew something about his upbringing. It was if he was being connected to life histories quite unlike his own. They couldn’t be comparing his life to the turmoil of the female patient with the voices. He’d travelled the world... normal parents ... just didn’t talk about feelings... never hidden under a bed... ‘under a smile?’… ‘price of toys?’… ‘social status?’… ‘not looking a gift horse in the mouth’. ‘ Where were these half-formed thoughts coming from?’
The politician who advocated ‘family values’ remembered a plea from his daughter. Simultaneously, brief images of several affairs flashed through his mind.
The warder wondered whether his children considered him emotionally accessible and how well he knew his wife.
Efficient management sensed the shifting atmosphere and wondered what it was that had been slipped under the radar. Despite her attempt to focus on policy she found herself revisiting memories of her withdrawn mother. She’d had to ‘manage’ - but had no complaints. It had given her the life skills to pursue a successful career. Intimacy was not on her radar.
The Visitors appeared oblivious to such practical considerations as the equivalent salaries that clinicians and managers might earn in the private sector. Wealth was unable to be recognised as belonging to someone who
had worked hard and earned what they had. ‘Earning’ was rendered as meaningless as ‘criminality’ and ‘mental illness’, or were these words subject to so much scrutiny that, along with many others used in the discussions, they evaporated until nothing was clear?
“Is there a clinical term for economic self-interest which rationalises the suffering of others? Is a professional earning a high salary, whilst pruning treatment budgets - and therefore the salaries of others - in accord with ‘what the economy could afford’, realistic or psychopathic? What about a politician who fails to acknowledge the suffering which accompanied a policy – or a business school that advises on the policy? Is there a diagnostic category for medical research companies who pay bonuses to directors and shareholders whilst excluding those who can’t pay from the treatments they discover? Is political and organisational spin ‘delusory’ – confusing human interactions with selling things? Does this become a form of ‘social psychosis’ when spin is taken for reality and shapes voting decisions or buying habits’?”
The Visitors appeared reluctant to use terminology that became pejorative but, once it was introduced by professionals, broadened its usage until it lost its capacity to locate disturbance individually - or to indicate statusand became a vehicle for social and historical reflections.
“Are paranoid thoughts over-sensitive rather than inaccurate representations of prevailing sources of persecution? How has the content of persecutory thought developed historically? Are powerful, religious traditions, promoting fantasies of evil and possession by devils, the progenitors of a media which also promotes fantasies of evil and seeks to manipulate thoughts rather than engaging in thoughtful conversation? Are individual psychotic symptoms manifestations of social processes located in vulnerable receptacles?”
Their failure to differentiate between electorates, mass communication, business practices and acute psychiatric wards indicated their inability to comprehend democratic processes, technology and market forces. When they twisted the already over-extended concept of ‘developmental age’ to include the range of responses exhibited by everyone it made interactions between adults apparently inconceivable.
These things might have been able to be reflected on if the Visitors had allowed some periods in which badness and madness were located away from the professional exchanges. Their insistence on meeting in venues which included the most extreme examples of emotional volatility meant that periods of reasonable communication were impossible to sustain. The suggestion that this was as much to do with the equilibrium of ‘social successes’ as the disequilibrium of ‘social failures’, and that locating success or failure separately distorted thinking, showed an inability to comprehend moral distinctions or the conventions that governed conversation. It was becoming apparent that the Visitors regarded interruptions as more interesting than conversations they viewed as putting interchanges into enclaves confirming the status of professionals, creating an illusion of knowledge and easing the anxieties created by uncertainty. Such an approach made it impossible for scientists to present research.
They were interested in the descriptions of chronic boredom they heard about in psychiatric hospitals and prisonsalleviated often by prescribed or illegal medication. They inquired whether undeveloped imaginative stems might be better fed and tended by immersion in a variety of engaging artistic projects, explorations or expeditionsand undeveloped emotional stems, by interactions which offered an experience of intimacy. Politician and manager combined forces to point out that these might: have health and safety implications, incentivise hospitalisation and crime, make treatment and incarceration more expensive, make it more difficult to adjust to the realities of a life where these opportunities were not on offer - and were not evidence-based. The manager countered by suggesting the formulation of policies which were carefully riskassessed, the politician with committees to determine possible courses of action.
“Are engagement and intimacy considered to be difficult to think about? What would be the impact on either of continuing referrals to committees and policy formulation bodies? Is creative momentum dangerous? Is imaginative and emotional austerity risk-free - or developmentally corrosive?” The manager shrunk into her seat. The politician shook his head.
‘The only possible view from which to assess scientific theory is its creative potential.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Biology in the Light of the Work of Kurt Goldstein’, in ‘Selected Papers, Psycho-analysis and Group Analysis,’ Karnac, 1990, p.42.
‘Truth is not given - it can only be arrived at.’
Patrick De Mare, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’, Karnacs, p. 124
‘If I know the analyst, I can predict what he’ll find.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Therapeutic Group Analysis’ London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., p. 136.
“Is emotional austerity connected with anxiety in relation to intimacy, love and sexuality?”
The obsessional woman smiled nervously. The manager sat up. The politician stopped shaking his head. The student with the eating disorder shivered. The nurse and warder caught the glint in each other’s eye. The old lag chuckled. He had been waiting for this to return. The flickers of curiosity in the eyes of the woman who shrugged became a flame.
The hospital social worker who had recently completed her advanced safe-guarding training leaned forwards. She was well-informed with regards to permissible interactions, professional boundaries, indicators of abuse and safe practices.
“Does intimacy elicit strong reactions because it is so little understood? Why have explorations of early sexual development and the evolution of desire, apparently a central area of psycho-analytic exploration a century previously, largely disappeared from social discourse? Are other theories safer to explore?”
The safe-guarder was momentarily nonplussed. This was not what she had been prepared for. The woman with the unfamiliar energy in her back giggled. ‘ Was creativity sexual?’ She imagined creative momentum receiving the wet slap of a bureaucratic procedure ‘ Was that a psychotic thought? Did they have psychosis on their planet?’ It was a long time since she’d laughed. ‘ Was she becoming dis-inhibited - an indication of a possible relapse?’
Less symptomatic individuals did not choose to follow up this line of enquiry. The nurse wondered if it would be returned to later - or quietly avoided by professionals whose understanding of both intimacy and sexuality was so varied and difficult to articulate it would be unlikely to seem coherent to alien visitors. It might then lead to intimate questions, honest answers to which might threaten professional status. Something to be bypassed!
The Visitors created space within the hubbub to hear about the beliefs, learning styles and organisational structures of therapeutic organisations - currently deemed unscientific, too expensive or too slow and being pushed
towards private practice. Representatives of these bodies invited the Visitors to consult with them separately. They thought that aspects of their guiding theories were in accord with some of the ideas that the Visitors were drawing into the open. The Visitors declined - but encouraged individuals to make themselves heard in the large group settings.
Representatives of training and practice committees explained at length why this would be impossible. The Visitors’ responses left professionals feeling as if they had been treated as resistant patients.
The woman who had given up shrugging listened quietly.
“What is the balance between thinking and feeling? What is the value accorded to interactions with an individual, a group or a culture as conduits for development? What is a ‘therapeutic relationship’ when the variety of potentially helpful ways of being with another seems infinite?”
Their enquiries elicited examples of drop outs from treatment methods in which mental health professionals disparagingly diagnosed patients - rather than themselves or their own methods.
The Visitors seemed confused by the reluctance of practitioners, particularly those who prided themselves on years of self- examination, to think with more empathy about the relationships they had been – and continued to be - unable to sustain. They highlighted occasions when loyalty to a method or body of theory replaced responsivity. They elicited examples of human organisations remaining in comfort zones even when thinking withered or rigidified and involved a shrinking band of disciples.
Inflexible methods, the limited capacity of therapists or nations to tolerate feelings or behaviours, cursory interventions, unaffordable fees, waiting lists, cultural insensitivity, exclusive suburbs, the fear of others; expulsions from schools, workplaces - and countries; the loss of benefits and the nature of cruelty - emerged unpredictably in sometimes hostile conversations reenforcing the longing of practitioners to return to the calm of their consulting rooms.
Sometimes, when professionals attempted to assert any precondition for their method to operate effectively, the Visitors would make enquiries until it became apparent that the pioneers of these methods had evolved the method during their lives and felt freer to adapt them to a perceived need than had many of their successors. The Visitors observed that belief systems were often developed in reaction to the perceived limitations of their forebears – only to become mutually reinforcing with adherents quoting each other in their writingsand wondered whether practitioners became less able to adapt to the nuances of their clients in their eagerness to practise their faith. Sometimes, in the chaotic interactions within the large group, it seemed as though allegiance to current authority became a form of cruelty – as well as perpetuating an ever-expanding list of social ills – and it became an impossible battle to explain benevolent motivation or practice whilst retaining loyalty to a national or professional identity. It was becoming clear that the Visitors regarded most attempts at definition as restricting thinking. Many professionals became reluctant to use diagnostic terms lest they be encouraged to explore their relevance to their own functioning –or in relation to social norms. Categories of all kinds - whether they related to symptoms, attachment styles, defence mechanisms, behaviour or thoughts - were subject to the same scrutiny as to whether they made conversation more possible or shut down thinking by offering the illusion of arrival.
“How much are theories, practices and the allocation of funding a response to anxieties? Has the longing for certainty undermined curiosity concerning difference? Are assertions accompanied by a willingness to introspect in relation to the evolution of the character structure of individuals and societies?”
Those who had never attempted this type of introspection didn’t intend to begin now. The suggestion that empirical conclusions might be influenced by the character structure of the scientists was quickly dismissed. Some, who considered themselves ‘scientific’, were convinced that the Visitors were mystics, easily seduced by unscientific, outdated theories. Those propagating a policy or selfaffirming an identity wondered whether the Visitors were an unstable life form. Their questions were a recipe for instability. Fragile alliances began to emerge across former
enmities - between people whose beliefs were poles apartunited only by the belief in their own certainties.
“Is locating knowledge externally a way of not giving credence to a variety of internal conversations? Does the complexity of the struggle to understand the boundaries of bodies, feelings, thoughts and impulses lead to the creation of fixed points – as if by defining reality thus - truth might become apparent? Might ‘being alongside’ require tolerating the absence of certainties and the difficulties involved in articulating fluidity?”
Some psychoanalysts felt hope at the Visitors’ historical perspective, their attention to unconscious processes and their readiness to challenge current fashions. But it was difficult explaining analytic reserve to the Visitors, or to clarify: when this reserve enabled insight rather than recreating neglect, how the apparent absence of interaction correlated with a responsive parental figure and why the cost excluded most potential recipients. Practitioners, who were interested in working with thoughtful patients most likely to benefit from their expertise, found themselves being invited to reflect on the anxieties underpinning this preference and the implications of adapting their methods to work in more turbulent and chaotic environments. [It was not possible to demonstrate the psychoanalytic method in the current setting – despite an invitation to try!]
“Is an interpretation ever ‘correct’? Does psychotherapy encourage conformity? How often does ‘difficulties with authority’ become a phrase which disguises an organisation’s resistance to change?
Are reflective conversations maintained with divergent ways of thinking?”
It was always going to be difficult to explain concepts developed clinically to non-professionals, but the Visitors were unnervingly proactive students. They puzzled over terminology used by apparently self-reflective psychotherapists that appeared designed to protect ‘experts’ from anxieties provoked by interactions. They noticed when assertions were made with the same bodily inflections as ‘sin’ by those with a different set of beliefs Trying to reply coherently was rendered impossible by the frequent interruptions in the unfamiliar settings they
‘The operative factor is that the patient now hates the analyst for the failure that originally came as an environmental factor, outside the area of the infant’s omnipotent control, but that is now staged in the transference.
… So in the end we succeed by failing - failing the patient’s way.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Dependence in Various Settings,’ [1963] in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,’ Karnac, 1990, p.258.
‘Thinking has to be nurtured and cultivated and tested out in dialogue… not simply a ‘negative tolerance of frustration’ but… a viable alternative to destructiveness.’
Patrick De Mare et al, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’, Karnacs, p.21/39.
‘The principal issues come before us in time, reliably, thanks to the fact that unresolved conflicts are manifested in repetition in the transference situation (repetition compulsion). Our group is allowed to be active and we follow its ways.’
S.H. Foulkes,
had chosen. The fraudster, still listening keenly – albeit with an eye out for ‘the main chance’ - realised that their questions were informed by rather unusual notions of individuality and responsibility.
“Is social responsibility conceivable?” and “when individuals feel let down by each other, are they able to reflect on the nature of their own idealisation, disillusionment and impulse toward litigation?’ tended to be followed by: ‘Would selflitigation’ rather than ‘other-litigation’ be more likely to reduce harm?”
Some of those on ethics committees found themselves placed in an untenable position further eroded by, “Do managerial policies and professional committees, implemented to safeguard standards and discipline staff members explore issues in a multi-dimensional way rather than looking for a location for guilt?” and “Does the modification of familiar patterns of relationship require risk taking and mistake making by professionals and patients engaged in reenactments - which might be learnt from - if they were able to be openly explored in a non-judgemental manner?”
Some citizens felt tantalised by the nonjudgmental curiosity the Visitors infused into the conversation, but more envisaged a slippery slope towards chaos, mystifying illness and justifying crime.
‘ Was the Visitors’ failure to recognise a location in the ‘real world’ for guilt and responsibility ‘psychopathic’?
“Vulnerable individuals need protection both from themselves and from damaging interactions. A complaints procedure protects clients from exploitation by professionals,” explained a hospital social worker. “Might individuals learn from conversations between all the parties involved in these interactions, What would be the implications of viewing everyone, professionals and patients, as victims of upbringings which they are likely to repeat?”
“Re-traumatisation of vulnerable individuals would occur,” insisted the hospital social worker.
“Can protection trap people as victims?” asked the Visitors.
“Or as criminals?” murmured the warder. He thought about how many recidivists were repetitively told that
society needed protecting - the voice of civilisation perpetuating mindless incarcerations. He realised that several people had heard him and he lowered his eyes.
The murderer thought about his brief period in a therapeutic community as an adolescent: the hope he’d experienced in community meetings – in the mountains and the art studio. There was a dark painting he’d worked on for days – after his mother had died.... But therapeutic communities had become less fashionable amidst changing social priorities.
Education was to be standardised and tested, crime ‘taken seriously’ - rather than ‘seriously understood’. Complaints procedures replaced struggling with difficult relationships. Confidentiality, sometimes to assist with litigation, supplanted more open community dialogue. The woman who had hidden under her bed listened to the glimmers he let slip of these memories and tried to imagine a community meeting in which everyone had an equal voice. First she tried to imagine equality. But there were too many experts in the room. Then she tried to imagine ‘speaking openly in a meeting’. She’d surprised herself by replying to some of the Visitors’ questions. But the memories of the cruelty in the playground returned. Critical voices drowned other conversations.
The politician felt frustrated that, despite the expertise and status of many in the room, divisions between health and illness, good and the bad, victims and perpetrators, professionals and clients had become less than clear. He exchanged glances with the professor of business administration. No successful business could be run this way. A disappointed newspaper editor caught his eye. Complexity and uncertainty offered no headlines. ‘Why did they show so much interest in theories that located psychiatric disturbance between people rather than within individuals? Why inquire as to the way that community interaction might most effectively address illness?’
Most professionals found improbable the idea that symptoms, understood as the result of early relationship disturbance, might best be treated when they re-emerged as current relationship disturbances which could be explored in groups.
‘ Who would want to tolerate such disturbances let alone explore them?’
‘ What was wrong with focusing on the positive - and dulling unpleasant impulses through medication?’ ‘ Why did the Visitors make so many enquiries as to whether people felt understood or connected?’ ‘ Why not promote self-sufficiency and independence?’
In the end the Visitors re-constructed the scenario many professionals had hoped to leave behind them in the prison: a noisy, chaotic atmosphere in which patients, professionals and delegates were invited to contribute equally – with many of the contributions having little connection with the reality understood by those in whom expertise had been previously located. Underlying emotions and unconscious motivations were everywhere. The perpetual breakdown of emerging consensus - without recourse to categories, diagnoses or behavioural definitions - alongside often mystifying conversations concerning developmental difficulties, was considered helpful. Unless they were brought back to specific topics, the Visitors seemed happy to think about the connections between everything. They returned repetitively to ‘the quality of relationships’, as if that could ever be an alternative to ‘the scientific method’. They made no indication that they were planning to share what must surely be their advanced technology. They did little to show dignitaries the respect to which they were accustomed.
Hence when they announced that they were planning to change the location of the discussion, few individuals held out much hope. It was becoming apparent that they had no interest in viewing humanity at its best - to only regard conversation as meaningful if it was located in a venue highlighting social difficulties – and most conducive of chaos. They seemed to consider this as some form of integration. When it became clear that it would be an international meeting, there was considerable curiosity and some relief. Dignitaries present at the previous meetings had given up hope of achieving any national advantage. At least now they might share their exasperation and allay the suspicions of their neighbours. Perhaps it would be held under the auspices of a respected international body. But again the Visitors inquired as to the nature of a meeting that might include those with whom it was most difficult to empathise. Representatives braced themselves.
Muted outrage and weary resignation greeted the Visitors announcement of the ‘terrorist camp’ [reported in various news outlets as being run by fanatics whose motivation for hosting international visitors could only be to give an abhorrent ideology credibility] in which the meetings would continue. Many instantly declined the invitation but others were reluctant to give up the chance of continuing to meet with an advanced intelligence that might not happen again for centuries.
‘The transitional space of dialogue is neither subjective nor objective, governed by neither the pleasure nor by the
reality
principle. On the contrary it leads to the establishment of a third principle, namely that of meaning.’
Patrick De Mare, ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’, Karnacs, p. 112.
‘ ‘Society’ is inside the individual, just as well as outside of him, and what is ‘intrapsychic’ is at the same time shared by the group, unconsciously, most of the time in either sphere, except in the group-analytic group. The border-line of what is ’in’ or ‘outside’ is constantly moving, and the experience of these changes is of particular significance. Even objectively there is no clear-cut frontier between inside and outside, as little as between reality and phantasy.’
S.H. Foulkes, SHF ‘Group Dynamic Processes and Group Analysis’, in ‘Selected Papers, Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis,’ Karnac, 1990, p.182-184.
Chapter III the loCation of eVil
When residents of the psychiatric hospital decided to continue the interactions with the Visitors, the hospital manager had a moment of relief - which she barely registered and would never acknowledge. She had a professional rationale for accompanying them. [The idea that personal, infantile motivations sat beneath professional, adult activities remained an unacceptable thought.] What safeguarding measures or organisational strategies could be implemented in a 'terrorist’ camp remained unclear.
The soon-to-be redundant hospital psychotherapist wasn’t sure why she’d accepted the invitation. Disillusionment with current institutions was definitely a factor.
The psychology professor’s daughter, the border-line woman and the nurse were enjoying the questions too much to return to the ‘givens’ of their previous existence.
The woman diagnosed with schizophrenia had never been abroad and her decision to travel, against both medical advice and the demands of her voices, felt like a bravely independent, albeit foolhardy, act. The obsessional woman, considered the Visitors questions to be akin to the 'flooding' she'd endured with one psychologist - too much to worry about to get obsessed by a detail - and wondered whether a terrorist camp would be more of the same.
Some prisoners envisaged escape opportunities in a foreign country. Others experienced unusual interactions with their bodies at the prospect of moving outside the familiar thick walls of an institution: the murderer developed back pains, the old lag felt weightless- as if he was floating; the fraudster, who found opportunity
impossible to resist, began tapping his fingers. The warder developed a headache.
The Visitors seemed oblivious to security issuesconsidering it sufficient to ask: 'who should we fear most' and 'do the dangers come from within or without?' which evoked a ripple of curiosity. They didn’t carry weapons but the unexplained nature of their movements fuelled fantasies of unimaginably advanced technology and few doubted their capacity to manage security.
The reporting of the meetings had turned them into international celebrities - or villains - depending on the news source. Many individuals wanted to remain part of a story that was receiving universal news coverage: name recognition could offer lucrative career opportunities.
‘Normal citizens’ braced themselves for the unexpected but, when they arrived at their destination, the absence of familiar reference points rekindled earlier reservations. Hot, sandy, empty, barely functional buildings, rudimentary facilities awaited them at the end of a long gruelling journey! [How the Visitors travelled, and remained apparently unaffected by the changes of setting, remained unclear.]
‘Why the open invitation to the residents of the psychiatric hospital and prison - the absence of distinctions between people?’ ‘Did the Visitors think that all human beings were mad, bad or evil?’
No police force or military! Fertile ground for anxious imaginings! ‘Were the Visitors planning to undermine law and order - to turn structure into chaos - before they took over the planet?’
The young terrorist at the camp gate had once been an intense boy with sharp angular features so full of questions that a shrug was inconceivable. His family had taken him to a new country in pursuit of opportunity. There was little in his observations of the world that gave credence to the aspirations of parents who worked long hours for little reward - or orchestrated the critical sounds and heavy silences that filled his childhood into a coherent melody. The gap between the worlds was bridged by an inner light where fire burned and purity was forged - unavailable for translation to parents who didn't see the bridge. Friends were not close. When they eventually arrived, they were also adherents.
Some had travelled with him when, two years previously, he’d left the land to which his parents had migrated, to join a group that did not waver from the beliefs that answered his questions and became central to his existence. It was time for a Godless Society to discover righteousness.
He listened intently when one of his companions declared, “We will eliminate corruption and temptation. Purity is all. It is better to die than collaborate or succumb to temptation. Wherever evil goes, we will eliminate it. If it rises up, we will pull it down. If it hides beneath the ground, we will pull it up by its hair.”
The speaker, ten years senior to the young man at the gate, had been a small, plump boy hidden in a cellar when soldiers wrested his home from his family. They insisted that the house had been bought legally from a landlord to whom, for several generations, his forebears had paid rent. They came with weapons and the boy’s father and uncle were killed defending the only home they had known. The boy bit and scratched the soldiers who tried to make him leave so they dragged him by his hair. Guilt that he had not fought harder, followed him out of the cellar as he was dragged past the bodies of his relatives. At first they put him in a camp for displaced children. Then he moved in with a distant paternal relative. For many years he refused to speak. When he spoke again, he asked where his mother was but the ‘Uncle’ just shook his head. Now his words came out in torrents. Tone communicated as much as words.
The woman plagued by obsessions comprehended immediately the need for a speed of delivery which preempted doubt or uncertainty.
The university student understood the relentlessness of a drive for perfection that offered no respite. The woman, who two decades previously had deemed a shrug inconceivable, felt simultaneously terrified and reassured by the familiarity of violent conflict. ‘Better outside than inside,’ said a thought. ‘Better visible than invisible,’ said another. ‘Or were they voices?’ She waited to be told that it was hallucinatory and to be offered symptom relief through medication.
The government minister enjoyed rhetoric, even when he abhorred the content. ‘Did he sound like that?’ The fraudster knew about single-mindedness, although never with intentions declared so openly - or with an ideological focus. 'Were attempts to persuade someone to believe in something, when that conviction hadn’t evolved out of their own life experiences, a kind of fraud?'
‘Did the Visitors’ technology include automatic translation?!’ Language didn't seem to be a barrier!
Representatives of various governments [and the fraudster] dismissed the moral warnings as extremism. Temptation and corruption were not concepts they dwelt on - certainly not introspectively.
The government minister recognised some of the warnings of divine retribution from church services his parents had taken him to as a child. He remembered switching off - a family tradition: moral imperatives did not sit easily alongside financial success! Economic rhetoric, highlighting individual responsibility and freedom to prosper, communicated a faith more consistent with the family's lifestyle.
His daughter accused him of switching off. He 'knew' her problems should be dealt with by professionals!
The nurse and warder thought he switched off to the misery his government inflicted.
‘Aggression is seen more as evidence of life. Under favourable conditions, fusion occurs between the erotic and the motility impulses, and then the term oral sadism becomes applicable, followed by all the developments of this theme. This is matched by mother’s wish to be imaginatively eaten. Failure of fusion, or loss of fusion that has been achieved, produces a potential element of pure destructiveness (i.e. without guilt sense) in the individual, but even this destructiveness remains a lifeline in the sense of its being the basis of object relationships that feel real to the patient.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘Classification’ [1959-64] in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.’ p.127.
‘We believe that civilisation is not built on the renunciation of instinctual gratifications but on a successful transformation of the inevitable anti-instinct of fury: there is no question at all of renunciation of instinct but there is an imperative necessity to handle hate.’ (p.148) … dialogue must continue as long as it fails to handle hate… the generating of hate is ceaseless, and, by the same token, dialogue never ends’. (p.60)… it is a skill that has to be learnt and used if humans are to survive the onslaughts of human mismanagement, let alone Nature.’ (p.64)
De Mare et al, Karnacs, Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’
Patrick
If he engaged now, it would give airtime to arguments that policies his government supported might be considered as a cause of international suffering!
When the Visitors inquired, "What was the motivation of manufacturers who built the weapons carried by angry individuals and by those who had displaced them from land they had farmed?" It was with some reluctance that he outlined those policies. "Arms industries provide jobs. Jobs drive living standards upwards. The economy depends on thriving industries."
The therapist wondered if the Visitors were asking about conscious motives, especially when the questions began to focus on systemic cruelties and the impact of historically influential powers - rather than recent atrocities by prohibited groups which ‘civilised’ powers were eager to condemn.
The idea that all might be required to reflect on current and historical behaviour: personally, politically and commercially was unrealistic. No successful organisation could operate under such restraints!
‘Why should international delegates tolerate threats that drowned out the Visitors questions and the replies of delegates who had come to meet advanced beings - not to endure the abuse of fanatics?’
One delegate in search of lucrative opportunities began to regret his decision to follow the Visitors into the desert. “This is becoming repetitive - and dangerous!” he declared.
“What is being repeated, the intolerable ideas of others or intolerable internal responses?”
A long silence ensued. It was too hot to even consider attempting to answer such a question.
Only the Visitors seemed unaffected by the outpourings as humanity sweltered in the desert heat.
"How does rage evolve? Can an understanding of maturational processes be applied to nations?
Do cultures with more sophisticated weapons - take responsibility for the impact of their actions on cultures less
able to preserve themselves against encroachment?
Does the unequal allocation of power invite insights gleaned from individual development?
Are dominant nations able to self reflect on the ways in which their behaviour interrupts cultural continuity or undermines the self-esteem and practices of indigenous people? Are the deepest traumas related to interruptions in continuity of being - individually and socially?"
This was too much for many delegates who retreated into the desert to consult with one another.
"The psychological development of individual personalities cannot be equated with that of nations," responded an elderly politician who narrowly managed to resist following her colleagues into the desert. In her youth she had completed a psychology degree before studying politics, then chaired several mental health committees, so considered herself to have some expertise in these matters.
“Angry baby killed.” said the pale woman who’d deemed a shrug inconceivable.
The nurse looked at her curiously. The warder was intrigued. ’Insight or illness speaking?’
The therapist veered towards the latter - in alliance with the manager.
‘Could social development be equated with individual development?’
The old lag thought that the pale woman’s comment went straight to the nub of the matter.
The government minister left the psychotic patient for the professionals to deal with, as he had done with his daughter, although her strange allusion continued to rattle around in his head.
Most individuals were too concerned with the emerging conflict to give time to contemplate the thoughts of a psychiatric patient.
”Land taken”... “relatives killed”.. ”divine wrath.” The nurse heard glimmers of the current speaker’s fury.
‘How would she respond if everything she had known was taken away by a more powerful outsider?’
The therapist retreated from the feelings being elicited within her. Normally she constructed her life so that she could have a thoughtful role within meetings. In the desert heat [unlike the controlled conditions of a consulting room] she felt herself drawn towards becoming an irascible, impatient presence. She decided to say little lest it betray the fragility of the reflective persona that she had spent years developing.
The warder was becoming familiar with the shifting spotlight between the personal and the social; to being invited to step outside everything he took for granted! ‘Had he been 'inside' for too long?’ He stepped outside to check which potential escapees had joined the protesting dignitaries, most of whom were already returning to the courtyard. Escapees he found were refugees from the Visitors’ questions, none from the prison. The burning desert wind was almost refreshing - although the selfcertain indignation of the dignitaries still braving the heat soon drove him back into the courtyard.
Some of the travelling prisoners expected a reaction of outrage similar to that of ‘the hard men’ in the jail, when it became clear to the perpetrators of atrocity that they were being treated by the Visitors as communicating a history of vulnerability which sought understanding - rather than as powerful or righteous. They were not disappointed and, for fleeting moments, outlaws and respectable politicians were on the same side stridently resisting being treated as immature children by an alien intelligence.
At such moments the terrorists seemed less evil, more like arrogant family members – difficult rather than dangerous, and diplomatic representatives, who had been thoroughly briefed by security experts before attending these meetings, found themselves worrying that they were relaxing their vigilance.
“God is great,” chanted several of the new hosts – in between the exhortations of the speaker.
"Doesn't exist," muttered a recidivist to the quiet nods or thin smiles of several journalists and academics.
“Whose God,” mouthed the fraudster for whom faith was a mystery – but had no wish to be at the forefront of a potentially violent confrontation of worlds.
“God hasn’t been great to me,” muttered the murderer.
“God doesn’t terrorise people,” affirmed a politician.
The manager [who instinctively preserved stability] nodded.
The nurse [who intuitively registered hypocrisy] frowned.
The fraudster and warder [who habitually watched closely] registered the exchange of glances.
‘Why had the speaker referred to pulling up people by their hair?’ thought the therapist.
The speakers changed but the themes didn’t. When an elderly terrorist, who had been ‘displaced’ many years previously, spoke about faith as being the bedrock of life - promising an eternal spiritual home for which he was willing to die and kill - the Visitors, curious as to why homes were considered more important than lives, inquired about the evolution of varying conceptions of ‘home’.
“Is a home a group of beliefs, a way of being, a way of speaking, a culture, a body, a building, an area? How do homes evolve? Are they ever stable? How do homes impact other homes? "
The government minister thought of homes primarily as comfortable houses owned by individuals - although he also thought that young men [he was no longer young] should be willing to die for their country. [He had invested wisely and accumulated enough to buy a small country - if the need arose!]
“Was it terrorism to reclaim the land you were born on and have not willingly parted with?”
‘Modern circumstances also speak of and treat the individual as expendable. Plans are made that literally discount millions of lives without hesitation. No wonder the modern individual is afraid of the group, of losing his very existence, of his identity being submerged and submitted to the group.’
S.H. Foulkes, 'Basic Concepts in Group Psychotherapy' in 'Selected Papers, Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis', Karnac, 1990, p. 152.
‘Trauma means the breaking of the continuity of the line of the individual’s existence. It is only on a continuity of existing that the sense of self, of feeling real, and of being, can eventually be established as a feature of the individual personality.’
D.W. Winnicott, ’The concept of a Healthy Individual’ in ‘Home is Where We Start From.’ Pelican Books, 1987, p.22.
“If the purchases were legally made.” [For some reason such affirmations felt less definitive than usual.]
“How often are laws instruments of existing power structures?”
“Are you advocating terrorism?” asked the Minister of Police.
“What is the nature of the connection between possessing and belonging?”
“Possessions can be measured and identified. They have a basis in law. Belonging is subjective.”
‘Does ‘owning’ 'a home’ that has belonged to someone who still considers it 'home' indicate a view of objectivity as a feature of strength? What relevance does that have to interactions between cultures?”
Fortunately, he could afford to buy his wife a second home after the divorce - although his daughter did not feel that she belonged there. ‘Had he made his daughter homeless - if the home she ‘belonged to’ no longer existed?' He frowned. The home she imagined could not be purchased! ‘Was ‘belonging’ so different than ‘owning’?’ Alien questions! Uninvited! ‘Were thoughts being planted in his head?’
He caught the eye of the woman who evoked memories of his daughter and for whom the latter question was an everyday consideration. He looked away.
He regained his composure with a familiar thought. His daughter had been 'unable to face reality' - not so different from terrorists who couldn't accept the realities of the distribution of power. 'Adjusting to reality' underpinned many of his policies - difficult to explain in the face of historical and relational scrutiny - particularly to your own child.
"Countries are also homes," explained the government minister. "They have national identities and frontiers. They require loyalty and sacrifice - particularly in times of war. Some groups, 'unwilling to accept reality', resort to force to precipitate change."
Outrage had succumbed to heat and representatives of the larger powers, who'd now all trickled back into the courtyard, murmured their assent.
"Were settlers and pioneers who resorted to force to take the homes of others viewed as terrorists?“
"Founding fathers and pioneers were inspirational figures,” asserted the elderly politician, wanting to make a clear distinction between violent extremists and icons she admired. She felt less self-righteous meeting the eyes of the fraudster smiling at the familiar rhetoric of adulation, persuasion and sales.
With that meeting of eyes, the warder felt the temporary loss of his observational partner but re-positioned himself alongside the Visitors when they enquired, "Is rhetoric a linguistic enclave?"
He liked the way that they brought words back to eartheven if they came from the stars!
He had a fleeting sense of looking down on humanity - of being a Visitor!
‘Were the questions being directed at politicians - who were currently struggling to answer them?'
“Did these ‘inspirational figures’ demonstrate an early level of development before empathy and concern become stable features of personalities - or of their nations of origin?" inquired the Visitors.
'Did they not hear the distinction she'd made between individuals and nations?' groaned the elderly politician - as if trying to orientate herself in an evaporating intellectual landscape.
‘Stable features of personalities and nations?’ puzzled the therapist. ‘Did they really believe international empathy was possible?’ ‘Were they expanding previous explanations with regard to how individuals developed under favourable conditions?’
It was harder for the warder to retain an observational stance when they asked how interactions were shaped
by: personal and social histories, inter-generational fears, forms of government and the allocation of wealth. Contemporary cruelties [such as terrorism], from which one could distance oneself, were dwarfed by histories in which it was difficult not to feel implicated, particularly when privilege or resource distribution were examined.
"Is 'terrorism' a term used by dominant groups - whose violence has become institutionalised - to describe less powerful violent groups? Does the violent loss of a home precipitate a terrifying loss of identity - of belonging - of annihilation? Are acts which terrorise a way of communicating that terror? Is ‘terrorism’ simply inexcusable cruelty [as suggested by news headlines], a communication of an experience or an attempt to reclaim a home? Is a home to be found in a place or a process?”
The 'border-line' woman considered the final question. Was her 'home' - at least the place with which she was most familiar - in her rapidly changing moods. 'Did she ‘terrorise’ professionals, invading their peace of mind by challenging their competence and knowledge, in a sense, leaving them ‘homeless’?' She knew that they preferred working with more predictable, grateful patients - who ‘got better’.
The obsessional woman, who was more predictable, was almost 'at home', even if she hated it, with the perpetual presence of anxiety. ‘Would a more peaceful state of mind feel alien?’ ‘Did she fear change?’ ‘Was that why strategies aimed at easing her anxiety never worked for long?’
‘Could people who lived in the same house be occupying different homes?’ wondered the student whose father found her 'illness' so alien to his aspirations for the family.
The manager thought that vulnerable people should not have been put in a position where they were asking themselves such questions. She would have been much more at home with a clear managerial hierarchy: the way the Visitors exercised authority was too alien to contain risk - and in this setting there was immediate danger!
The nurse was intrigued. Psychiatric patients had become actors on an international stage.
'Was it the uncontrolled nature of these proceedings that so many professionals found difficult?'
'Did the encroachment of an egalitarian moral order make powerful people feel ‘homeless’?'
'Were the Visitors intending to move the location of homelessness around the group to give everyone a taste?' The nurse and the warder exchanged anticipatory glances.
"If I became a convert, would the war inside my mind end?" asked the obsessional woman. "Could I fight someone else instead of myself? Would I belong?"
The manager was horrified. All her worst fears had been confirmed. "Even patients with successful ‘outcomes’ are made ill by this setting," she announced and received a range of confirmatory glances and nods. Her gaze skipped over the soon-to-be-redundant therapist.
The therapist saw the eyes which skipped quickly past and wondered whether guilt dictated the speed. ‘How were things connected?’ A terrorist camp was an ocean away from a psychiatric hospital… and yet… long term psychotherapy was losing its home in public institutions…. ‘was it too subversive - enabling individuals to discover their own meanings, rather than following a pathway in which they were recipients of treatment packages?’ ‘Was long-term therapy considered likely to subvert order… difficult to measure… to control…. could go anywhere… redistributed too many resources?’
She felt relief at escaping difficult patients with chronic conditions - and short-sighted, cost-cutting managerswho ‘pulled up threats to their policies by the hair’ … a fleeting association …
Redundancy could be brutal - and a way out! She felt some guilt at being 'at home' in her private practice with clients who could pay. ‘... in identification with a mother who had to be in control?’ The Visitors' questions made clarity elusive. 'Was home to be found in a familiar or reassuring activity?' It was hard work addressing developmental damage precipitated by neglect. ‘Whose, her clients or her own?’
Not providing attentive relationships exacerbated anxieties, interrupted glimmers of self-confidence and intensified the sense of not even being at home in one’s own body. But fighting wars on too many fronts had become
‘Omnipotent control of reality implies fantasy about reality. The individual gets to external reality through the omnipotent fantasies elaborated in the effort to get away from inner reality.’
D.W. Winnicott, 'The Manic Defence,' in 'Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis, Hogarth 'The Inst. of Psychoanalysis,' 1977, p.130.
‘Shall I say that, for a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest parts of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, and who but the child's own parents can be in a position to be hated without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship?’
D.W. Winnicott, 'Home Again', 'Deprivation and Delinquency', Tavistock/Routledge, 1985, p. 52.
too much! Perhaps the most meaningful location of a sense of home was to be found in continuity - personally, culturally, developmentally - but it was torturous work attempting to facilitate developmental processes in an unsupportive environment!
‘Was she colluding with a form of institutional terrorism against those least able to defend themselves?’ A momentary thought of violent protest flickered through her awareness before being buried beneath law-abiding messages and clinical adages that advocated adjustment, rather than protest. A residual adolescent hope faded. Were like-minded colleagues also ‘adherents’, but rationalising their behaviour in clinical rather than religious terms?’
"Was peace always transient? Was it just the location of conflict that fluctuated: with known or unknown people, between the inside and outside of selves and societies?"
The recidivist, who knew that violent crimes were the most guaranteed way of getting a long sentence, had the uninvited thought that his alcohol-fuelled attacks were a way of returning home.
The warder felt at home in prison. Familiar routines, which included responding to violence, were reassuring - especially as the institutions designed to meet such challenges were deeply embedded in his family history. This journey involved a kind of adolescence in which something else was being imagined...
The nurse watched the therapist and the warder emerging from the shadows of received knowledge… She felt more ‘at home’ than when she had lived at home!
Internal and external resonances and meanings were dancing.
"Darkness hides," said the pale woman who’d been told she had schizophrenia.
She often slept under her bed - away from shouting parents and, in the hospital, the distancing language of professionals. The terrorists' words, like her own voices, were openly cruel. They eased her guilt.
The murderer had been steadied by the familiarity of prison life but the comforting quality he imagined that a home generated was more elusive. He understood momentary gratification - but had little sense of an attentiveness that was more sustained.
The fraudster wondered if he had always felt homeless. Gratification was not the same as belonging.
In between her horror at the cruelty and irresponsibility on display, unwelcome thoughts were being rapidly expelled from the manager's mind in relation to both. She felt ‘at home’ when she was in control. At work that meant deciding and implementing policies - including disciplinary procedures and redundancies which made others ‘homeless’. She had not considered cutting her own job. ‘Why was she contemplating such a thought?’ Nor implementing disciplinary procedures against herself when the impact of her policies was harmful. She never thought anything she did was harmful! ‘Was someone putting thoughts in her mind?’ ‘Were efficiency savings, policy priorities and bureaucratic procedures a way of not 'taking responsibility' for cruelty?’ She looked suspiciously at the Visitors.
Successful citizens resonated with the idea of homesand wealth - enlarging and being in need of protection. 'Protecting against whom?' was a question likely to elicit unpredictable conflict and therefore better left unexplored. The mirrors that the Visitors held up kept growing - across time as well as space.
It was difficult to reply when prepared statements were preempted by ever-expanding enquiries.
"Is the planet considered a home for future generations or only for current occupants?
Who accepts responsibility for that home?
Which interests damage the planet most profoundly?
Is this considered a form of terrorism?”
“Did they know how to focus?” asked a behavioural psychologist to the professionals within earshot.
“Was such a broad field of enquiry, in which no clear solutions were possible, a form of illness which could be added to current diagnostic dictionaries?” contemplated a psychiatric consultant.
‘Was It easier to imagine deficits in aliens,’ thought the nurse, ‘than to reflect on human hypocrisy?’ “Were words used differently on their planet?” wondered the soon-tobe-redundant therapist.
“Have they learnt the norms of discourse?” asked the elderly politician to a nearby business executive.
“Have they lost their minds?” replied the executive.
‘Did they have minds that human beings would recognise?’ The nature of mind seems to be one of their central preoccupations, mused the warder.
‘Was questioning becoming infectious?’ worried the hospital manager.
The individual most likely to be defined as having lost her mind smiled at the government minister. ‘Why had they bought her - this woman who made him think about his daughter?’
‘Was this what they meant by ‘bringing things together’?’
The hospital manager found herself exchanging glances with the perturbed father. She had long since decided that it was better to go straight to the top if you wanted clarity. They both knew that this was no environment for vulnerable ‘service users’. At least a nurse was beside the schizophrenic woman. That thought was a preliminary risk assessment. The manager took some pleasure in the knowledge but as soon as she began articulating that part of her mental scaffolding, it collapsed.
The nurse, who had first seen the minister speak in a mental health debate about local responsibility for the health budget, remembered the manager implementing the resulting cuts without negotiation in relation to the harm caused and regarded their exchange of glances as cementing an unholy alliance.
‘Which of these ‘successful’ faces of humanity did she dislike most?’
She returned the managerial nod with a glare. If the woman felt reassured by her proximity, it was because of their previous relationship – not because of a managerial obsession with preempting risk.
"Risk assessments bureaucratize common sense and undermine responsive interactions," she informed what she considered to be patronising eyes.
"Were risk assessments obsessional?" asked the woman who had so much difficulty packing.
"Or a way of stopping people exploring?" asked the University student.
"Did they involve being locked up forever?” asked the murderer.
"Hopefully, in your case," muttered the drug baron.
"Inside your mind," said the pale woman who realised that she was at the centre of a conflict between professionals trying to keep her safe - just when she was waiting for her evil to be revealed to the world. ‘Did they not understand how dangerous she was?’ She agreed with the manager’s policy - although travelling along a different path towards a different destination. She needed a risk assessmentsoon!
But now her voices had competition. This had become a world in which everyone was threatening to eliminate someone they considered evil. She asked quietly if this was what being normal was like.
The faintest hint of a smile appeared in the fraudster's eyes. The old lag grinned broadly.
The current host speaker was not to be distracted by this imported discussion which highlighted how little these immoral unbelievers understood about redemption..
‘...the early experiences have not enabled the innate process towards integration to have effect, so that there is no unit and no total responsibility felt for anything. Impulses and ideas arise and effect behaviour, but it can never be said: this baby had the impulse to eat the breast (keeping artificially to this limited field for illustrative purposes).’
D.W. Winnicott, 'The absence of a sense of guilt', 'Deprivation and Delinquency', Tavistock/Routledge, 1985, p.110.
‘There is however, much sanity that has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalised, and to feel that the world is unreal.’
D.W. Winnicott, 'Primitive emotional development',1945 ; in 'Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis,' 1977, Hogarth Press, p. 150.
“Without mercy, we will drive the imperialists and their godless forms of government back into the sea.” [The therapist’s free-floating attention moved from hair to sea.]
The pale woman felt less alone. The speaker spoke in a similar tone to voices that had for so long provided her only conversations! Chaos and incomprehensible threats were well-known territory, but she was puzzled by the admiration of the old lag and even more by a warm flush when she looked at the young terrorist who had stopped guarding the gate and was nodding appreciatively in response to each of the host speakers.
‘Would he speak soon?’ ‘What would his voice sound like?’ ‘Would it be deep and full of passion?’
This was unfamiliar. Echoes of when the murderer had stood near her in the hospital! But medication had blunted erotic sensations long ago. ‘Was she enjoying herself?’ Also new! ‘Was it possible that her body had a function beyond hosting an orchestra of medications which were forever being re-tuned?’
The hospital manager noticed her flushed look with some disquiet. ‘Why did it bother her?’ ‘Had that question come from within or without?’ ‘Could she be sure?’ … that kind of thinking was a recipe for chaos. To silence an internal dialogue, she clarified the situation.
"She is a vulnerable service user undergoing clinical treatment and in no position to manage her moods, make decisions or form relationships."
‘Why had she uttered that statement aloud?’ It was tantamount to inviting the Visitors’ curiosity.
"Were desires considered terrorists who had to be protected against - rather than experienced, acknowledged, and comprehended - in relation to bodies and minds as well as personal and social histories? Were interactions with dangerous external voices worse than those with threatening internal voices? Where did they meet? Which were experienced as more enlivening?"
The newly cast actors of this international production began to grow into their roles.
The woman who lived on the 'border line', and had learnt to fill in mental health assessment forms compliantly, looked up. These were not questions she'd been asked on these forms.
The University student who wrote essays obediently, imagined her father's look of horror if she wrote about desire and terrorism. Her mouth crinkled. ‘Was this what being more at home in your body felt like?’
The old lag saw a tentative smile carving an unfamiliar line across an habitually blank canvas. Something that prison routines had not dulled stirred within him - a kind of awakening - usually achieved through mood enhancing drugs. He was enjoying these interactions, The craving for a chemical journey faded. The manager flinched. The questions flew like arrows towards everything she stood for. Even more disturbing was the possibility that she identified with the authoritarian way of thinking, self-evident certainties and definitive phrases, that flowed through the sentences of the terrorists. ‘Did they have something in common?’ That thought never reached consciousness. It lodged as a pain in her spine.
She flushed: it must be the heat!
“Could fragments of conscience push through policy formulations?”
She steadied herself. She mustn’t let the Visitors get under her skin. Empirical evidence was important. Objective criteria, safeguarding and professionalism were essential - and she’d been employed to implement advances in management science as part of an efficiency drive.
‘Why had people accepted the invitations to come to this dangerous place?’ She had only agreed out of a sense of professional responsibility when it was clear that a number of service users would be ignoring professional advice and continuing to meet with the Visitors – probably wherever they went. Vulnerable people might be drawn into some kind of cult – although she was wary of articulating such a thought – in case the Visitors questioned whether management science was also a cult - or even a form of terrorism. She tried to listen to what was being said - but her back ached. The long conversation about colonisation’s impact on indigenous development had nothing to do
with her. She implemented structures which delivered health care. She supported the government minister's emphasis on stability, order and self-discipline in the answers he gave. She’d got where she was because of hard work.
[And she was of mixed race – although she didn’t advertise it. She’d come across a few racist individuals – and even more sexists - but nothing would check her career.] The success of her efficiency drives were second to none. Someone needed to be in charge. Tough decisions needed to be taken. Strong leadership was necessary in public organisations. Redundancies were inevitable in the course of progress. A wave of relief passed through her. She was regaining control of her internal narrative.
"Staff needed managing. Nurses needed to be reined in – particularly those likely to become emotionally overinvolved." That was a retaliatory strike against the glare. ‘Why had she said it aloud?’
“‘Reined in,’ was that phrase indicative of a view of authority in which dominant humans treated others as requiring control? Is that a form of over or under-involvement? How is 'over' and 'under' understood? What values were implicit within preferred styles of engagement?"
The manager met the nurse’s glare with what she hoped was a look that prized efficiency.... this was a look she had given her younger sister - meeting a similar response.... an irrelevant thought! … the personal and professional were not to be confused..... but the memory lingered.
“Were managerial and governmental styles permeated by personal and social histories and fused with anxieties induced by less familiar, albeit more responsive, forms of relating?"
‘Were they suggesting that the past and present, personal and professional, could never be clearly distinguished?’ Perhaps they were playing with her mind! She made eye contact with several people sharing similar thoughts.
"Were efficiency drives a more recent manifestation of a colonial state of mind – involving a form of political and economic domination?”
‘What were they advocating - inefficiency, irresponsibility, corruption, chaos?’
“Did imposed policies dam the developmental river?”
‘Who were these questions being directed at?’ Any connection with his or her own role would be unjustified, explained several people simultaneously. They’d ‘done their best in complex circumstances’. The warder was struck by the way themes in vastly different fields kept overlapping. Now a variety of politicians, managers, businessmen and academics had become engaged in defending their practice.
Rather than supporting demands to challenge atrocities (which would win support in the civilised media), the Visitors asked about the numbers who had died through such causes as disease, malnutrition and the absence of clean drinking water - and the historical factors that impinged on these matters, implying more general culpability - as if individual governments were not accountable for their own problems!
The location of evil was fluctuating wildly.
They drew attention to differing living standards and inquired as to whether, in an international marketplace, there was a direct correlation between comfort in one area of the world and death in another - linking anyone with a reasonable standard of living to the perpetrators of shocking atrocities. Then they returned to more direct forms of violence.
The government minister listened closely.
“Did attempts to protect national security, which killed as many people as the initial terrorist attack, demonstrate an equivalent level of atrocity?
What was 'defensive military action' and ‘collateral damage’?
Might all deaths, wherever they occur be regarded similarly?
What was the distinction between a ‘surgical strike’ and knifing someone in the street, except that the former allowed for a greater measure of disassociation?
‘In treating man as a social being in a social context, we are forced to review far-reaching concepts – such as, what is an individual, what is mind? ... I do not think the mind is basically inside the person as an individual…’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘My Philosophy in Psychotherapy’, in ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis’, Karnac, 1990, p. 277.
Why do enemy deaths become viewed without sadness?”
He switched off just as quickly.
The days turned into weeks.
‘Condemn, exclude, imprison, expel’ were met at every turn of the winding interactions by queries in relation to ‘ negotiating, thinking and connecting’ however intolerable the behaviour being outlined.
The Visitors must have had considerable intelligence to move across vast tracts of space but they were unable to comprehend such concepts as: the greater good, national self-interest, national security, geopolitical considerations and national sovereignty. They understood national boundaries, within the sweep of history, as little more than lines drawn recently on maps and the only definition of ‘responsibility’ that they could understand involved concern for all of the disparate elements of humanity.
They drew no distinctions between the actions of democratically elected governments and those of ‘rogue regimes.’
“Were tyrannical dictatorships or corrupt regimes also in need of empathic, thoughtful interventions?” 'Surely the history of humanity showed that many regimes (as with individuals) would only take notice of force?’
They seemed unconvinced when war crimes trials were offered as an example of progressive and civilised judicial practice by international representatives.
“Was thoughtful authority difficult to sustain and in all societies easily lost?”
The elderly politician gave up her attempts to differentiate the individual and the social.
The Visitors acknowledged that some ‘children’ might be extremely difficult to help but asked whether committed parents would go to more imaginative lengths to support their children than they witnessed being attempted by professional bodies and political entities despite their greater resources.
"If the human family was viewed as an extended family would the extermination of difficult individuals be viewed as reasonable options?"
‘Interactions between nations could not be equated with the intimacy of families and loved ones!’
These references to authority and parenting risked exposing reservoirs of unacknowledged guilt.
Careers had been frequently prioritised over families. Sons and daughters had often been sent to boarding school so high flying parents could pursue careers without interruptions - usually justified in terms of a ‘good education’ for the offspring. Others had been quick to seek medical diagnoses when children became difficult: hours talking to difficult offspring was an ‘alien’ concept.
Individuals were reluctant to engage with the Visitors in a discussion of these practices lest one of the few areas in which they considered human benevolence to be evident disappeared.
The government minister wondered if the Visitors knew about his daughter and his unpleasant divorce. [How advanced was their surveillance?] He recognised the accusations of his daughter in one of the fanatic's diatribes on greed and hypocrisy. He’d thought he was protecting her. ‘From what?’ was becoming less clear as he watched psychiatric patients become enlivened by the unfolding drama.
‘Had they chosen to come to this hell hole?’ ‘Wasn't it too stressful?’ ‘Did they have capacity?’
He realised that he hadn’t felt able to stay away despite disparaging the venues.
‘Was he questioning his own capacity?’ ‘What had motivated him?’
It was becoming apparent that several of those the Visitors brought with them felt that they had more in common with the position of the terrorists in relation to authority – albeit without the religious rhetoric and the homicidal intent – than they had with the official representatives of their own cultures. Those individuals watched with
pleasure the discomfort of authoritarian compatriots when the Visitors asked: “Does both tyranny and the wish for strong leaders indicate a regression to a level of development before negotiation, compromise and grappling with complexity was firmly established?”
“Do regressions in response to the threat of uncertainty occur both within individuals and cultures?”
The therapist noticed the similarities with the earlier enquiries in relation to the development of the capacity for concern.
“Anarchistic psycho-babble,” said a young, fervent politician and glared at the nurse who was smiling. He then became aware that terrorists were also glaring at those who sympathised with such questions. The energy went out of his glare at the thought of his involuntary alliance.
He fell off his perch and looked around for another ledge!
His glance slid past the wrinkled face of the old lag. There was no purchase there.
For a moment he felt homeless, just as the schizophrenic woman began to feel most at home!
The young terrorist had begun saying many of the things her voices had been saying for years.
The Visitors noticed the shifting alliances - as they noticed the youth of many of the current hosts who seemed most fervent in their cruelty. Questions returned, altered slightly by the context.
"Was the apparently fanatical faith of these young people a conduit for a deeper sense of outrage?”
“Why did people become displaced from their extended families and their communities?”
“How did invasion and economic disruption impact ideologies and family structures?”
“Who took ‘responsibility’ for these matters and would they be
held to account in the way that the larger powers intended for the young terrorists?
Was ‘holding to account’ a diversion from the more difficult and ultimately productive task of understanding?"
Even when the Visitors stopped focusing on a theme, it remained in the mind as background music, like a tune you couldn't get rid of, thought the government minister who was finding it difficult to distinguish between the questions of the Visitors and the uninvited questions that were entering his mind.
“Was the intensity of belief indicative of a gap in an individual’s life - with a spiritual or philosophical home filling the gap left by a cultural or emotional one?”
‘Does that apply to my political views?’
“Do policies that make anyone unwelcome lead to them feeling unstable and prone to volatile behaviour that communicates that?”
‘Am I responsible for community unrest?’ Homes require defending! ‘Can that ever be terrorism?’
The way the Visitors organised the discussions, it seemed as if a clear location for responsibility was impossible to establish.
When the representatives of the larger powers attempted to place it on others they were soon examining the historical impact of their political and commercial practices on current events.
When the smaller powers attempted to locate cruel practices with particular tribal groupings, or with the larger powers, it wasn’t long before they found themselves self-reflecting on their own interactions, systems of governance and wealth distribution.
When the hosts of the venue attempted to locate evil in the beliefs and practices of others in the room, they found themselves exploring the way they related at an interpersonal level – despite their attempts to explain why such matters were irrelevant compared with the
‘The group, the community, is the ultimate primary unit of consideration, and the so-called inner processes in the individual are internalisations of the forces operating in the group to which he belongs.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Access to Unconscious Processes in the Group-analytic Group’, ‘Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis’, Karnac, 1990, p. 212.
current moral endeavour for which they were eager to die.
The pale woman who had spent so much time under her bed, liked it when the fanatic she fancied talked about his willingness to die. Each time he quoted his most frightening holy injunctions, she knew that he heard voices too. “Had his parents shouted at each other? Was his mother depressed? Had he been bullied?” she asked the nurse - who wondered whether the Visitors might ask such questions in relation to disappointing, violent and denigrating cultural experiences.
The pale woman liked the way the Visitors questioned the young terrorist but didn’t want to harm him.
The law was being fried into an inedible goulash and the Visitor’s questions were the cooking fire. When she voiced this thought, a psychiatrist explained that it was her psychosis speaking. At one time she would have been at home with this explanation.
Thoughts tumbled out of her. She liked having the nurse nearby. She recognised several "infant-adults": fellow patients, criminals, warders, the hospital manager and politicians from the meeting in the hospital and enjoyed the way that the Visitors made them explain themselves. Sometimes the voices were quiet in case the Visitors made them explain themselves. ‘Was this the Visitors’ ward round?’
The heat intensified.
The alternation of fiery language and silence mirrored the heat and silences of the desert. Forgetfulness seeped in through the cracks slashed into normality. The heat sucked out retribution, impulsivity and, eventually, even the manic energy of terrorists. In the sweltering exhausted silences, overheated bodies registered an equality in which thought and conversation felt like a luxury.
After a very long silence, interrupted only by the sound of laboured breathing, she smiled shyly at the tall young terrorist in the Adidas trainers - who, in the heat, was beginning to falter.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “I like listening to you.”
He pulled himself out of the slump he had begun to share with the rest of humanity.
“Do you think I’m mad,” he muttered. His voice was hoarse.
“Aren’t we all?” rasped the fraudster through painful lungs. Breathing was like sucking in fire.
The terrorist frowned. He hadn’t intended to begin a conversation.
The government minister also frowned – at the fraudster. ‘Why begin a conversation with a terrorist?’
The warder looked wearily at them before smiling wryly at the woman out of whom the thoughts had tumbled. 'Were they all ‘infant-adults’?'
The ‘infant-adult’ serving time for fraud was puzzled by how alive the psychotic woman looked - despite the heat - as if her earlier passivity had slipped away.
He disliked emotional surprises. Observing gave him time to plan.
‘Why had he chosen to come to this place with the Visitors?’
‘Did he choose or just find himself doing things?’
He was unnerved by the look of childish pleasure on the face of a murderer he’d avoided in the prison.
The ‘infant-adult’ serving a life sentence for murder felt simultaneously pleased and frightened that the Visitors had included him on this venture. It wasn’t just that it was a holiday from prison; he felt that the Visitors had wanted him to come. It was a long time since he’d felt wanted.
‘Can I like aliens without liking humans?’ He rubbed his back: the rod kept moving.
Extremism was the new location of condemnation and ostracism.
There was respectability in the rejection of ‘terrorism’ that could be shared with compatriots.
He had become a known danger: anxiety now resided in the intentions of the unfamiliar!
He was doubly included by joining in criticism of the Visitors - for encouraging hostile rhetoric and ignoring the continuing physical discomfort - both everyday experiences in the prison but indignation and suspicion of the Visitors’ motives [about which everyone seemed ignorant] connected him to people. It was a good feeling sharing ignorance with people who normally looked down on you!
He knew that the Visitors wouldn't retaliate.
The rod in his back knew that any calm he experienced was transitory. Nothing lasted.
The ‘infant-adult’ nurse felt disquieted – despite being invigorated by most of the questions.
‘Why did the Visitors refuse to condemn the cruelty of the powerful even when the inconsistencies and rationalisations of governments and companies became exposed?’
The wish to form alliances against those who abused power was confounded by the Visitors’ apparently viewing angry revolutionaries and complacent super-powers as emotionally young entities in whom concern was only tentatively established - who needed support in their development rather than international law courts
They were curious with regards to interruptions in empathy - towards anyone.
‘Might the cruelty of the mighty and the oppressed both elicit sadness?”
"How might groups discover links and restorative interactions rather than triggers for hate?
Did moral absolutism interrupt reflection?
Were condemnation and idealisation part of a cycle that might helpfully be interrupted if the focus was on repair?
Their refusal to condemn anyone infuriated everyone.
Sometimes contemporary responsibilities disappeared into an historical fog.
Sometimes the sense of accountability was overwhelming. Most disturbing: it was shared.
The ‘infant-adult’ politician, who had first met with the Visitors in the prison, experienced a tremor each time the Visitors shifted the conversation away from any possibility of moral or legal retribution.
He shuddered as he imagined a society and a world devoid of consequence.
Understanding, however multidimensional it became, would never act as a form of deterrence.
The Visitors were characterising international relations as a form of continual interaction and reflection in which everything was forever ‘becoming’ without any prospect of arrival.
Clarity was being defined as a defence against thinking!
The ‘infant-adult’ therapist, who had once tried to explain boundaries to the Visitors whilst being glared at by a murderer, mused over the chaotic range of feelings that she had experienced since she’d first met the Visitors in the psychiatric hospital. There was a pattern. They’d listen with apparent respect to most explanations before making enquiries which riled the speaker - including herself.
In the hospital, she’d felt supported as they queried the certainties of politicians, managers, psychiatrists and psychologists - until they re-framed her own explanations as a series of questions!
She’d been surprised by the prison warder who’d volunteered to accompany criminals to the hospital
‘Hate is simply untransformed mental energy … destructured as distinct from destructive. The structuring is a transformational linking.’
Patrick De Mare et al, Karnacs. ‘Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group’.
and terrorist camp and then seemed to be enjoying the questions. He’d been less interested in defending the prisons than had the politician.
‘Was she less open than the warder?’
‘Was she looking for the Visitors’ approval?’ … an image of the disappointment that she experienced when her father took her mother’s side… ‘where had that come from?’
It wasn’t that the Visitors took anyone’s side – although their questions did seem to redistribute power. Perhaps they were on the side of the powerless, but not – strangely - on the side of victims, unless everyone was a victim!
"Was ‘power’ a child-like state of mind - given the limited capacity of most human beings to reflect - and the even more limited time that their molecules hung together in what was known as ‘a life span’?"
“Light,” said the murderer, “harsh light and blindness!”
The fraudster was surprised: the murderer didn’t usually talk in metaphors.
The warder looked curiously at a man usually described in terms of his index offence.
Phrases such as ‘you lost the right to be listened to,’ formed on the lips of politician and manager.
Images of Oedipus losing his sight [a cornerstone myth in her training] and fleeting glimmers of the frailty of theory flitted through the therapist's pre-conscious without finding a place to settle.
The nurse was intrigued: she’d noticed how often on psychiatric wards the individual apparently least in touch with reality said the most pertinent things and cut through professional pomposity.
The light stripped away subterfuge.
It wasn’t just the heat that was relentless.
"Darkness," rejoined the schizophrenic woman.
This was the kind of interaction the old lag enjoyed.
The murderer hadn’t intended to be profound. He’d looked directly into the sun beating down on the parched enclosure and now could see nothing. The heat and the light had reduced the questions into little more than background static: yet sounds which gave relief from selfdeprecation continued to seep into his thoughts – noises which discovered a developing infant mind rather than a fixed adult identity.
The fraudster looked again and caught a glimmer of the man’s struggle - as he did the many small, unresponsive and unremembered interactions from the beginning of his own life - congealed together into what the judge had described as his ‘exploitative personality’?
The therapist watched the questions resonate through unlikely candidates for therapy in an environment most certainly not designed for it. There were too many uncontrollable variables. The focus was too broad – unless the location of disturbance was perceived as international, and yet, most of the Visitors' enquiries included the way people communicated with each other..
"Dialogue is not a sufficiently stable base to sustain organisational and professional structures," she explained during a conversation about the interplay between beliefs, behaviours and cultures with scant consideration of national borders.
‘Had they understood the psychological importance of boundaries – or about knowledge being built up on previous knowledge?’ ‘Was it possible to theorise if you didn’t ‘know’ anything?’
‘Was it just that the Visitors couldn't tolerate certainties?’
The questions expanded categories, pejorative terms and the location of disturbance.
Professionals found themselves feeling like perpetrators of sentencing and treatment - with the implication that terrorists, criminals and patients were at the receiving end of thoughtlessness.
‘In the changing micro-cultures in the median group’… given the time and space in which to talk to each other, people’s cultural assumptions are in no way allowed to remain unaccountable. On the contrary, they are constantly being questioned and through the process of dialogue new micro-cultures come to be established. This process we have called ‘transformation’.’
Patrick De Mare et al, Karnacs. Koinonia, From Hate, through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group, p.80.
Delegates reluctantly decided to modify their language.
The difficulty was that, without recognizable, 'professional' phrases, explanations took so much longer.
It became difficult to define or find a location for an act of terrorism – as it had with crime or psychiatric illness. Everything came to hover between people.
It was becoming clearer that this was the place that the Visitors line of questioning identified as the logical location of judicial action and treatment.
The Visitors seemed doubtful as to whether any amount of medical or psychotherapy training or experience freed anyone from a defensive propensity to locate difficulties in others.
Psychotherapists, considered by many to have the most in common with the Visitors, belonging to organisations that emphasised empathetic relationships, found themselves self-reflecting in relation to the cruelty that had been located with the terrorists. Some reassuring and kindly practitioners concluded that it would be impossible to retain these qualities in the presence of so much hatred and brought forward retirement plans. Others retreated behind selection procedures or familiar terminology which rationalised ‘a business as usual’ approach. Most remained perplexed as to how to develop the resilience required.
"Are cruelty and resilience personal or social constructions?
Is personal resilience experienced differently when social structures are thoughtfully supportive rather than exclusive or litigious?
How is cruelty modified when a strand of hope, however fragile, is responded to?"
The warder exchanged glances with the old lag. Both had spent a long time behind bars.
‘Was it hope that had brought them here?’
The curiosity of the Visitors was unrelenting.
They seemed driven to ask disturbing questions which led towards extreme conclusions.
It was as if they equated theoretical dogma with cruelty; the absence of curiosity as preliminary to genocide. Surely professional organisations had to live within contemporary social parameters!
They questioned adaptations made in accord with social norms rather than thoughtful explorations - and the cost to thinking involved in successfully marketing such adaptations.
Their refusal to live in the real world reactivated the attention of those who were hoping for some sort of revelations from the Visitors. Hope emerged that the Visitors had some greater purpose and perspective which might be considered to have a spiritual dimension. Some representatives of humanity, who had been brought up in fundamentalist religious traditions, thought that they might be angels, devils, divine messengers or a sign of ‘the last days’. Others wondered whether they were speaking about spiritual beliefs that had been overlooked in a materialist society.
It was true that the Visitors showed an interest in the eternal in as much as they seemed to have no notion of fixed points in time during which things could be evaluated. Everything was fluid, historical, intergenerational– with the current and personal never more than a flickering reflection of an interactional infinity. Working compromises emerged out of explorations in which considerations of merit seemed irrelevant. To some, the focus on reflection and introspection was not dissimilar to meditation or prayer.
The difficulty was that because the visitors were so curious about the whole picture, they progressively alienated all the segments by frustrating individual alliances. They spoke about developing connections but continually interrupted them by their indiscriminate compassion and relentless curiosity.
Anxieties fluctuated concerning the Visitors’ identity. ‘Did they understand individual freedom?' 'Did they have a ‘communist’ or a ‘free market’, totalitarian or democratic, religious or atheistic ideology?' ‘Perhaps
some form of enemy AI?’ 'Robots designed to undermine our national integrity' , was the headline worded by a journalist disturbed by the scope and nature of the Visitors’ questions.
The majority consensus still considered aliens to be the most probable hypothesis. ‘What were the implications of this?’ ‘Were they a symbiotic life form?’ ‘Did they have separate minds - draw distinctions between themselves - have disagreements? ‘How did they resolve conflict - did they need to?’ ‘Did they have impulses - or know about frustration?’ ‘Did they communicate with each other when human beings weren’t present?’ ‘Or had they participated in so many conversations over the aeons that, like some old married couples, they understood what each other was thinking?’
Their replies to enquiries were hard to remember. Most of those who met the Visitors considered themselves invited into a state of mind in which questions procreated. ‘What was a mind?’ ‘Were conflicts resolved or, if one remained attuned to the evolving dynamics, did the focus of tension continually shift? ‘How symbiotic or independent was any human being?’
than on individual assessments, they seemed designed to promote an unpleasant and volatile atmosphere. One group included: 1] the cost-cutting hospital manager trying to ignore; 2] the soon-to-be redundant therapist; 3] the pale faced woman who’d been initially enlivened by; 4] the murderer and subsequently by; 5] the terrorist in Adidas trainers; 6] the nurse who felt less uneasy at the presence of the young terrorist [whose rhetoric horrified normal people!] than by the inclusion of institutional norms in the manager and; 7] the government minister [whose rhetoric horrified thoughtful people!]; 8] the fraudster with whom several group members found themselves in an undeclared and uncomfortable alliance and; 9] the warder - increasingly unclear as to who he was protecting from whom.
An unpredictable, unscientific - and dangerousconcoction!
They invited professionals who described themselves as therapists to oversee communications, some of whom replied that their expertise involved working with individuals after assessment. Others explained that their method involved the therapist selecting clientele who: did not meet outside the group, considered themselves to be in need of therapy and were carefully assessed as to the nature of their disturbance. The Visitors asked whether anyone selected their neighbours.
The Visitors finally appeared to bow to the criticisms of those who pointed out the difficulties of conversations in large, unstructured forums; accepting that there might be a helpful way of communicating outside the tumult - but remained unable to see the value of meeting separately with professional groups who viewed themselves as the location of a form of expertise.
They had little interest in holding negotiations with powers thinking of attacking them [and debates were raging among politicians and moral authorities as to whether this might become necessary, 'to preserve civilisation as we know it’] nor in meeting with potential allies. They remained puzzled by everyone.
Suspicions, barely allayed by their offer to meet in smaller groups, returned when the proposed composition of these groups became apparent. Based on interchanges rather
It was explained that streets were not therapy groupsalthough it was becoming clear that the Visitors were more interested in the therapeutic possibilities of communities than in more exclusive settings.
The government minister thought that house prices filtered out undesirable neighbours but decided against sharing the thought in case replying to the inevitable questions led him into replies which would harm his leadership prospects.
Faced with the reluctance of professionals to conduct potentially volatile groups, the Visitors offered the role to individuals without formal training.
Chapter IV talking with intoleraBle PeoPle
They were sitting on wooden chairs in a circle. The fraudster wasn’t clear why he eagerly accepted the offer to ‘conduct’ the group - but he couldn’t ignore an opportunity! He could always ask the therapist what to do. ‘Was a group ‘conductor’ someone you could trust?’ He registered the doubt in his companions’ eyes. ‘Suspicions confirmed,’ thought the terrorist, now alone with this sample of the unbelievers he’d been told to allow in through the camp gate.
Only the safe-guarded patient, still waiting for her evil to be revealed to the world, expressed no surprise or unease concerning the group's composition or the invitation to the fraudster to become the convener. She watched intently when the young terrorist, as if unaware of the smaller size of the group, began to lecture everyone on corruption. He’d listened with deferential respect to his older mentors in the previous meeting but now, as the solitary representative of those beliefs, he came into his own.
His admirer was flanked by horrified expressions on governmental and managerial faces.
The therapist, sensing that a privately-held diagnosis for each of the group members risked putting her in alliance with the self-righteous certainties of the terrorist, tried to look as neutral as possible.
The warder had seated himself, with a look of resignation, between the terrorist and the murderer.
The nurse sat where she could watch the politician and the manager.
It was early morning but already hot. Confronted with a flow of unyielding rhetoric, ricocheting off the dried mud coating on the walls of a large room overlooking a desert courtyard, the thoughts of participants drifted to previous occasions when they had been unwilling listeners.
The nurse remembered the manager lecturing on the reconfiguration of the service in accord with government policy. She even remembered the language which gave a positive spin to the cuts in funding. She blinked the sweat out of her eyes.
The warder remembered the politician speaking on television about being tough on crime, which had involved cutting education and rehabilitation programs in the prison, resulting in an increase in violence amongst bored prisoners and making his job a lot harder. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
The murderer found himself re-visiting his sense of being serially replaced and the abiding rage on which anger management sessions had so little impact. He perspired internally.
The fraudster-conductor’s thoughts drifted back to the hours he’d spent soothing his mother’s anxieties. The boy had cultivated the art of looking interested long after he’d switched off. ‘Was that fraud?’ No-one had ever explained much about his father’s job in finance – but it meant he could go to a good school. He remembered a Christmas when he’d focused on the cost of the toys he’d unwrapped. He’d barely noticed the food. Sweat was running down his neck.
‘... an assumption based on universal observations regarding the behaviour of human beings brought together: they react, they show interest in each other and make contact. Thus they begin to interact, communicate and form relationships.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Therapeutic Group Analysis’, Allen and Unwin, 1964, p. 158.
‘In forming the group-analytic group we make some preliminary assumptions: firstly that the character of any situation which we cultivate determines what goes on and its meaning.’
S.H. Foulkes, 'Therapeutic Group Analysis', Allan and Unwin, 1964, p. 158.
The politician remembered his daughter accusing him of being incapable of listening. ‘Was it true?’ ‘Why was he thinking this now?’ He had nothing in common with a terrorist who used rhetoric to justify atrocity – unless he saw himself through the eyes of the nurse! He tried not to look in that mirror. Soon this heat would again be unbearable. ‘Why was the warder’s glance so critical?’ He’d always supported law and order. He tried to ignore the terrorist’s ranting. His expensive shirt was soaked in sweat.
Attempting to block out unpleasant thoughts, he looked for a more comforting memory - his father’s preeminence in commerce. He shut out his first wife’s view that this disguised emotional paucity – 'like father, like son!’
The terrorist had stopped for breath. ‘How had he continued for so long in the heat?’ wondered his solitary admirer, during a short pause, before warring voices filled her mind.
In the silence the fraudster began telling a story... something about his father.....
'Why had no-one asked to go home?' thought the manager. It could only be a matter of time. ‘Where might a risk assessment begin?’ ‘Where were the Visitors?’
The terrorist checked whether anyone had taken in what he’d said. He glowered at the politician and unusually forthcoming fraudster – a preemptive strike on those considered likely to challenge his dominance. Despite his determination to have nothing in common with corruption, the look in the eye of the storyteller - stirred an unwanted memory. He tried to ignore it - then remembered how he’d disappeared into his computer to distract himself from the shame of his father’s humiliations. He overheard the end of the fraudster’s story about a Christmas when the food was uneaten because a father hadn’t come home… a rich father… not one who couldn’t find work - until there was little food of any kind on the table… he needed to refocus! ‘Why think about fathers?’ ‘Were they getting inside each other’s minds?’ Such things happened in the heat.
He looked back towards his female admirer to help steady his focus. ‘Why seek reassurance from an unbeliever?’
Her voices were more active when he became less active and she was now arguing with herself. The government minister looked at her and said something about his daughter in a much quieter voice than the one with which he’d previously been speaking…. disconcerting - but he was still the representative of colonial cruelty and secular temptation…. Loyalties were not to be diluted!
The quiet voice penetrated the psychotic quarrel and her eyes refocused. She stopped mumbling and glanced appreciatively at the politician before glancing shyly in the direction of the terrorist.
The fraudster had finished his story but he found it difficult to return to his message.
The warder watched. Glances brought people to life in an uncomfortably individual way; made you realise that you had never met anyone completely; escaped faith… evaded formulation... opened the door to uncertainty; every glance different, even when exchanged with a familiar face; eyes echoed - deep in memory - context radically changed, gaze length varied – as did eyebrow lift; unique shadows around eyes - even if you circumscribed the moment and yoked it to past thoughts.
Something new - something returned!
The manager elbowed her mind into a familiar activity – formulating policy and establishing order. The soon-tobe-redundant-therapist was one of those whose services were old-fashioned, unscientific and not in accord with managerial priorities! The nurse was a wild card. She would have to be managed on their return to the hospital, possibly put her on ‘administrative duties’ while she completed ‘a structured program of in-service training’, followed by ‘a carefully monitored return to patient contact’ - under careful supervision of course! She dismissed the service user’s recollections which had suggested that a relationship was more helpful than an evidence base; ‘not a properly conducted survey’ – ‘too subjective’ - the service user’s ‘illness speaking’. But, unfortunately, under the regime to which performance bonuses were linked, the manager required ‘service user feedback’ to validate her authority - and the potential source of validation was proving less than accommodating.
‘.... we count on the old, inevitable repetition in transference, that is to say, a displacement of old reactions into the treatment system.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Therapeutic Group Analysis’, Allen and Unwin, 1964, p. 158.
‘We have coined the term 'transposition' for the introduction of matters from previous contexts into the group, similar but distinct from the manifestation of transferred relationships in psychoanalysis.’
Patrick De Mare, 'Koinonia, From Hate through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group', Karnac, 1991, p. 103.
‘The centre of gravity does not start off in the individual. It is in the total set-up.’
D.W. Winnicott, 'Anxiety associated with Insecurity,' Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis, Hogarth & The IPA, 1977, p.99.
If only she could have had some input into group selection: a psychologist rather than the psychotherapist, a more predictable service user - perhaps the obsessional woman! Certainly not the murderer or the terrorist….. or the nurse… ‘Why had she been put in a group with these people?’
She could suggest an agenda – but would sensible conversation be possible in such a group?’
She sensed hostility from a familiar source. The role of protector was unsustainable in the mirror of the nurse’s eye. She avoided looking in that direction but the glare followed her inwards. Cutting the service hadn’t been her decision. Nor was the salary she earned. She tried to erase the memory of the fraudster's phrase, ‘it was only taxpayers’ money’. ‘Why did it follow her?’ Everything she did was legal… Normal mental filters were not functioning… ‘Were the Visitors inserting questions into her mind?’
Memories resurfaced: the birth of younger siblings after which mother became depressed and father couldn’t cope…. she’d been left to manage …. someone had to take control!
These thoughts were not relevant to the current situation although she’d heard the soon-to-be redundant therapist suggest on several occasions that behaviour learnt early in life continued into adulthood. Such attitudes muddied the water and confused ‘the primary task’. Her job would be a lot easier when such people had been let go of!
But, after so much interaction with the Visitors, questions refused to fade away. ‘Was it true that people continuously recreated familiar ways of relating: with career paths and neglectful political ideologies shaped by familial roles?’ ‘Did that apply to ‘being left to manage’?’ Past and present were merging. She felt disoriented. It was the heat! She stopped herself entering into a conversation with the fraudster about parents - not on the agenda! She ordered memories away - but had to use considerable will power to stop them returning through the back door.
The terrorist knew that his father had been a good man who’d been treated badly. Faith was a righteous weapon!
Contemporary images and memories coalesced: tentative hope in the eyes of his mother and the mad woman. Her withdrawn look echoed his mother’s hollow gaze.... tenderness – long forgotten, half remembered! He focused his hostility on the manager who’d looked at him as if he were dirt: the same look he’d seen directed at his father by immigration officers and employers. There was strength in anger! 'Why let random emotions affect him?' Family and friends were meaningless in relation to overriding faith and the knowledge of salvation!
The mood in the group had changed. Introspection gave limited fuel for righteousness.
The man who had killed his wife was missing the routine of prison life: interactions here were too confusing.
The politician assessed his audience. Admiration and suspicion were familiar on the campaign trail.
He tried to prevent a return to his more pensive thoughts – to disconnect himself from his preoccupation with the woman who heard voices. He was no criminal or terrorist – unless he allowed himself to be influenced by alien distortions of logic! 'Why had the Visitors invited a fraudster to lead the group rather than himself?' 'Did his daughter see him as a fraudster?' 'Could she not see how busy he was – and how important was the work he did?' He remembered her disappointed look when he explained that his schedule meant that her mother would have to attend those family meetings alone....
The therapist quietly congratulated herself on declining the Visitor’s invitation to conduct the group. “Safety is the bottom line for therapy,” she asserted - whenever the opportunity presented itself.
And yet - people were strangely affected by each other. Monologues, silences, spasmodic outbursts, hesitant glances and the absence of conversation evoked memories she’d spoken about with her therapist many years previously - although her outbursts were never in public and, even within the boundaries of the therapeutic session, spoken about rather than ‘acted out’.
'Had she chosen a form of therapy acceptable to a family culture valuing intellectual rigour but subtly distancing and emotionally disconnecting?'
The story the fraudster had recounted evoked further thoughts concerning unavailable parents and intimacies interrupted or undeveloped.
She asked the kind of question she might have asked in a therapy session.
“Did your father, when he returned, feel like a different man to the one who left you waiting?”
The fraudster wasn’t sure what she meant but remembered his mother’s look when his father finally came home - a look that never found words.
He forgot that he had intended to be active.
The warder wondered whether the therapist would direct this kind of question at herself.
What she'd said about her father sounded like he was also a preoccupied man - not unlike his own!
The terrorist withdrew into thoughts laced with images of disappointment.
The nurse looked suspiciously at the therapist who could be insightful but spoke as if she was looking down on people. ‘Did the Visitors know that she would refuse to conduct the group?’ They must have guessed by the way that she had described group psychotherapy in response to their questions: a method involving a selection procedure that would have excluded most of the people in the room.
‘Any better than a manager whose responses were dictated by procedures?’
“I work with everyone, despite in-service training which drains enthusiasm.” she declared before glancing sidelong at the manager.
The manager, casting around for allies, reiterated the therapist's declaration, “safety is the bottom line!”
The nurse shrugged. The warder smiled thinly and shook his head. “Safety from what?” asked the nurse.
The thin smile deepened - joining up the furrows across the warder’s brow.
Nurse and warder knew that if they were to continue to follow the Visitors’ lines of questioning their next question would be directed as much at the culture as at any individual.
'How much choice did the therapist or manager have in a reductionist and litigious world?'
The nurse felt her anger dissipate into the heat rising from the mud floor. Roles crumbled. Sweat was a great equalizer. Attempts at frightening, protecting, persuading, controlling, dominating ran out of energy until everyone was left with their own thoughts and memories. Silence descended on the group.
The therapist wondered whether the Visitors had declined to meet separately with schools of expertise because they were seeking to create interactions in which certainties were rarely confirmed.
The fraudster considered whether the Visitors had appointed him because of, rather than in spite of, his conviction. He heard the psychotic woman replying to a question from one of her voices with, “we are all fraudsters here.” ‘How had she known what he was thinking?’
The man-boy with the rod in his back was revisiting a younger man-boy: disembodied eyes watching.
The politician wondered whether the psychotic woman was the same age as his daughter. It was disconcerting to hear that some of her voices repeated the words of her parents. ‘If his daughter heard his voice in her head, what would it be saying?’
“Are you feeling safe?” returned from the safe-guarder - devoid of curiosity or introspection, thought the nurse. 'Had she eaten a brochure with 'recommended interventions' for breakfast?'
‘.... the group members are in a state of interaction, in a common field, in interpenetration and communication. They speak now through one mouth, now through another. Active currents within the group may be expressed or come to a head in one particular person, between particular persons, or, in a sense, be 'personified' within individuals.’
S.H. Foulkes, 'Theoretical Formulations and Applications,' 'Group Psychotherapy, the Group Psychoanalytic Approach', Karnac, 1990, Foulkes and Anthony p. 259.
‘The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’ and the object is there to receive the communication.’
D.W. Winnicott
‘It is important that survive in this context means ‘not retaliate.’ Without the experience of maximum destructiveness (object not protected) the subject never places the analyst outside and therefore can never do more than experience a kind of self-analysis, using the analyst as a projection of a part of the self….can only feed on the self and cannot use the breast for getting fat. The patient may even enjoy the analytic experience but will not fundamentally change.’
D.W. Winnicott,
The hospital manager was asking the madwoman the question - but the disembodied eyes felt penetrated by it. The years collapsed. The rod dissolved. Of course he didn’t...the absence of routine. ‘How could the unpredictable waves of rage that flowed through an identity for which he had ‘responsibility’ stop crashing against the sea wall?’ He needed the rod. The noise and then the silence! So many strangers! Those glares!
“Does anyone?” came from the woman who had not wanted to conduct the group.
‘Had she refused because of him?’ The heavy darkness rushed into his ears. The world disappeared and when it returned he was lying on his back in the centre of the circle with a heavy weight on his chest. Another woman’s voice eased the crushing sensation.
The terrorist had surprised himself. ‘Why had he leapt to the defence of a non-believer?’ He had put himself between the man who killed and the woman who declined before those who protected had realised what was happening. He had nothing in common with the criminal on whose chest he was sitting - although they were both angry - and about the same age. But his rage was against a corrupt civilisation of which this man was as much a part as the therapist he’d rescued. And she irritated him more! … the sound of his mother’s voice complaining how she had been promised so much by a husband who had taken her from her family … to leave her alone with children in a hostile world. Late at night Papa returned drained from jobs he would never have considered in their native land, Unendurable humiliation! Rage flowed out of the man below into the man above - but punctuated by the nurse’s voice.
The therapist felt shaken. She wasn’t sure whether it was a result of the attempted assault or because she had previously diagnosed the man sitting on her wouldbe assailant’s chest so confidently. For a moment her categories felt empty. She found herself re-considering what she’d previously said about both group composition and boundaries. She had been rescued by a man she had considered to be a homicidal sociopath from what she had little doubt was an attempt on her life. Those she had considered most sane had remained in their seats. ‘What point were the Visitors making?’
‘What had prompted her to voice her question - a way of covering herself, protecting others or confirming her professional identity?’ ‘Protecting against what?’ ‘Covering what?’ ‘What form of professional identity was confirmed when she retreated from meaning and focused on risk?’
‘Was she defending herself against guilt at being so quick to exclude people she feared from her groups?’ ‘Was she any different than her mother – so conditional with regards to the aspects of her daughter that she could tolerate?’
Manager and politician felt shocked: the former at feeling protected by the incarnation of risk, the latter at being cheated of his outrage by the identity of the rescuer. ‘Had the Visitors scripted this?’
The politician thought he wouldn’t put anything past them – before remembering that this was what his second wife had said about him.
The manager had quietly liked what the therapist had said previously about group composition, boundaries and safety. No risk assessment would have permitted a group of this nature. Perhaps the therapist did value order despite her alarming preoccupation with unconscious processes! Might the 'reconfiguration' which had made her redundant be revisited? Perhaps she could be retrained - or given a role in which she consulted on safety. [But ‘safety’ no longer felt uncomplicated!]
The warder felt surprised that he'd been so slow to react - as well as some reluctant admiration towards the terrorist.... but... when you found yourself admiring criminals you lost your moral compass! He echoed the nurse’s irritation with professionals who had jobs where they could choose their clientele - and felt annoyed at the intrusiveness and self-righteous certainties of the manager and the therapist. It was never good to stir things up – at least until you knew who you were dealing with. [‘Was that why the lowkey fraudster had been invited to conduct the group?’] He remembered the Visitors’ enquiries as to whether violence could be considered an expression of hope. It was hard to imagine that when you were in the middle of it!
The murderer tried not to think about the pain in his chest which he had first thought would be the warder. He managed to distract himself from the nurse’s questions
which he sensed would threaten long-established barricades but didn’t want to distract himself from her tone of voice. It soothed him.
‘What was it the other women's voices had been saying about ‘safety’?’ He hated that word.
The social worker had questioned whether he felt ‘safe’ before she took him into Care.
‘Why had he replied?’ What followed was worse – broken promises and prisons.
The social worker was just the first in a long line of professionals who knew nothing about his mother. ‘But what did ‘he’ know - what did his mother know about ‘him’?’
He could feel his anger returning although, with the crushing load on his chest, he didn’t feel any sense of power. With the weight trapping him in immobility and helplessness, his rage found the impotent vent of a forgotten child. He remembered the remains of a bear disappearing down the toilet and sobbed.
The terrorist felt awkward and confused. Violence had become a familiar form of problem solving. Tears were not included in the life script that had brought him to the desert. He’d learnt to immunise himself, firstly to his mother’s tears and later to those of individuals who, in a holy war, became fuel on the fire of salvation. A wave of hatred towards his mother and to both of the women who had asked questions about safety entered him. He didn’t feel angry at the voice beside him speaking gently to the man who was crying. He wondered if he might exclude her from his purification program – even if she wasn’t a believer. Then he noticed the unfamiliar absence of hostility in the eyes of others in the circle.
He felt disloyal to his father and his faith.
The returning admiration in the eyes of the woman who hadn’t objected to the composition of the group eased his disquiet – tempered the pain of disloyalty and he made a snap decision to exclude her from his diagnosis of cultural corruption. 'But, how could he justify this sense of connection to two non-believing women, one of whom
was mad – let alone shifting his weight so as to lessen the discomfort of an immoral murderer for whom he was beginning to feel an involuntary affinity?'
The murderer took a deep breath as he felt the shift of weight away from his lungs. He remembered times he had been restrained in that therapeutic community – the nurse seemed to talk in that same calming way... an image from an expedition they’d taken him on: he’d thrown his boots away - they’d sat there for ages before he let a man lace up his boots so they could keep climbing up the hill. 'Why was he thinking about it now?' Strong arms and attentive eyes invited recall.
The politician wondered whether this was the time when he had advocated the closing of such projects under a variety of policy headings emphasising fiscal and social responsibility and, of course, being ‘tough on crime’. He wasn’t to know that many of those young people would seek the familiarity of stern judges and tough sentences or be too difficult for foster parents to manage.
'Had he contributed to a boy being returned to the streets and the violence which followed?'
“Had the mountain climbing trips been risk assessed?” The manager almost immediately regretted asking the question but health and safety had long since become a compulsive mental filter. The regret became guilt when she heard the murderer, who told the nurse his name was Jason, still with the terrorist on his chest, gasp about things not being allowed any more. She read between the lines of his description that the expeditions had withered when the staff, regardless of previous experience, had to be certificated by private companies and do a lot more paperwork before and after the trips. Alternatively experts, who focused more on skills than developing relationships within which hate was metabolised, were brought in to lead trips. ‘Safety was primary!’ The costs or the demands on staff time became prohibitive. Expeditions became infrequent - delayed until they were less likely to preempt behaviour - and more likely to function as postmortems after Jason had already hurt someone.
‘The focus of the safety was somewhat selective,’ thought the warder.
‘Actual destruction belongs to the object’s failure to survive … This quality of ‘always being destroyed’ makes the reality of the surviving object felt as such, strengthens the feeling tone, and contributes to object constancy.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object,’ in ‘Playing and Reality’, Tavistock Routledge, 1993, p. 90-94.
‘.... we assume that modification of the group and of the individual are interdependent. Any change, any modification in the group, goes together with a change in the individual and vice versa.’
S.H. Foulkes, ‘Therapeutic Group Analysis’, Allen and Unwin, 1964, p. 158.
‘No more able' to meet and match the moment of hope', thought the therapist. Not her favourite words but they niggled away at her. ‘How often did thinking in a particular way lead to not recognising an uncomfortable communication?’
Jason spoke directly to the eyes above him and alongside him about despair on being returned to the familiar streets.
His gaze was returned by the nurse, feeling so much more at home when things burst into the open, and the terrorist, feeling considerable ambivalence at being a receptacle for the despair of an unbeliever.
The manager felt like an outsider to the caring: her own role having become the new location for cruelty. It was clear that the nurse and warder - those on the front lineviewed her priorities in that light.
Her procedures were becoming re-framed as onslaughts on creative alternatives by the waves of questions which began breaking.
‘Who risk-assessed streets, pubs, housing estates into which vulnerable human beings were discharged?’
‘Who risk-assessed the drugs, the absence of alternative forms of engagement?’
‘Was risk assessment primarily about professionals protecting themselves?’
‘Should the professional state of mind as well as the time spent on risk assessments be risk-assessed?’ She realised with a shock that it wasn’t the Visitors asking – but the waves kept breaking.
‘Why was she even listening to a violent criminal with an even more violent criminal on his chest?’
‘If she asked this question aloud, would the Visitors treat it as a metaphor for international relations – before inquiring as to its relevance to her own decisive style of management?’
Surely she could not be thought culpable for the actions of a murderer because of the way she had been part of a society that prioritised safety, planning and qualifications.
The sea became even rougher – it was some comfort when she confirmed that others were also interrogating themselves.
‘How often did control become a defence against engagement?’
The therapist caught the manager's eye. They were swimming in the same sea.
‘When did an elder sister’s attempt to step into a gap left by a mother lead to futile attempts to control a changing cast of siblings?’ ‘Were they expected to offer emotional support as well?’ They had only been children. ‘Why had their fathers left them in that role?’ ‘Had they - much later - been left in professional roles by someone who could have been more thoughtful?’
‘Was an obsession with safety directed at diminishing the risks of liveliness - of unpredictable thoughts and feelings?’
‘What was the alternative?’
"Lives are impoverished by control," the therapist heard the nurse arguing. Then, a few sentences later, "Managerial cuts justify neglect under a group of high-minded policy headings."
The nurse reminded the therapist of the younger sister most likely to challenge her.
Danger brought the service user to life, thought the manager - a worrying development in this setting! The residue of the Visitors questions was an array of chaotic uncertainties.
‘Where were the Visitors?’
"Her attraction to the terrorist is dangerous! Vulnerable people need protecting." The declaration momentarily restored the manager’s equilibrium. But the tide was still
coming in and questions kept breaking on the sands of her mind. 'How often did protecting someone against dysfunctional relationships sentence them to medicated isolation?' 'What would creative risk look like?'
‘Where were these thoughts coming from?’
Disturbing: she didn’t normally have those kinds of thoughts! ‘Was she beginning to hear voices?’
‘Had the Visitors left the group to manage itself?’
This was dangerous!
The therapist took a deep breath. So much had happened in such a short space of time. Still stirred up by the averted assault and unexpected rescue, her thoughts were racing.
‘Had her parameters been as damaging as the overvaluation of safety, justice, empirical evidence and business models which, outside this mad environment, appeared to have exacerbated the lonely misery of the woman she had thought of as a patient and the bubbling rage of the man identified initially only as a murderer?’ ‘Was she looking at the limits of her own self-exploration?’‘Did infantile disappointments still influence her selectionsdespite justifications which she could easily produce if she was questioned?’
The Visitors’ questions concerning the nature of resilience lingered. ‘But how much more therapy would it take?’ ‘Would five times a week be enough?’ They seemed more interested in a way of being than a method. ‘Was it the nurse’s deficient grasp of reality that made her oblivious to the dangers?’
The therapist knew that she was prone to defensively diagnosing behaviour that made her feel uncomfortable, or of which she felt a little envious - and attempted to quieten that reflex - but - she had always liked categories. In adult life this took her to long forgotten articles in a range of therapy journals.
When she was much younger, she remembered teaching her younger siblings the names of things. When she didn’t know the name of a plant or animal she had investigated
meticulously until the name was uncovered. Her siblings had been willing listeners - except the sister who was most like the nurse.
‘Willing listeners’: was this what she looked for in her selection procedures - whatever her professional rationalisations?’
She remembered phrases she’d uncovered from her medical file before spending months in therapy trying to fathom their implications: 'Incubator after premature birth’ leading to ‘lung complications’, a sustained period in hospital and subsequent ‘difficulty breastfeeding'. [Her mother was reluctant to speak about 'those times’.]
Subsequent milestones were apparently ‘normal’ and accompanied by family stories she’d come to distrust. 'A happy child,' - that grated! It was in a school report alongside, 'quiet and studious' and 'the intelligent child of busy parents.' Only one teacher, whose classes she'd enjoyed, deviated from the bland consensus, reporting that she rarely played with the other children and queried whether she'd 'had to grow up too quickly.' Her mother thought that teacher was arrogant and impertinent.
She’d spent hours in therapy talking about the anger she felt in relation to maternal insensitivity but her mother never understood why she ‘needed therapy’ or asked 'so many questions' about her childhood - and had accused her of 'self-indulgence.'
Her husband was more sensitive but often preoccupied by his work.
Now that their youngest daughter had moved out, the home they had made together felt empty.
‘Were the boundaries that she advocated a way of fending off a deepening sense of invisibility?’
‘Had she ever felt seen… listened to… touched… smelt…tasted?’ 'Were the earliest boundaries sensory?' ‘Could boundaries be responsive and adaptive, inclusive and receptive?’ ‘Would she disappear without the only kind of frame she knew?’ ‘Had she refused to conduct this group because she was disappointed that the Visitors had understood her philosophy but not her practice –
‘In this way, the guilt is not felt but lies dormant, or potential, and appears (as sadness or a depressed mood) only if opportunity for reparation fails to turn up.’
D.W. Winnicott
‘The therapist should not think he must understand; it is sometimes very important not to understand… Not understanding is important for the possibility of learning something new.’
S.H. Foulkes,‘The Leader in the Group,’ ‘Selected Papers,’ Karnac, 1990, p.294.
‘Instinct–drives leads to ruthless usage of objects, and then to a guilt-sense which is held, and is allayed by the contribution to the environment mother that the infant can make within the course of a few hours....’
D.W. Winnicott
‘When confidence in this benign cycle and in the expectation of opportunity is established, the sense of guilt in relation to the id-drives becomes further modified, and then we need a more positive term, such as ‘concern’....’
D.W. Winnicott
at a time when her profession was already beleaguered?’ Disappointment was irrational; the Visitors didn’t overtly support anyone; but it was unusual for successful professionals to be asked to think about their emotional development alongside more problematic individuals. ‘Were professional roles defensive enclaves rather than routes towards creative interactions?’
She’d inadvertently provoked risk by asking a question about safety - itself a response to the question of the manager whose compulsion to protect had been thwarted by her charge being attracted to a safe-guarding anathema. ‘Did any of this make sense?’ She was no longer viewing this charge, whose voices had quietened, through a diagnostic lens. ‘Was she losing her clinical focus - being influenced by
the nurse speaking quietly on her knees - who had engaged so much more effectively than the other professionals?’
The nurse and the terrorist helped Jason to his feet and sat him between them in the circle.
The warder was disturbed. He'd been ineffective whilst the worst criminal in the room had rescued the therapist from an attack by the second worst criminal – if such things were to be measured in terms of recognised atrocities. ‘What would he do now?’ His admiration for the reflexes and effectiveness of the terrorist disturbed him further. Then there was his continuing irritation at the women who had stirred things up. ‘Why did that bother him?’ ‘Had his irritation at their interventions slowed him down?’ He could have said something…. ‘Why did he speak so infrequently?’ ‘Where did habits come from?’
But no-one in his family said much… never saw his parents lose control…nor express much affection… didn’t remember anyone speaking to him in the way that the nurse had done to the sobbing Jason… never spoken that way to his own children…. felt in awe of the way the nurse had taken charge of a situation that, in his experience, would have led to an emergency team of six warders, a substantial period in isolation for the offender, criminal charges and an extended sentence…. enjoying himself… group unpredictable, dangerous – and dynamic! In the prison, it often seemed as if only the cell doors moved. He
revisited his earlier assessment. There was something to be said for stirring things up – a thought that precipitated a thickening in his stomach: the beginnings of unease, a disloyalty....
New ideas were interacting with old sensations. Generations of his family had accustomed themselves to a kind of habitual inertia. Sons, the eldest always called Oliver, went into the army or the police. There was some surprise when he went into the prison service. It was a small rebellion but, before it began to enclose him, he had felt that he could do some good. The Visitors’ questions reminded him of this hope. He looked towards where he had thought that they would be sitting and realised that he had become so engaged in the group he hadn’t noticed them for some time. ‘Were they planning to join in later?’ It was then that the service user sunk down into a foetal position on the floor.
‘No sooner does one individual stop acting out than another one begins!’ thought the therapist. She was not enjoying herself. There was too much to balance. The personal and professional could no longer be clearly delineated. A therapeutic interpretation highlighting the jealousy of the attention that the murderer had received formulated in a mind annoyed by the woman on the floor - and worried about losing its clinical focus. ‘What would be left?’ ‘Would she have liked the terrorist to sit on ‘her’ chest?’
The inner smile that accompanied this thought confused her. The question was motivated by an unexpected energy which burnt off the dust accumulated by family life and professional milestones. When had ‘she’ last flirted? She rarely spoke with her husband about the absence of sex in their lives together. Her conversations about obstacles to physical intimacy occurred with her patients.
Oliver inquired as to whether everyone was going to ground.
The manager suggested that the service user return to her seat but, not wishing to be seen as cold-hearted, and against her better judgement, sank down onto the floor beside the woman who had never learnt to shrug. This was an unfamiliar position, not a comfortable one: the manager felt clumsy and ungainly. Her knees refused
to bend when she tried to cross her legs. ‘Was physical contact appropriate?’ ‘Was there a policy on touch?’ She introduced herself to the foetus as Helen, became aware that now only the name of a murderer and her own name were public property; felt out of her depth, embarrassed by this unplanned spontaneity, and climbed back into her chair. She couldn’t compete with the nurse!
The therapist's mind retreated and her heart advanced. The manager had clearly gone way out of her comfort zone and was now looking rather lost. In a gesture of solidarity with another daughter who had been expected to grow up too quickly, the formulator of interpretations moved across the room, sat in a vacant chair beside the embarrassed Helen and introduced herself as Sylvia. Then Jason, moving beyond the definition of his index offence, slid onto the floor nearby the now uncurling foetus.
Sylvia and Helen, feeling more like awkward elder sisters than safeguarding professionals, wondered whether they should do something to protect the woman on the floor from a murderer. But it was a long time since the hospital where Helen had implemented safeguarding procedures by placing nurses between vulnerable service users and visiting criminals. Protection and safety had become complicated concepts. For Jason they had meant the removal of a familiar form of care and subsequent serial abandonment. Good intentions were not free of destructive outcomes.
The fraudster-conductor saw two adults on the ground with common experiences of chaotic parenting trying to find a way into the world and, using his calculations to good effect, waited.
Jason asked the name of the woman on the floor before pointing to the seat he’d vacated. Helen had the bizarre thought that she had become a student in a form of in-service training. The foetus, also in a process of development, nodded shyly whilst uncurling slowly; murmured that her name was Emily before climbing onto the seat between the nurse and the terrorist who flushed, shook his head and almost smiled for the first time in the group. The beginnings of a shrug rippled awkwardly across his stiff shoulders. Thawing was not a blessing: it provoked uncertainty and introduced memories.
Jason walked across the room and sat beside the warderwith the politician on the other side.
The nurse looked curiously at the rapidly matured foetus who’d settled in beside her.
The politician had lost track of who was helping who but noticed that he hadn’t flinched when the murderer sat next to him. ‘Was this some kind of ethical ‘musical chairs’?’
Sylvia returned to her thoughts concerning the manipulative quality of Emily’s behaviour. She noticed a pejorative diagnosis gathering shape in her mind before wondering whether there might be another pejorative diagnosis for the speed with which she was looking to categorise. Whilst her categories might have some validity, this was a lonely human being searching for recognition and experimenting tentatively with erotic attraction, sitting next to an individual, traumatised by dislocation and the atrocities which had become part of his life - who had forgotten how to be a child… if he had ever learnt.
Helen had seemed to be just as lost when she stopped organising and tried to interact in a more spontaneous fashion. ‘What was it that they were learning together?‘ Learning each other's names! ‘After so long?’ Feeling more composed - albeit supported by a woman that she had made redundant, she tried to organise her thoughts. ‘What were these themes that the Visitors had kept steering them towards?’ ‘Locating the disturbance between rather than within individuals?’ ‘Was this what was happening in this group - as roles became less sustainable?’ She had been stirred up by a range of interactions. ‘Were policies the refuge of an older sister when chaotic emotions were too difficult to respond to?’ ‘Meeting hope’: was this what the nurse and the terrorist had just done – even the murderer and the therapist by leaving their seats - and she, with her focus on paper trails and evidence, had somehow misunderstood?’ She had tried but it didn’t come naturally. ‘Sitting in someone else’s seat - standing in someone else’s shoes: could intuitive kindness be risk assessed or measured?' ‘Was attempted violence really ‘a moment of hope’?’ ‘Was it the response which determined whether it became part of a development?’
‘The infant is now becoming able to be concerned, to take responsibility for his own instinctual impulses and for the functions that belong to them. This provides one of the fundamental constructive elements of play and work.....’
D.W. Winnicott
‘... in the developmental process it was the opportunity to contribute that enabled concern to be within the child’s capacity.’
D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Development of the Capacity for Concern,’ 1963, in ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment’, Karnac, 1990, p.77.
Jason puzzled about the sensations that the nurse had eased in him – and those she’d evoked.
He didn’t remember much of what she said but he knew that she’d listened to him when he talked about home and hope. Both ideas dissolved easily. The prison was his home. He didn’t know the prison warder well but better than he did his father. He’d felt cared about when the terrorist sat on his chest - although it hurt - and when the nurse had spoken to him through his tears! The way that the terrorist had ranted reminded him of his cellmate. The nurse reminded him of a woman in the therapeutic community. When he sat between the nurse and terrorist he’d felt settled – a sensation that remained with him when he’d moved in between the warder and a surprisingly friendly politician. “Was this what some peoples' homes were like?” He saw the nurse watching him so he sent the question in her direction. He didn’t have memories of that kind of home: his memories were of anxiety, fear, rage, excitement and jealousy more powerful than the desert sun. He barely heard her reply but felt less agitated when he saw his reflection in her eyes. He had a good feeling at having given something to the woman with voices which seemed less angry.
The fraudster was still calculating but not about profit. He wondered about the introduction of names in the group. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard the name of the murderer before, but he had largely avoided him in the prison and the use of names seemed to risk pushing the group into unfamiliar territory.
He was enjoying the title of group conductor but sensed that, if everyone knew his name, he’d feel as if something had been taken away. His mother had used his name in a particular way when she was angry with his father. That had felt like the theft of his name. ‘Was that fraud?’ ‘Had that shaped his attitude to property?’ ‘Was this what the Visitors had meant when they asked about the impact of small events that would never make headlines or lead to prosecution?’
The politician’s confusion had been exacerbated by an unfamiliar uncertainty. He was a well-known figure: those who listened to the news must have heard his name. ‘Why had nobody addressed him by name in the group?’ ‘Had his stature crumbled alongside memories shared, personal
details revealed and overtures made?’ ‘What would it mean to declare his name now?’ He’d had enough of unbearable ambiguity: always discovering, never knowing! He decided to remind everyone that his name was Simon. No response. ‘Did they know already?’ Something within himself dropped away. ‘If roles dissolved, and the refuge of policy collapsed what would he be left with?’ ‘No response?’ ‘What point were the Visitors making?’ ‘Why blame the Visitors?’ They could have all introduced themselves long ago. ‘Or could they?’ ‘Had the Visitors designed an environment to create something new?’
Oliver felt no impetus to declare his name. He doubted whether being referred to by name would have contributed to his sense of being known. Being defined by his work had helped him to see how much it permeated his existence. The first name uncovered was of someone previously defined by his crime. Jason had received a gift, his name uncovered in the context of compassion rather than condemnation: not only Jason – they’d all had a gift! Something different was being created between them.
Sylvia puzzled over the nature of the introductions. Normally names were given as part of a perfunctory ritual – something to get out of the way. She was used to her patients knowing little and imagining much - but this was something else. It felt very different, names emerging in the context of interactions.
Helen wondered whether she wanted the kind of relationship with a service user that seemed to come so easily for the nurse. She couldn’t imagine herself being like that - except that - a spark seemed to have been kindled when the murderer was on the floor with the nurse at his head. No-one had ever spoken to Helen like that. But then she had never shown anyone how intensely she felt about things.
She felt a moment of envy towards the criminal - quickly suppressed by a stronger feeling of outrage on behalf of his victim. ‘Was it possible to feel empathy for both the hurt and the hurtful?’
She was grateful that Sylvia had come to sit with herespecially given the fraught nature of their previous professional relationship. 'Did Sylvia really see managerial decisions as hurtful?' She had not been intentionally
cruel.... she was pleased that she’d made the effort to support Emily….. curiosity was slipping under the radar of rationality!
No-one complained about the heat although it was now at its most intense. Outrage was losing its edge. Order and morality were both leaking. "Meaning can never be a substitute for consequence," declared someone. 'Doesn't that depend on the weight that meaning can carry?' said
someone else. "That society allows it to carry," added a third person. The Visitors had not been seen since the formation of the smaller group but, like the desert wind, which blew sand into eyes, ears and pockets of anyone who went outside, there was no retreat from the winds of curiosity. During the day they talked. At night, dreams were flooded by images and interactions evoked by the relentless daily explorations. After some dreams no-one looked the same.
‘We do not even, in terms of pure sound, hear a simple summary, a summation of all the individual waves which reach our ears, rather, these are significantly modified, being part and parcel of a total sound. In truth, what we hear is the orchestra. In the same way, mental processes going on in a group under observation reach us in the first place as a concerted whole.’
S.H. Foulkes, 'Basic Concepts in Group Psychotherapy,' in 'Selected Papers, Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis', Karnac, 1990, p.153-154.
BiograPhies
Mike Tait
Mike has spent most of his life working in organisations influenced by a therapeutic community ethos in social service, judicial, educational or health settings with children and adults. His roles have included: support worker, group facilitator, activities coordinator, therapist, group analyst, drama-therapist, supervisor, teacher and consultant. More recently, he has become a father and participated in international online explorations of the themes that have preoccupied him for half a century.
Marcus Price
I was hurried and became stamped plastic Lego soon to be a beer mat,
I can't slow down
The clock rhymes with my ambition
I have been door knob, a drawing pin and a set of false teeth.
I can’t slow down,
I have climbed Colne Ford Hill, ridden a bike and stroked a rabbit.
I can't slow down,
I've received numerous certificates for swimming, Yes!
I’m secure, because my mother taught me how to dress, and I shall die in my clothes beneath the sky with everybody else.
(1970s)
I worked in a pottery and then a picture framing firm before my first NHS work as a nursing assistant in a large hospital for people with learning disabilities (long closed down). I was doing art with the residents and soon set up an art department in a house at the gateway of the hospital. After about ten years, I trained as a nurse and then, while working as a nurse in Mental Health, trained as a psychotherapist. I came to view psychotherapy as an art form closely related to poetry, as described in my first publication, ´Asleep on the Volcano: The Poetic Landscape of Psychotherapy´, EPI Publications, 2020. I was inspired to paint a lot during the pandemic, a desire which had always been simmering below the surface. I have had a private psychotherapy practice since 2004 and organise international seminars and conferences for health professionals.
BiBliograPhy
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Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis,' Karnacs, 1990
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Price M. J. ‘Asleep on the Volcano, the poetic landscape of psychotherapy’. EPI Publications, UK. 2020.
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‘Comments on the Report of the Committee on Punishment in Prisons and Borstals,1961.- ‘The
‘Anti-Social Tendency,’ 1956.
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‘Dissociation Revealed in Therapeutic Consultation’, 1965
'Home Again', 'Deprivation and Delinquency'.
'Struggling through the Doldrums'.
' ‘The absence of a sense of guilt’.
‘Home is Where we Start from,’ Pelican, 1987.
‘Playing and Reality’, Tavistock Routledge, 1991- ‘The Use of an Object,’
‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,’ Karnac, 1990
'The Child in Health and Crisis'.
‘Classification’ 1959 – 64
‘The Development of the Capacity for Concern,’ 1963.
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‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self.’
‘Dependence in Various Settings,’ 1963
‘Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis’, Hogarth Press, 1977
