17th March 2008

1. In this paper I shall draw a distinction between the nature of history and of mythology, which I think is helpful in understanding the evolution of different kinds of belief about the meaning of transference interpretations.

2. I shall describe some clinical material, principally a dream, and suggest two ways of looking at it - one mythological, the other historical - which throw light on why the evolution in belief about the meaning of the transference has occurred. In doing so, I shall compare myth thinking in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and myth thinking in anthropology, with particular reference in anthropology to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. And I shall argue that the formal reading of myth, as found in Lévi-Strauss, though increasing adeptness in understanding, does not do justice to the full orientation of the dream-myth element in thought.

3. I shall discuss Bertram D. Lewin’s 1946 paper on the dream screen which (inadvertently perhaps) establishes the postulates of the mythological reading, while remaining historical in its understanding of the transference. I shall link the type of thinking in Lewin’s paper to a paper by Mrs Klein of the same date, which describes the disintegration of the self through splitting and projective identification, as ways of avoiding responsibility.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.
The earliest models for transference interpretations were historical in nature, acts of biographical reconstruction, similar to the type of knowledge acquired from archeological debris, or from the facsimile or from the post mortem dissection. They were historical in the sense that history is about scrutinizing the shells or shards that remain when bodies as living entities disappear.

I shall propose that history is an attempt to deal with a certain shock. Human being have bodies and live in a world that is largely corporeal; and it is in the nature of the corporeal that it somehow eludes thought. It is matter of fact, and within the system of facts there is no means by which the nature of fact can be challenged. The corporeal world is its own substrate; it supplies no alternative to itself by which it can be thought. It is impossible to “think” bodies unless one is psychotic and even thinking “about” them is unsatisfactory unless we translate bodily experience into the modalities of art or science.

And bodies are disconcerting in another way. They are both too obdurately there, blocking our view; and at the same time, they suddenly disappear. People and animals die and, so far as their bodies are concerned, nothing is left of them. This is the shock. Thought is either inhibited by the presence of the corporeal or undermined by its disappearance. Life, for the historian, is nasty, brutish and short. It is brutish especially. History dwells on the brutishness of man the murderer. It deals in brute fact. It observes how brutal life can be as a catalogue of successive deaths, not always of one’s own doing.

This is an understanding of history as an approach devoid of mythological aspiration, which of course is seldom the case. In the early years of psychoanalysis mythology was not excluded; but it was firmly kept within the historical-corporeal context. Karl Abraham, for instance, often discusses clinical material in the form of miniature biography. His discussion is historical in nature; clinical phenomena is inseparable from the patient as a character, as a way of living out a life - which may be a way of living out a death. Only incidentally does Abraham consider the setting or the nature of his intimacy with the patient.

Psychotherapists nowadays in comparison tend to think about their clinical experience as a fluent unfolding of events within a certain setting. The setting in part has to do with space and time. But it is something more; and it is here that I shall embark on the relationship of psychoanalysis not to history but to mythology.

I shall make two points about the nature of mythology in its relationship to psychoanalysis. One is that mythology always requires an implicit screen in order to be sustainable, in the same way as a biological organism requires a piece of glass on which to form its culture. This screen is sometimes internalised, though in certain primitive forms of thought it can be externalised as a skin, as in those people who wear their mother’s glances as though they were a succession of robes. The existence of the screen is only indirectly available to verification by the senses. It is as elusive to sight as water can be, as elusive to touch as air. Most importantly of all, its translucency allows it to be transformed by the presence of light.

The other point is that mythology is always a two-world theory. Let me say something more about mythology and the screen, before I look at mythology as a two-world theory.

MYTHOLOGY AND THE SCREEN.
Mythology, and this includes psychoanalysis as mythology, is always concerned with a screen, on which it emerges, or out of which it derives, or in which it remains embedded as a potential. The mythologist does not have the matter of fact of bodies and their actions, on which the empiricist depends and whose loss the historian grieves over. The mythologist, like the artist, cannot depend on the physical world; he has to depend on something else: call it conventions, the screen, good objects. He has no support apart from the screen, which (as I see it) is a rudimentary representation of an inner world formed about good objects.

Learning through history and learning through mythology are aspects of the growing process. Both are essential; either alone gives a lop-sided view. Mythology, for instance, avoids interruption and absolute endings. It deals in perpetual transformations - metempsychoses, bodily transmigrations - and it requires some manner of liquid suspension in order to continue its eternal return. The screen is this liquid suspension.

Mythology describes bodies and bodily action but in a bodiless way. It is like music and, possibly, mathematics. Obviously, if music is to move us, it must relate deeply to our being; it must be more than a formal arrangement, more than an autonomous series of transformations. It must arise out of some ground analogous to the screen.

Actually this experience of continuity in disembodiment has one source in bodily experience, for a human eye is a translucency through which the cultures of feeling and phantasy take on being and are communicated; and it is through an experience of its mother’s eyes that the infant is first liberated from its corporeality.

In terms of an infant’s experience of its mother, history is knowledge of the breast as a corporeal presence that must be lost; the breast as something that looms close to you, becoming to an unfocused eye like a snowy shadow; it invites refuge, as well as being the source of nourishment; then it moves away from you. In terms of an infant’s experience of its mother, mythology is the growth in intimacy through glances and looks. It is knowledge through the eye. It assumes that the eye is window to the soul; and how right this archaic expression is! It assumes that glances are soul-talk. Through this experience, history and corporeality validate the importance of mythology.

Looking into eyes introduces the infant to an experience of resonance and imagination, as well as to the concept of immediacy: the wonder of the here and now, as well as to the fact of hurt. Eyes can accuse; but they also can invite you into spaces, whose remarkable nature you had never known existed. Eye contact is the prelude to an understanding of the breast as containing a psychic interiority which, on the level of shared reverie, a mother may invite her infant to look into and to explore.

THE TRANSFERENCE AS MYTHOLOGY.
How does this effect the evolution of the transference? Therapist and patient seldom have occasion to look each other in the eye; but in order to reverie experience together, they need to look into the shared eyes of a temporarily conjoined inner world, as though sharing the vista of the same dream. This can open the way to a whole range of misunderstandings and subterfuges; but it is also the one way to intimacy.

In the mythology of the session, the aches and insistencies of the body are articulated as stories: it is as though actual bodies disappear. But what will support thoughts and images if bodies disappear? You need the setting, the eyes, for the meaning of the look in the eyes to be able to exist, but in the act of looking the setting seems to dissolve; the meaning in the eyes becomes the eyes. There is a looking into something which communicates the structured unfolding of an evanescence. The nature of this unfolding is the source for a meaning, whose existence depends on its being an evolution.

It is as though the time of a session, or indeed the time of an entire evolution of the psychotherapeutic relationship, were the turning round of a kaleidoscope, in which (by a series of reflections) bits and pieces, usually of glass, transform from pattern to pattern. (I am now extending the metaphor of the human eye as a translucency on which inspiration forms by the kaleidoscope image. I do this, in order to emphasis the differing nature of the types of formation.) The effect is beguiling and sometimes something more. But it is often incomplete. It can disturb, in the same way as does a dream which eludes understanding.

I now want to make a point about the nature of the screen on which the patterning changes - in the kaleidoscope the screen is often a mirror on which the fragments of glass lie. I owe this point to my experience of working with Donald Meltzer. The screen has to have the quality of a combined parental object if it is to be a sane and not delusive object. The formal relationship of the fragments are only truth-informing if they are seen as a mother radiant with love from the light of a father’s eyes. In part, the light in a mother’s eyes is the light of recognition: she recognises the loveability in her infant; but it is primarily there through her relationship to the infant’s father.

I am making a point about the concept-forming structure of mind; not about instances in experience. Conceivably an infant brought up without actual parents will have this structure in thought if it is capable of thinking.

This is a basic tenet in the optics of the inner world: the pattern glows because the beauty in the mother, the formal organisation arising out of the screen, is informed by the introjection of a father’s love. My clinical material will centre on how this insight was becoming to be apparent to a woman whose upbringing had been less than adequate.
The reflecting bits within the kaleidoscope are stories, or part-stories, that the patient tells, which the therapist responds to with the part-stories of conjecture and interpretation. This is selfhood known as layerings in story, layerings of radiance, as disembodied as the watery agency of an eye - essentially, this is how the student of myth as opposed to the historian understands consciousness.

TWO-WORLD THEORY.
The screen and the culture on it suppose a contrast, a binary situation, like the age-old comparison of matter and spirit.

Mythology always assumes a two-world system: it does not postulate the one-world of the corporeal, which by fact of its being one world is unthinkable.

In mythology, there is always an alternative to present experience; there is always the possibility of travelling from one world or another; for instance, as when someone crosses from the realm of profanity, by way of the sacrificial altar, into the realm of the sacred. This journey assumes at least two contrasted kinds of being; against the incoherent states of being associated with profanity arise the mutatively quite different, intense and integrated states of being associated with the sacred.

In the two-world theory, you can make a significant division of almost anything: sky versus earth; far versus near; left-hand versus right-hand. Preoccupied by the fact that divisions exist like frontiers between two countries, mythology often concerns itself with the demands that the frontier guards make on the traveller who wishes to cross the border; it seeks to engineer crossings. In the mythology of psychoanalysis, the significant and mutative border crossing lies in interpreting there and then as here and now; a border crossing that can be devastating.
Mythological thinking, by being binary, is twin haunted; two seemingly identical babies, two seemingly identical breasts, two seemingly identical eyes. It often dreads twoness, but it cannot get away from the fact that oneness tends to destabilises into twoness, the indefinite dyad, as Plato calls it.

The dying pharaoh is equated with the bright sun that becomes the black sun that travels by boat behind, or beneath, the world at night. The pharaoh rejoins his twin self, whose presence had been kept in mind during the pharaoh’s lifetime by his umbilical cord and placenta, which had been enshrined and deified as fetishes, and which now in death bring him back to his twin.
(Mythological thinking tends to make a talisman out of certain parts of the body, as the historian tends to make a talisman out of shards and fragments of ancient script and the modern traveller of the passport: in particular, primitive man sets unusual spiritual value on the umbilical cord, the placenta and the jawbone.)

CLINICAL MATERIAL.
I shall now turn to my clinical material.

A woman in her mid sixties says: I remember looking into the eyes of one of my babies - her second son - and thinking to see all wisdom there.

I was moved by this insight, although it will become clear from the context that she, my patient, was in part using the insight to evade an unwelcome realisation of another relationship. But from the mythological viewpoint, I could believe that what she had experienced was true. In the here and now it is possible imaginatively to believe that everything is happening as though for the first time, as though this were the first moment of creation, the biblical making of the first light.

The patient has often remarked on the beauty of her mother’s eyes. She was the last child in a large family, and she remembers her mother as fatigued and not much interested in her. When she said that in her son’s eyes she saw all wisdom she was reporting on an insight embedded in her deepest being, which her early environment had given little support to.

I guess that most of us would feel psychically murdered if we had endured the kind of life that she has endured. The circumstantial way in which she describes her father’s sadism towards her as a child sounds convincing, and so does the torment she suffered from her teachers who were nuns. The family - her mother especially - idealised the eldest son - who died from a wound to the neck in the second world war. The mother never recovered from this loss; and for the rest of her life tormented her family with her desolation.

My patient has survived psychic death in the main by distracting her persecutors, latterly her internal persecutors, by means of obsessional devices.

She tells me she has joined an art class - by chance as it were. Her interest in colour has been hinted at in many sessions over the years, but she had been unable to accept the possibility that she might ever have some active relationship to colour. Somehow now she has managed to get around her internal persecutors. She enjoys the chatter and friendliness of the art room and feels she might be aged eleven once more. She is immersing herself in colours, the glow and hue and depth of the three primary colours; as she might immerse herself in the wisdom of a newborn’s eyes, rediscovering the first moment of creation which is always the core of the here and now.

It is as though she had begun to be able to sink into the different colour radiances provided by her three sessions in the week, the three primary colours symbolising the different placings of the sessions in the week. Out of these places in time many colour possibilities can be modulated. The colours are bodiless in their radiance, they allow you to enter them and to be enclosed by them. They are mythic rather than historical entities in their capacity to transfigure one another as well as anyone who enters them.

The evening before the morning session in which she told me about joining the art class, she had brought two dreams to her session. She has two morning sessions - and one evening session, which has the longest break before it; often she is clamped up in the evening session, but often again she will glimpse through the constraint a visionary moment that will move her to convulsive tears. In summer during the evening session light comes through the window; but the time now is autumn, and the dusk is closing in on her as she arrives for her session. She feels disquieted by this.

In the first dream she finds herself in the carriage of a train, the kind of carriage with tables on which you can rest your book. This is the kind of carriage she prefers. The window beside her offers a wide unbroken vista. Facing her is her daughter, V, who has had a history of mental instability.

The train is moving. She describes the view she sees outside the window. Her description is resonant; it brings the view into the room. I can feel the view in the room; or rather I can see it, as I might see the image of a setting when reading a novel, a tamed kind of hallucination.

As often before, I am struck by her capacity to evoke a scene. Some patients have it; some do not. Perhaps those who have it to some unusual extent need to ponder on the nature of their mother’s eyes - on the mysterious and wonderful fact that depth in feeling can manifest itself through the glances of eyes.

Clearly she describes something seen within the object. She looks by way of the breast-eye into a floating interiority: in which projections are as feather-light as the penetrations of certain looks of the eye. People who enjoy this kind of communing tend to be sensitive to atmospheres and the uses of atmospheres in fiction. She has the fiction-makers’ ability to present material on a fairly shallow level and then to return to the experience, but described on a deeper level, often with a bizarre iconography that seems right for the circumstance because of the depth of the experience.

It is only four-thirty in the afternoon; outside the carriage window it is already dusk. Snow has fallen, and she sees people trudging through it. She thinks of their wet feet and she imagines her own feet as getting wet, as though the glass between her and them had thinned away.

The meaning of this dissolving of the glass as the return of something she has projected outwards (or into her mother’s eyes) becomes clear from a a sequel to the dream in which she finds herself in a concourse or shopping centre where various women return things to her that she has mislaid, including a multi-coloured muff. These returned things are placed in a case given to her by another much loved daughter, which grows increasingly large and heavy. That this burden might be benevolent is indicated by a subsequent dream in which finds she has her sister’s baby on her shoulder, and her sister’s baby grows increasingly large and heavy. This is like the burden St. Christopher had to carry across the river.

But to return to the snow outside the carriage window. It is as though she had projected dolefulness into the object, which benevolently returns it to her, purged of despair, so that now, through the window, she is able to see an amazing sight. High in the mountains the sun is setting. Its light falls on a mountainside, which appears to be covered by thousands of small pieces of glass. It blazes with every possible colour. Astonished, she points out the view to her daughter, who shrugs and looks away from the window. Later her daughter asks her what’s to be seen and with regret she has to tell her daughter that the view has now gone.

I want to look at two broadly different approaches to the dream experience. The first approach is to consider the dream as myth, in the way that certain structural anthropologists might do (Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular), in which the meaning of the dream is restricted to formal possibilities, to powers in transformation of a non-representational sign language. In this kind of reading the units of meaning are like sounds in music, a notation that only contingently, as in programme music, stands for anything. If music stands for anything, if music is symbolic, it is symbolic of a musical idea or form, which is indistinguishable in kind from the notation that evokes it.

The significance of mental pain and of the individual’s accountability in relation to mental pain, which is so important an aspect in post Kleinian theories of symbolisation, has no place in this approach.

Some of the structural anthropologists think that the formalist approach discloses organisational abilities in mind that are unconscious and can be closely compared to the unconscious organisation of signs and sounds on which language use depends. The present-day structural anthropologist is as committed to the belief in some profound affinity between myth and language as had been such nineteenth-century linguists as Max Müller.

Certainly my patient’s dream is as organised as a piece of music. You have inside and outside the train carriage, stillness within the carriage, movement outside it. Then you have the unusual function of the window, glass which opens up a contrasting realm to those who look in from outside or look out from within. There are opportunities for reversal in perspective. (Potentially inside and outside might denote different time scales.)

Outside the window there is the trudging of those on the snowy wet path in contrast to the radiance in the mountains. There is a close by in the view and there is the distant. I think the ability to see vision afar, if you like to perceive the far-fetched, is evidence of talent; talent being the ability to be fertilised by the stray seed of suggestion, the minutest or most distant indication.

There is a mother who looks through the window and is amazed by what she sees and a daughter who declines to look through the window and is disappointed by what she fails to see.

In an association we learn that the daughter who looks away from the view is the same daughter who will look into her mother’s private writing desk and find a letter that brings her father’s reputation into disrepute. The mother maintains a rather brittle sanity and has divorced the father - she has appropriated a false-self masculinity; while the daughter who has suffered mental breakdown is reputed to have been too close to the father and may have had an incestuous involvement with him.

But why should we wish to spell out these transformations? Because, essentially, myth celebrates its freedom from body by exercising its power to transfigure. In his Notebooks Lucien Lévy-Bruhl observes that in certain primitive types of thought “it makes no difference to say that the man becomes a leopard or that he is a leopard.” Transformation is “like a change of skin.” (Lévy-Bruhl, 31.)

I could imagine certain children playing a game in which it made no different if they were a leopard or were about to come a leopard. There would be no need to think of genus or species or indeed of nature in this kind of game. This is a world securely of the eye and not of the breast.

Conjectures about disembodiment are crucial to the mythic imagination which thinks in terms of transformations, soul-transmigrations, metempsychosis.

In his study of person and myth in the Melanesian world called Da Kamo, Maurice Leenhardt writes, of the “kamo” as meaning “the living one” a term used without distinction of gender and with only the most indefinite meaning. “Kamo” as a predicate indicates neither outline nor nature. It is embodied life, but the fact of embodiment is barely noticed. The embodiment of life is a dream on the verge of disappearing; like a troubled thought in someone’s eyes; shapes in water that might be shadows in the water’s reflection. I quote from Leenhardt, “Animals, plants and mythic beings have the same claim men have to be considered kamo, if circumstances cause them to assume a certain humanity.” ( Leenhardt, 1979 24). “In legends, the kamo flies, swims and disappears under ground” without anyone stating “whether it is by turn a bird, fish or deceased man. The story-teller follows the personage through his adventures, and he may change his appearance without a change of state. He undergoes metamorphoses; he is like a character endowed with a sumptuous wardrobe who perpetually changes costume.” (Leenhardt, 1979 25)

What we see here, I think, is an externalising of the screen as the site where transformation originates into an outwardness, which is a skin. An infant looks into its mother’s eyes and sees deeply within the eyes transformations in feeling. Associated with these transformations is a rich variety in phantasy. Those who would avoid the depth in a mother’s eyes, or feel dissatisfied by the shallowness of the eyes they know, would think to become their mother’s eyes, wearing the look in her eyes as though it were a discardable skin. This strikes me as a quite reasonable move in terms of mythology, but offensive to the historian who respects the fact of the body’s limitation.

It has been said that primitive thought is able to create two kinds of visual art: the three-dimensional, carved, air-cleaving object, characteristic of African sculpture,and most available to theories concerned with the dynamics of projection, and the skin-like surfaces of Oceanic art (which would include the art of Melanesia).

The skin-like surfaces are marked, sometimes with tattoo effects. I want to consider in some detail the nature of the marked skin-like surfaces.

The dreamer talks of the carriage window in the train as “a screen,” as though it were something onto which things might be projected. It is not necessarily a translucence for sad or radiant vistas, reflections of feeling in a mother’s eyes. The carriage window as a screen projected onto would show eyes as patches on a face, eyes as signs, not eyes as guardians to the unfolding of an inward revelation.

This may not be as disastrously regressed as it sounds. Sinking into colour for its own sake, for instance, would be to sink into colour as sign; but this restricted type of response might be a helpful stage in the development of the capacity to experience colour as symbol.

THE HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCREEN.
In his 1946 paper Sleep, The Mouth and the Dream Screen, Bertram D. Lewin describes the barely observable ground out of which dream emerges as the dream screen.

Lewin places the psychogenesis of the dream screen within a historical and corporeal context, in the infant’s experience of going to sleep while lying on the breast, the sight of unfocused breast skin thus transformed from being an object in history into an object in mythology; it modulates into existence the ground out of which the dream narrative takes shape.

This is a fascinating idea; it marks one of the points at which the centre of psychoanalysis moves from history into mythology.

Lewin makes two unquestioned assumptions in putting it forward; both of these are historical; both see thought and phantasy as derived from the corporeal.

One assumption is the Freudian belief that “actuality” is the dynamic for image transfiguration in dream - he does not allude to the controversial nature of this theory; the other assumption is that the dream screen arises out of an experience of satisfaction, though the clinical material which gives Lewin the idea of the dream screen is a dream which both projects and is about frustration.

The patient, a young woman said, “I had my dream all ready for you; but while I was lying here looking at it, it turned away over from me, rolled up, and rolled away from me - over and over like two tumblers.”

Lewin understands this screen-like object to curve over into a convexity before distancing itself from her. He infers this to be the sight of a breast close to the infant’s eyes that takes on convex definition as it moves away from the infant. At the same time, what is noticeable about the dream, though Lewin does not say so, is that it projects frustration. It does not deliver the goods; it promises a content which it does not have. Lewin informs the reader that when the patient was aged seven her mother was unsuccessfully operated on for breast cancer and some time later died; would he think of this later experience as informative of some earlier disappointment in feeding?

Thinking about this dream, I am reminded that my patient had said to me two weeks before the dream about the view from the train, “I had a dream last night, and all I remember of it is that I was desperately thinking I must remember this dream, so that I could have something to bring to you.”

Is she informing me about some early feeding disappointment? The therapist as historian might want to relate this possibility to the fact that at different times both she and her mother underwent drastic surgery and that this might be the historical occasion to which might be related those states of mind in which she became confused with her mother.

The therapist as mythologist will make the more interesting observation that the dream of the view from the train is structurally similar to the dream of the screen on rollers, from which Lewin inferred the existence of the dream screen. In the train dream there is stillness inside the train carriage; while outside the carriage window, correspondingly, everything moves. This might be an immobilised baby’s view of its mother as she moves her breasts away from it after a feed.

Becoming aware of the formal binary patternings in experience - as between stillness and movement - is a way by which a baby might deal with its anguish at being left by its mother.
Another way of dealing with anguish would be to project despair into an unstable travelling companion, perhaps a daughter who looks up to see a vision when the vision is no more. A person inclined to self-reproach might want to excuse the behaviour of an impatient mother who frustrates her desire for closeness of contact, by assuming that she, the baby, had been offered the closeness but had failed to appreciate the experience while it had been available.

Is the dream screen comparable to Bion’s dream screen? Possibly. On the session after giving my patient the Christmas holiday dates, she brought a dream about intensive intrusion into my house.

She ended the session by saying that she had the impression of having some wire mesh before her eyes. She linked the mesh to earlier work in the session on a mess/mesh in a dream and to anxieties about being enslaved by her psychopathology. As the session closed, she said, when you hold a mesh sieve some distance away you can look through it, but when you hold it close to your eyes you can only see the metal strands.

This sounds like a reversal of the original dream screen dream. While the dreamer in Lewin’s interpretation experienced the breast as leaving her, my patient dreams of her psychopathology as the obverse of the feeding object, crowding in on her and denying sight of everything but the prison bars that face her. In this contention, Bion’s beta screen would function as a type of Kleinian bad breast.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE DREAM.
Lewin’s dream screen derives from an experience of the unfocused. The infant’s eyes unfocus as the breast comes close; there is a blurry whiteness. It is alleged, implausibly, that out of this random phenomena comes into being the basis on which the images of the inner world are formed. This is to assume dream to be cognate to hallucination.

Mythologists of the inner world will see this formulation as too tentative. The screen may have been discovered by way of a historical accident; but mythologists of the inner world will not see it as some tentative adjunct to the corporeal. It is the basis of another type of view. It is the psychic basis for the origination of language and mythology; and it has its own authority as a source for experience. The existence of the screen may seem to be contingent on the bodily experience of the mind when awake; but this is not so. You see with your eyes opened when you are awake; and you see when your eyes are closed, when you are asleep. But the world you see when asleep does not stop when you are awake; you may think it disappears but it does not stop;it continues as reverie in the waking mind; here is the two-world theory in terms of psychoanalysis. The inner world does not oscillate into or out of existence; its graspability does not depend on whether the infant focuses or does not focus its eyes.

However, the theme of focus is important in understanding the two-world principle in another way. The eye is the prime bodily mediator between the historical-corporeal and the mythological understanding of experience; it is the angelic messenger; and its capacity to focus is informative of the shock in which a there and then consideration can zoom into the here and now, so abruptly sometimes in interpretation that the observer is disarmed and in the first instance cannot know if the observation derives from an evil or good source. At such moments I am sure the Platonists are right in arguing in terms of different kinds of reality in being; that you can talk of being as scattered and incoherent and profane or being as intense, integrated and inviting awe - sacred being.

Also, I am struck by how Isakower and Lewin’s fascination with the meaning eyes discover in their grasping on the contours of the breast as it focuses and unfocuses is akin to my interest in talent as the ability to elucidate distant or very slight signals, events on the periphery of consciousness that can easily be neglected.

Lewin alludes to Isakower’s proposal that infants in general are unable to appreciate the distinction between their own skin and their own mouths and the skin on their mother’s breast. (Whether this fascinating idea is true in observation, I do not know.)

Lewin writes, following Isakower: “The baby does not know what it is eating: it may be eating something on the breast or in the breast, or something that belongs to itself.” (Lewin,428) He mentions dreams and phantasies in which skin lesions are comparable to mouths, or oral devourings, projected onto or into skin. This is like the markings on the skin-like surfaces of Oceanic art. Presumably the skin projected into by these mouth-thoughts is skin denied the curatorship of a nipple; it is cloud-like in enclosing the mouth; it is a little like eyes clouded by cataract. As Milton said of a similar situation: it indicates “blind mouths.”

Lewin refers to a child mentioned in one of Piaget’s surveys, who was asked where his dreams occurred and who answered, “in my mouth.” Along these lines it would be possible to reformulate Isakower’s observation as follows: The baby does not know the source from which its dreams originate: they may originate on the breast or in the breast; or it may originate in one of its own orifices used as a dream uterus, the prime example of this being its mouth.

By extension of this belief, the infant may conceive of its mother’s eyes as dream sources also, either seeing her eyes as projections, markings it has placed on her features or as agencies it does not control, agencies for for symbol formation, eyes as windows to the soul.

I would suggest that it is on an understanding of the here and now as the exchange of loving glances that a Kleinian-Meltzerian reading of the dream can be seen both to have kinship with the structural anthropologist type of reading and to diverge from it. For one entry into the meaning of the dream, which happens to be the gist of this lecture, is that the power of love is transformatory of states of understanding, as when the eyes you love look into you lovingly. Dream is the primordial reality, not least because it is the first and potentially most concentrated vehicle for the passions: for hate and, more importantly, for love.

I want to relate Lewin’s paper of 1946 to Mrs Klein’s paper of the same year, on schizoid mechanisms, and to ask two questions. Where do the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope come from - and why should the stories told in a session, and the comments made on these stories be so fragmentary? Is this evidence of some damage done? And how does the transformation come about by which the bits and pieces make visionary patterns?

The sun which transforms the glass bits on the mountain heights into a radiance of many colours, so reminiscent of a dream of three years before in which she had dreamt of a beautiful ecclesiastical rose-window (she loves the colour in glass), is comparable to the radiant response invoked in a mother by a a father’s loving look. In their ways of looking and loving, the bodily experience of the primal couple become translucent: here, quite vividly, it is possible to the process by which, in Bion’s terms, alpha function transforms beta elements into alpha elements.

Interestingly it was when I linked the sun’s shining on the mountain side to the love between a parental couple that the dreamer recalled that she had thought to have seen all wisdom in the eyes of her infant son. It was possible to recognize the genuine quality of this insight, while at the same time recognizing her skill in getting off the painful observation I was making.

She had taken the transaction of love between the parental couple and appropriated it for herself and her baby. Mrs Klein’s paper of 1946 gives a lead into this material. Like the ill daughter in the dream, the patient could not tolerate the prospect of lovers and had turned it into something else. It was possible now to indicate to her how she was using her daughter as a receptacle for her own psychopathology, and how looking for the incriminating letter in the private writing desk had relevance to her own disapproval of the loving sexuality of the parental couple.

By the end of the session she was more tolerant of the parental couple. She talked of a couple she had seen on the tube, a young man and woman - she had thought them a loutish couple - who had tenderly kissed and then seemed transformed. The radiance of the couple would in contrast then make her dread the sadness that is implicit in the closing in of the early darkness of autumn.

At the same time I think she must have felt betrayed by me as the mother in the transference who had invited her into a free-floating reverie and then pointed out to her that the reverie is one between parents from which she is excluded, and which may have been arranged to redress her acts of aggression, for surely there is some link between the glass of the carriage window and the broken bits of glass on the mountain side which the lovers are able to transform into vision?

Two weeks later, early one morning early in the week, she begins the session by telling me how she has passed a car close to the car she conjectures belongs to me. Someone has smashed the window of the car and broken glass lies on the pavement. The car radio has been ripped out. I interpret in terms of some act of abortion between the primal couple and she says, “I understand what you say but I do not feel it.”

We are back to the theme of frustration. She is depressed by her inability to feel. I had no evidence to point out the possibility that she was experiencing some attack on her perceptual apparatus. On the contrary, she refers to a television play that she had seen over the weekend in which various men caught in an immense fire were trapped behind a glass screen which they could not break.

The nature of her alienation became clearer when she talked of attending a lecture by a woman she is frightened of and with whom she has worked in the past. The only seats vacant in the hall were in front of the lecturer. She had felt very exposed. The lecturer had made a point of greeting certain members of the audience but these did not include her. She was not sure whether the lecturer was deliberately ignoring her or failing to register her presence. The lecturer apologised for her inability to recognise people - often people she had known well - and described her disability as a kind of dyslexia. In talking to my patient later, she addressed her by the wrong name.

I took up the association to “dyslexia.” My patient recalled teaching an intelligent child whose “dyslexia” took the form not of reversing words but of experiencing them as entirely smashed up, like glass, and then inadequately reformed. The disintegrated words she mentions were “dab,” which I think means daddy plus baby reversed and “ambition” which I think contains the daddy-baby couple, and mixed in with this couple, M for mummy.

It is possible to achieve a here and now focus in the transference by having the mother in the transference accept the indifference of the lecturer or the incomprehension of the intelligent girl as an understanding of how the patient experiences the mother’s absence over the weekend. But this tells us nothing about why the patient must suffer from an isolation in feeling.

So I do not act out her wish that I, as the mother in transference, should accept her projections into me as genuine criticisms of my limitations: that I should think of myself as the dominating lecturer who cannot see what is there to be seen, or the intelligent child who cannot read. I take up these projections as bad sibling presences within her who hinder her from feeling the meaning in my communications by denying her the right to understand things as they are, who impose a state of dyslexia on the channels by which she communicates with herself - in effect by smashing the translucent window or screen or glass on which the organisms of myth and language mysteriously come to form when the light of love shines through it.

References.
Klein. M. Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. 1946. The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol.3.
Leenhardt. M. Da Kamo Paris1947; University of Chicago Press 1979.
Lévy-Bruhl. L. The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality. Paris 1949; Blackwell 1975.
Lewin B.D. (1946) Sleep, the mouth, and the dream screen. In the Psycho-analytic Quarterly 15. 419-434.

Back to Lectures»