Friday 22 June 2018

containers

Another day adrift on the dark and shoreless oceans of whatever ALL THIS is - but are they shoreless, really? If they are then what is all the stuff that I keep bumping into?



More chocolate was presented to me today; this time it was a very large white chocolate frog which I ate this evening while reading an essay, by Melanie Klein and called 'A Study of Envy and Gratitude', that I last looked at about fifteen years ago and which consequently is festooned with the magenta-inked traces of the mingled bewilderment, amusement, excitement, consternation and general feeling of being unable to engage in any remotely critical manner that formed the hallmark of this phase of my explorations in psychoanalysis.

I thought the Klein essay might be useful for thinking about why people have been giving me things this week. It wasn't though.

this is all utter nonsense by the way and emphatically not the kind of thinking that my doctor employs. This is from the dark ages and barking up the wrong tree to boot. Although it seems that hysteria psychoanalysis lives on: I recently met a person who claimed to be in a Lacanian analysis.... colour me highly sceptical although this person certainly was a gigantic affected wanker.


I do like the pink pen line, and everything it conveys about what reading a passage like that one does to the mind of a reader who thinks being a good reader is a matter of being as attentive, receptive, compliant and amenable as you possibly can. Not to be scornful of the person I was then, not at all. But I think differently now about what it is to be a good reader. 

My doctor informed me months ago that she was going to be away for an extended period of time. In my last session with her she asked me how I felt about her imminent absence. I said I was okay and that I had already resolved to not be proud and to ask my friends for things I felt in need of. I also told her that I sometimes imagine her giving me interpretations of something I am imagining telling her about, and she smiled at this, and why wouldn't she? I was showing her that she's a good doctor and she's successfully made her analytic capacity available as a holding container for my psychic use when she isn't actually present. That said it has taken nearly three weeks for it to dawn on me that there's a connection between her going away and me feeling incredibly bad immediately afterwards.





I received a gift from one of the volunteers which perhaps I shouldn't have accepted, since it's a memento he's kept for fifty years of his unwilling and disastrous participation in a filthy war, and he may soon regret giving it away to a person who can't possibly see or understand a fraction of what it represents to him. But accept it I did. Does it make sense to say that setting aside my scruples and doubts and allowing him to be the best judge of what he needed to do felt like the right thing in the circumstances?







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