Comment On: ‘Enduring Horror: Psychotherapy with Monsters’

This is a truly stunning and intensely moving paper. It conveys so well the nature of work with a particular client group within the world of people with learning difficulties and, from the first paragraph, gives us the sense that sometimes the client does not even seem fully human - not a ‘he’ or ‘she’, but an ‘it’. Just as Shelley's monster moves from subjectivity, ‘he’, to a malign ‘it’, so do the countertransference reactions move back and forth between working with another human being to working with a monstrous being who might at any minute pull out its intestines or cover you with its corrosive affect. It is a testimony to Linington's skills and courage that he was able to stay with these particular clients, despite such horrifying countertransference, and to work with them to reassert their own humanity.

I thought about my own associations with monsters and horror from my childhood, and remembered that one figure in particular had both seemed like a monster and had been capable of arousing horror and fear in me. This was a middle-aged man with Down's syndrome, who lived up my road with his elderly, widowed father. Ken would lean over his garden gate and roar and contort his face at the children passing by, some of whom would further arouse his fury by shouting insults and teasing him. I was so afraid of meeting Ken that I would cross the road and would pretend not to see his father waving at me from the window, inviting me in for some sticky boiled sweets stuck to the paper bag. I would often dream about finding myself in their house, unable to escape Ken's approach. It did not seem to help my fears that I myself have an older brother with severe learning difficulties, nor that from my early teens I would often baby-sit for families with Down's syndrome children. Ken's introjected monster self was strong and convincing.

I also remembered the story that my Mum used to tell us, that when she gave birth to my eldest brother, sixty years ago, another woman on the