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We learn no facts from the session about John's mother. But as an ontological presence, as a condensed state of being that you could cut with a knife, she is the session: she fills space and time. It is John and his therapist (by way of John's projections) who behave as though they thought themselves to be non-existent. In this oppressive atmosphere of anti-imagination, both of them might be a kind of stuff in the mother's mind.
As a hypothesis, I would suggest that the pressure of at least two shocks that she could not tolerate has impelled John's mother to mould John into a figment of a grief she could not stand. The first shock is of the miscarriage: a loss perhaps conceived of as a gap, the gap being translated into John as the gap-ghost. The second shock is Mark's birth when John is aged 18 months. Round about this time, Mark has a ‘lifethreatening illness’ and John begins to suffer from severe epilepsy. Again as a hypothesis, I wonder whether John's mother went into another blankness when faced by Mark's life-threatening disease. I am put in mind of the theory that a trauma occurs when someone at least twice fails to register an emotional shock. John might be the configuration of a trauma: it is as though traumas were print-outs on the plasticine of the body.
John, the ghostly simulacrum of a miscarriage, is now transformed into a somatic agitation. His body does not act as though it has been mentally born into a community of shared experience. It is tortured by fits, as though the idea of embodiment had been turned inside out: it talks in minus speak.
Medication controls the epilepsy but (so far as we can see) it does not modify John's ontological state of being possessed. He ‘lives in a world of his own,’ meaning that