Hinshelwood Cup

Having been brought up by not just one psychoanalyst but two, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with psychoanalysis, a bit like a child-parent relationship: there are times when I think it has the answers to a lot of the questions I'd like to understand, but there are other times when I just ‘don't want it interfering with my life …’ So, when Dad asked me to write a poem for the conference - ‘a daughter's perspective on psychoanalysis’ - I was honoured if a little daunted. I spent a lot of time mulling it over, catching up on my Clinical Klein, a bit of bedtime reading of the Dictionary until Karl Figlio gave me an idea for the structure … he'd made a comment on how surprised he was at Dad's interest in racehorses. Between Dad and his partner, Gillian, they have bred a racehorse: Joe Caster (son of Oedipus Regina - isn't that the wrong way round? See, I always knew that psychoanalysts confuse things!). They trained Joe. They raced Joe. And although Dad considers horses to be ‘the dumbest creatures on earth’ he took a lot of interest in Joe's progress, and invited us to all the races. I decided this would be a good metaphor for the poem because, like Dad, Joe is retiring this year. And although Joe's had a shorter career and written a lot less books, it seemed to strike quite a chord with Dad because well … there's been a lot of discussion and debate about ‘now that Joe's back home’ and ‘it's going to make a lot of changes to the way things are in the stables’, ‘with all the other horses’ etc. so the decision has been made to cut his balls off. And, quite rightly, Dad has concerns in that area.

Hinshelwood Cup1