Emotional Turbulence (1976). Four Papers

The entity known to members of the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic professions under the usually adequate designation ‘borderline patient’ or ‘borderline psychotic’ is in no way familiar to laymen and workers in other fields. It therefore seems possibly illuminating to approach the conference's topic as it usually presents itself to the medically unsophisticated and to work from this to the medical definition.

We are all familiar with the term, ‘latency’. I want, for the time being, to forget the customary usage because it is easy to focus on latency rather than what is latent. I find it useful to consider that, in latency, what is latent is emotional turbulence. When the quiet, cooperative, nicely-behaved boy or girl becomes noisy, rebellious and troublesome, the emotional upheaval rapidly ceases to be limited by the physiological boundaries of what we call John, Jack, Jill or Jean in his or her corporeal frame. Into this emotional field the psychiatric worker enters. His problem can be seen in its hideous, practical reality when he is called upon – usually too late – to pronounce on the admirable (though to exceptionally intuitive authorities not so admired), docile child, and strongly suspects schizophrenia; or when he must judge the depression (or admired liveliness) of a manic-depressive psychosis. In choosing ‘emotional turbulence’ I include its counterpart and opposite.

Leonardo's Notebooks contain many drawings of water swirling in turmoil, of hair in disorder. Milton, in Paradise Lost, writes in his invocation to Light at the start of the Third Book, ‘Won from the void and formless infinite.’ We can think of other works by painters, poets, priests, which call up similar pictures or thoughts from our own experience. It is not my intention to interpret, psychoanalytically or

otherwise, these instances of human creation. I wish to recall them so that you may invoke similar images from your own scientific, artistic, or religious inheritance – whatever