[November/December 1973]. Cogitations

[Transcribed from a tape recording.]

The murderous stranglehold – transformation into many varieties including the schizophrenic patient who covers himself completely with blankets and just peers at the analyst through one small hole with one eye only. One feels that there is a method by which the port of entry is felt to be so tiny that whatever can come into it gets tremendously compressed to a point where virtually it has had all the life squeezed out of it. It sounds like a vagina that might be a kind of penis, but a penis that has a very small opening and a very small point of egress, with these compressing and concentrating effects which finally compress and squeeze the life out of the thing itself.

There might equally be expansion in the opposite direction. But the real thing is this entry and egress, with this very narrow sort of port-like entering into a penis, or a vagina that is far too small to be able to take anything in and far too small to be able to let anything out. I am sure this theme needs to be followed up in its many applications.

I might write a book that could be drawn up in terms of the Grid, either by a special index arranged in the Grid order of the primitive nature of the thing – not to do with thought at all, the elements – through to the things that are various transformations of visual imagery, and so on. I must consider this more deeply according to the two axes, co-ordinates – the vertical and horizontal components.

It seems to me that it isn't simply a question of the concentration that is produced by the very strangling vagina or mouth, and the very explosive penis or breast or object that is put in. In other words, the conflict is between the container and the contained thing in which they both seem to be on very destructive terms, where either the container gets split apart, or the object that is put into the container gets

destroyed. This seems to be a theme that occurs over and over again; whether it is a question of my coming t