[August 1978]. Cogitations

When the patient said he dreamed he was being swept down the river to the weir – “I tell you, I never woke up so fast in my life” – what, according to me, was he talking about? In so far as I know, I was in the state of mind in which I am wide awake. Is that ‘wide’ enough? Or is it a state of mind that is too narrow – like “to–fro tender tram-beams” truckling “at the eye”? [Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Candle Indoors’.] Or too ‘wide’ awake, too conscious, too rational?

“By that window” [Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Candle Indoors’.] what sights did the patient see that made him ‘wake up’ so fast that he could not be swept down the stream? Was it the danger of becoming, like me, too wide awake? Or, like me, too fast asleep – in fact, the sleep of death? Or in the state of mind or ‘sleep’ of psychoanalysis?

“There plant eyes, all mist from thence purge and disperse, that I might see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight”. [Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III.] But the price appears to be the loss of ‘mortal’ sight. It cannot, however, be bought by ‘losing’ mortal sight; to be blind, unconscious, unaware of the world visible and audible, when you are in the ‘yin’ state of mind, is not the solution. One must dare to be aware – consciously – of the universe that is apparent in the state of mind in which one is asleep and the state of mind appropriate to ‘awake’, Yin and Yang [Chinese concept of the negative, material, and the positive, metaphysical together constituting the Cosmos]. Therefore merely being able to concourse musically, balletically, athletically, is not enough; it must be an intercourse – a means of communication ‘inter’, between two states of mind. Socrates described himself as a mental midwife; perhaps the psychoanalyst is a midwife between two states of mind of the analysand; for example, Maths + Art of Fugue, Cézanne + La Montagne Sainte-Victoire. The psychoanalytic experience consists in being able to know what it means when the physical quality says t