Eighty-Eighth Session

Richard arrived a little late, sat down, looked at Mrs K. and, taking out of his pocket a small fir cone, said that this was the first he had found that year. He thought it might help the work and had therefore brought it. He obviously wished Mrs K. to praise its shape and also to make use of it for the analysis. The next thing he took out of his pocket was a poppy. He put it beside the fir cone, tasted a bit of it, said it was poisonous and threw both the poppy and the fir cone away.… At this point an interruption occurred. A man came to read the electric meter. Richard said in a whisper, while the man was in the kitchen, ‘An intruding Daddy’; but his reaction to this disturbance was of a much less persecutory nature than it had been when a man had come to repair the window (Fifty-fourth Session). However, he asked Mrs K., as soon as the man had left, to help him darken the room. He put on the electric light and the fire and said that he felt very cosy here, and he seemed quite happy.

Mrs K. interpreted that pulling down the blinds and putting on the lights was partly meant to keep intruders out; but he also intended in that way to avoid seeing the rain which he so much hated. (It was pouring at the time.) She also interpreted Richard's wish to help the analysis as much as possible, which was why he had brought the fir cone and the poppy. The fir cone stood for his genital and he wanted Mrs K. to praise its shape. She suggested that the poisonous poppy stood for the eaten-up Daddy-genital, the attractive but in the end poisonous lobster, the internal ‘secret weapon’ which had appeared in the previous session. He felt that this internalized Daddy-genital became mixed up with his own. He wanted to spit it out and to satisfy himself with his own small more harmless penis. However, it seemed that he felt that they could not