Chapter 2. The Beginning of the Analysis: Her First Two Dreams

As I have said, Susan spent the first month of analysis telling me her history and how she felt there was something missing in her since the E.C.T., but she did not know what it was. On her return from the first Christmas holidays (January 1944) she tells me about a feeling she had while doing the clay head—that she felt there was a circle inside her by which she knew when she got it right, and that now she knows that this is what is missing. She tells also about a fear of getting into the centre of the circle, at the time of her breakdown at the farm, and the feeling that she would have the heart pains if she did; also about a ritual she had had as a child of getting into the centre of the head of a pin—‘as part of exactness’. She adds that she had fears of being buried alive and that her mother had them too; also that the world is no longer outside her, as it had been after her ‘breakdown into reality’.

She goes on to wonder if Mrs Dick was really like that—that is, paranoid—or if she imagined it. But she says the people there at the farm thought she, Susan, would go ‘bats’ if she stayed on. She thinks people will see something in her eyes that ought not to be there. The next day she says that psychoanalysis is no good if it depends on her because she is so dense; but adds that she feels that she must be getting better because the night before she had been terrified of the air-raid. (Later this fear became nearly intolerable because, as she had now lost the feeling of outside space that she had so recently acquired, there was nowhere else for the bomb to fall except on her, since everything was her.) And now she feels she cannot breathe, has no hope and feels so weak and helpless. It was also on this day that she told me how at the time of going to the old man she had tried to ‘pee like a boy’ (the old man had made her watch him urinate); also that she could not eat after seeing the maggoty rat and having the idea of sending it to her mother. A week later she tells