Chapter 6. A Change in Technique: Attention to the Threshold between the Articulate and the Inarticulate

I will now try and describe certain changes in technique that I found myself developing over the early years, in response to what seemed to be her particular needs and difficulties. But first I must explain something more of her early attitude to me. As I have said, over the years of analysis, she gradually came to remember more about what she was like in N.I. before the E.C.T. As she did so she became more and more critical of me and arrogant, because she said she had got somewhere at N.I. and knew things other people did not know, and how could I help her, because I did not know them?

It was not until she happened to come across and read my first book1 that this attitude changed. Her comment on the book was that it was so like her she felt I must have thought she had been reading it before. After this she felt I did perhaps know a bit about what she was talking of, and her open arrogance subsided.

Increasingly, she became preoccupied with the question of what had really happened to her in N.I. Hospital before the E.C.T. and how she was to evaluate it. On the one hand, as I have said, she felt it as an intensely valuable experience, so that if, at moments, she did begin to come ‘slightly more alive’ the feelings of this were constantly disparaged and even rejected because she said it was nothing like the intensity of what she had felt before; but on the other hand, there was this idea that she must have been crazy.

One day, I think it was before reading my book, she had come in and said she had just discovered the word ‘mystic’ and thought that she must be one, in the light of what had