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During the time that I was trying to practise my changes in technique there were definite signs that Susan was beginning to become alive again. One was a dream that seemed to show that she is becoming aware of a growth process beginning in herself and how it threatens her own omnipotence.
7 July 1947. In the dream she is beginning to have a baby and wondering whether to do away with it or not—both ways seem a horrid idea; it is frightening to have something inside you you can't do anything about.
I felt the baby was surely the frightening stirrings within her that have so often before been projected into the outside world and played a part in her dreaded thought of really strangling a child.
On the same day she tells me how her friend, Edna, gave her a music lesson and how ‘for ten minutes it felt marvellous’; this is the first time she had reported having any good feelings, since the E.C.T. Also she is now able to tell me something about moments when her good looks have returned. For instance she tells me, in September 1947, how during the summer, when Edna had taken her abroad for a holiday, Edna had constantly been saying that she, Susan, was evil and was all the time fighting her badness; but one day Susan had suddenly ‘let fly’, and then a young man who was with them had said that Susan looked beautiful—‘it had done something to her face’. I thought it was interesting that it was in a triangle situation in which she had dared to express openly her anger with another woman that her beauty had returned.
Also about this time she told me of two occasions on which she had, as she put it, turned up—though she had not told me at me time. One was at Jackie's wedding—she said people noticed it and commented, by which I understood her to mean that she looked beautiful. The other occasion was one day when she was standing by the piano at the X's and she had