Chapter 9. A New Experience of Breakdown: When her Foster—Home Breaks Up

Parallel with the inner movement that seemed to be bringing her alive as a person there was another which she feared was going in the opposite direction, since it showed as a lessening of her clinging so exclusively to common-sense reality, a movement which was interpreted by her as ‘going mad’. Gradually I was able to get her to see that she might be becoming able to make fuller use of her analysis just because she was now more able to risk letting go her too-rigid clinging to what she called sanity. For instance, there had been a day, in June 1948, when she said she suddenly had the feeling that if she looked at me something awful would happen. What I seem to have said was, ‘You are afraid of seeing me as different, perhaps?’ to which she had answered, ‘Yes, that's the worst thing that could happen: you might not change back.’ And two days later she had suddenly seen me as a dead body sitting up with eyes shut in a coffin, so that I at once thought of her finding the dead Mrs Dick.

Then she had added that she had written a letter to me but torn it up. She had in fact brought me, not the letter, but a bunch of violets. When I said that perhaps she was considering whether to tell me what was in it or not, she had said her neck stiffened up—and she did not tell. I had been left wondering if this might not have been an appreciative letter, like giving me the violets, a trying to say it with flowers, but if so, this was also a dangerous step for her because if I did not give her my love in return, in just the way she wanted it, her pride would be so hurt that she could wish me dead—hence, surely too, the stiffening of her neck. (Here I remembered how she had once said that when she told Angus, at the farm, that she loved him, while at the same time knowing he was not in love with her, everything had gone black and red.)

Later in that session too she had told me that if Jackie ever praised her piano-playing she felt awful, overwhelmed; so here I had thought of another asp