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On Monday 15 May, I had heard a report from Mrs Brown that Susan had been much better lately, but when she arrives she is again very paranoid about Mr X, again insisting that he broke up the marriage deliberately in order to ‘bitch her up’. Soon I accidentally drop my matchbox; she goes crimson and then says she wishes I had not made that noise—it made her jump. This is the first mention of the return of her startle reflex, which had apparently, so she said, quite disappeared since the ‘shock’ therapy. She says the noise reminds her of an accident outside their house at home with a scream of brakes, though she did not see it, but her mother was sure the rag-and-bone man's wife was dead.
Now she tells of her interview with the consultant psychiatrist, how he took hold of her head with both hands and asked what she thought of just before the shock, and she had said, the love and beauty in her. And then he asked where had the beauty started, and she said, ‘In my throat.’ Then he asked, ‘What would have happened to all that beauty if they hadn't given the shock?’ And now she cries, ‘I don't know what he meant!’ and starts a sobbing that is very near laughing, while telling how he had tried to move her head and she could not let it go, and how then he had asked her what she was frightened of, that she held her neck so tensely. Suddenly she goes crimson again and seizes tight hold of my hand, holds it for a little, and then drops it. I seem here to have talked of her great fear of showing pleasurable excitement, the sobs that were near laughter, her pleasure in having her head held by a man, her need to hold onto my hand when she feels perhaps something new is going to be released in her. She moans, ‘Has it got to come up?’
She now talks about how angry she is at the implication of the consultant's remarks, angry at the idea that the beauty she felt inside her could have a sexual aspect; she says, ‘Beauty is in your head, not in your sex organs.’ She adds that she did have