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A computer hacker who was eventually caught, used to sign himself online as ‘Erik Weisz’. It turned out that he had chosen as pseudonym the real name of a late nineteenth-century magician and escape artist - the famous Houdini. In a sense, hackers are the cyber Houdinis of today, albeit that they devise ever more ingenious ways of getting into rather than out of impossible places. Like the original Houdini, they are attracted by increasingly elaborate obstacles and by the constant threat of detection. The state of mind that seeks such challenges, along with Houdini's life and psyche, are some of the topics explored in this insightful book.
The book begins with a situation that is familiar - at least to child psychotherapists. Phillips is in the therapy room with a little girl who insists on a strange and frustrating opening ritual to her sessions: she stands in the middle of the room, shuts her eyes tightly, claims that she is hiding and demands to be found. Whatever the therapist's response, she is not satisfied. Phillips notes that what he has found already, which is ‘her in the middle of the room, hiding - is obviously not what she wants me to look for’. The girl, eyes still shut, says urgently that she cannot escape, and is trapped. The therapist is under an even greater pressure to ‘find’ and release her. Phillips realizes that she has created a therapeutic entrapment, because her ritual never changes and because ‘what I say - even though it is as different as I can make it each time, even though I rack my brains for what she wants to hear - seems equally repetitious’. Furthermore, according to her parents, this game is repeated with friends until they tire of it. Everyone becomes impatient with her, and, Phillips suggests, impatience is ‘something that always verges on indifference’.
As child psychotherapists we experience countless such moments of enigma and frustration in our working lives. They push us to act out, to become impatient and indifferent instead o