Change as a Process in the Self: What is the mutative factor?

MOST PROFESSIONAL analysts and psychotherapists have by now read a great many of the books and papers on the subject of the self, even if each of us admits (whether privately or publicly) that there are many we have not read—yet—and that we could benefit by re-reading those we do know in order to improve the integration of them in our lives and work. But at first I will leave aside acknowledgement to the written word and will offer readers something different to keep at the back of their minds; or they could treat it as a sort of frontispiece illustration.

A man who was in analysis with me quite a while ago, told me of something very important in his early life, which had been on a rocky and austere island. He was extremely unhappy throughout almost all of his childhood. He had many memories of grimness, both in the natural and in the human environments. Sometime during those early years he had fashioned for himself a ball of peat and he kept it in a small gap in one of the dry-stone walls on the edge of the moor. He used to go at intervals to see that his ball of almost black peat was still there, secret, safe, waiting for him. Sometimes he picked it up to handle and hold it. At other times he simply saw that it was there.

It is in the nature of analytical therapy that patients entrust the pictures of their secret selves to their analysts, provided there is basic confidence. The man who made the ball of peat fortunately had that, although it was very often hidden in the blackness of intense hate of me, his analyst. The opening of one of his dreams was: ‘It was the dead of night, I was alone on the rocky outer side of the island, it was raining hard’. It can be seen—through the dark and the rain—that the blackness of the peat is intrinsic to the whole story; the ball was a miniature globe, small enough for a boy's hands; the wall it was kept in was made from the rocks embedded and strewn all over the soil of a harsh island, windswept in a stormy northern s