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From Jane Graves, London
June 1999
Thank you for the opportunity of hearing Joyce McDougall speak on 19 June 1999 (London). It was a wonderful experience and far exceeded my expectations. Even though I have read and enjoyed her books, I was not prepared for the depths of her humanity.
Like many others I left full of unspoken thoughts and ideas and I'm sure we were all sorry we could not continue. No doubt we shall all be mulling over other possible interpretations of the outpouring of the ‘black stuff’.
I did wonder about this patient's birth experience. Meconium is the first ‘black’ outpouring from our own bodies and the existence of meconium in the mother's waters is interpreted as a sign of ‘foetal distress’, usually meaning that the baby is in a breech position. Freud recalls an interesting case (I think in the Interpretation of Dreams) in which a midwife is asked the meaning of meconium in the waters. She answers that it means the baby is frightened. Freud comments that, although she failed her exam, her response seemed a wise answer in that it paid tribute to her understanding of the baby's fear of the birth experience. One wonders in the case of this patient whether this fear might have reached an extreme peak of terror for both mother and baby, since it seems unlikely that the mother felt in any way prepared to be a mother and may well have experienced the baby as a cancer growing in her own body and the birth as an horrific attack by an alien creature.
From Gottfried Heuer, London
9 November 1999
Re: , JAP, 44, No. 3, 1999, pp. 416-7: Review of ‘Electra versus Oedipus - Femininity reconsidered’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1998, 79, pp. 41-56.