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Bion empathized with Coleridge's description of the fiend following at his heels—a fiend of madness that possibly lurks in the corners of everybody's mentality, and whose existence is acknowledged somewhere by all the poets. So Bion's “act of faith”, says Meltzer, would correspond not to the child swimming for the first time without his water-wings, confident in Daddy's presence but, rather, to “floating free in shark-infested waters”. (Williams, 2005, p. 194)
This book is a collection of 11 clinical papers by the gifted child- and adulttrained Jungian analyst Alessandra Cavalli. It opens with a paper about her work by Warren Colman who pays tribute to Cavalli's “radical courage and depth of engagement” (p. 4). It was this courage, and perhaps her own “fiend of madness” in the service of the work, that meant she was prepared to float free in shark-infested waters.
Cavalli's papers are a developing exploration of the impact of trauma on the developing self. They describe the challenges, as well as the vital necessity for the analyst to survive unbearable emotional tensions and storms whilst trying to find or create meaning. This, she was fully prepared to do. In the first of her papers in this book, she describes how, whilst working with one “severely neglected … feral child” (p. 19), she felt “[It] is so unbearable that at times I imagine that I could give up, this case being too difficult for me. I fear I will die if I go on, a martyr to psychotherapy” (p. 31).
Cavalli had a prodigious appetite for life and work. In addition to her busy practice in London working with children, adolescents and adults, she ran infant observation seminars, taught and supervised child and adult analysts and psychotherapists in the UK and internationally, was involved in the development of child analysis training in Russia, and supervised therapists working with homeless children in Mexico. When Cavalli died suddenly on May 17, 2020, it was hard to take in that someone so vibrant, and wit