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During the next four years there were various signposts that were to become crucial issues for me, although I did not always recognize them at the time. For instance, in 1947 I was asked to contribute to a symposium on ‘black’ at the Tavistock Clinic. I spoke about a child patient who, when painting the roof of a house black, had said, ‘There's lovely shiny black and there's horrid black.’ He also once said to me, ‘I wish you and I were the same person.’
About this time too there was another theme emerging in my preoccupations: a wondering whether psychoanalysis could concern itself with joy as not entirely the same as what the English translations of Freud spoke of as pleasure. This preoccupation first found a voice one day when Clifford Scott was giving a paper to what was then called The Progressive League, a group of all the progressive societies in England. He had to leave early and I was asked to introduce the discussion. What he had been talking about was pleasure and unpleasure, but I felt the mood of the meeting was a bit anxious and bothered, so I said that perhaps they would find it easier if we talked more in terms of joy and woe as William Blake does — I even quoted Blake:
Man was made for Joy and Woe;And when this we rightly know,Thro' the World we safely go
Amongst the clutter of my mostly unclassified old notes I found a contribution I had intended to make to Clifford Scott's paper on the Body Scheme presented to the Society in 1948.1 The part of the