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The hypothesis I formulated under the name ‘precipitation anxiety’ (Houzel 1989, 1995) gradually took shape in my mind as a result of working with autistic and psychotic children at a time when I was fortunate enough to be in supervision with Donald Meltzer and Frances Tustin. I am indebted to these two supervisors for inspiring the idea.
The first inkling I had came from a sequence in the therapy of a psychotic boy, a therapy supervised by Donald Meltzer. I was treating this boy with three sessions per week, and at the time he was about twelve years of age; there were unmistakable references in the material to sexual themes, which I linked to the onset of puberty. One day, he covered two little dolls, one male and the other female, with modeling clay, then dashed them violently one against the other. Donald Meltzer suggested that the modeling clay might represent the sexual energy – the libido – attributed to the two dolls, and that their violent coming together might relate to a fantasy in which sexuality, untransformed by mental processes, remained crude and primitive, and was therefore expressed as an irresistible attraction, violent and destructive.
The second indication I had was drawn from the therapy material of an autistic boy, who had four sessions a week with me; this therapy was supervised by Frances Tustin. At one point, the boy turned his box of pencils upside down, with a loudly exclaimed ‘Crash!’ Tustin suggested that, in the context, he was expressing a fantasy of being catapulted into birth, experienced catastrophically as a destructive collapse.
In both instances there was a representation of an energy gradient creating an irresistible force of attraction that was experienced as violent and destructive: in the first case the source of the gradient was sexual attraction, in the second the caesura of birth.
The ‘dynamics of the gradient’ began to interest me more and more, and led me to put forward the hypothesis of precipitation anxiety. That there cou