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Never to enter the sea and notice how the water dividesWith perfect courtesy, to let you in!Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!Never to leap in the air as you open your wings overThe dark acorn of your heart!No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaintThat something is missing from your life!
The title of this chapter borrows from the title of a poem by Mary Oliver (1997). The epigraph of this chapter, quoted from that same poem, seems apposite to many patients who find their way to the analytic couch. These patients leave the impression that they are in search of something missing in their lives: perhaps the emotional contact with an elemental quality of self, a certain kind of lived-experience akin to entering a courteous sea, being one with the grass, leaping in the air and even opening to the dark acorn of the heart.
These missing elements of experience, linked to various unlived and heretofore unheard aspects of self and their ‘uncontained’ (in Bion's sense of the term2) perceptions of encounters with the agony and ecstasy of being, often come to inhabit a hidden capsule3 within many ordinary neurotic, borderline or psychotic adults (Bion 1957; S. Klein 1980; Mitrani 1992; Rosenfeld 1985; Steiner 1993; Tustin 1986a). This capsule may be shrouded in somatic symptoms, encased in extremes of acting out, ensconced in therapeutic enactment or overlaid with a verbal message that is, by and large, deceptive in its expression. Nonetheless, as disturbing, misleading and distracting as these protective decoys may at times be for the analyst hard at work trying to enter ‘the long black branches of other people's lives’ (Oliver 1997: 61) – we frequently discover that their effect upon us (if we can bear to suffer it) is imbued with meaningful-if-encrypted communications, perhaps signaling a point at which that ‘something missing’ might have the opportunity to emerge and to develop.
The implications of the findings of Fran