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THE CLINICAL TASK AT HAND is to provide what design clues we can for the building of a holding environment for a treatment that is trying. The transcripts present us a picture in words of an interpersonal situation rife with mistrust, confusion, dread, instability, fragmentation, vagueness, menace, difficulty and doubt. It is in fact very hard to tell just what is going on. The transcripts succeed admirably at recruiting the reader into this atmosphere, so that the reader too feels frustrated and confused.
In fact, as I read these transcripts, my mind wandered to works by Samuel Beckett, where nothing much happens; whatever happens is tedious and trivial and irritating, yet it keeps going on, continuing itself with incredible tenacity. Beckett, of course, was inspired by both vaudeville and reality. These transcripts rob us of any sense of conviction as to there being solid ground under our feet. The brief history presented is a tragic and daunting one, leading us to reflect on matters of history, vanity, and perhaps even on the intrinsic perversity of our own species. The history involves neglect, severe limitations in early investment and physical and psychological care, social and cultural dislocation of a massive kind, trauma, and so forth.