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Who is the third who walks always beside you?—T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Edward McCrorie's poem, Following Sybil, comes closer than anything I have read to evoking the painful, bewildering experience of surviving a relationship with a “survivor” of early, severe traumatic abuse. The poem bears witness to the transformation of a man's psyche as he falls in love with, then suddenly loses—in a stunning, unexpected emotional reversal—a woman whom he has “followed down” into the hell of her mind's relentless attachment to a nightmarish past.
Something in me said I should probably resist interpretively tampering with the sad dignity of the poem, its universal, redemptive message about evil, justice, and love. The poem transcends any particular, tormented relationship.
Yet the relevance of the poem's message for our experience as analysts persuades me to try to delineate some of the parallels between the human experiences the poet describes and familiar aspects of the therapeutic relationship that are often less well articulated in our professional language. And what a strange profession we practice—one that calls upon us repeatedly to “follow” similarly haunted Sybils, to encounter, enact, and renegotiate aspects of our own psyches in order to relate as authentically as we can to the torments that pursue many of the patients we love and hate the most. With this analytic scene in mind, here is how I read Following Sybil.