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24th June 1965.
Dear Michael:
I hope you were satisfied with the meeting last night. I had quite a lot of other things I would like to have said but it seemed to be
important to sit down and give the meeting a chance to react to your paper in its own way. I still think we need to go on trying to make a statement of what we are aiming at doing when we treat a psychotic child. In a way your theme continued mine of a few months ago in the same room when I talked about psychotherapy in terms of two people bumping up against each other. I think we are all on to the same problems and that is what makes it so interesting.
I wanted to say something more about repetition. My case illustration was rather out of step because the patient was a different kind of case, but the pencil rolling business illustrated an aspect of repetitiveness. I think you were talking about other meanings of this word. I felt that what happened in the pencil case has to be understood in terms of the dynamics of that place into which the withdrawn child mentally withdraws. In this place dynamics is to be looked at in terms of pendulum movement. Even in stillness there is a potential pendulum movement, so that stillness alternates, as it were, from being relative to right or left. If there is no pendulum movement then there is death.
I think that this patient in the course of her recovery was able to make a relationship with me on the basis that I accepted one half of the pendulum movement, so that she could accept the other and the game had to do with establishing a relationship to the world on this basis. The normal equivalent of this from my point of view is the rocking of infant-care, and in psycho-pathology there are all the clinical rhythms of autistic children and the rocking of deprived children to be remembered.
I thought that Wisdom was on to a good thing when he drew attention to the universality of this phenomenon although perhaps he need not have gone as far away as the beaches of Alexandria