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Sitting in a consulting room some two thousand hours a year watching the shadows on the wall of one's mind, would certainly seem an ascetic and fanatical thing to do were it not for the intimate companionship with the patients. There can be no illusion of being able to look into the mind of the other person, but the situation and method does certainly encourage and develop an ability to look into one's own, and an interest in the events found there. But occasionally an essentially unpleasant event occurs; instead of pictures, one's dreams of the patient's dreams, writing appears, as on a word processor. This is unpleasant because it seems to carry an imperative that drags one to the typewriter to record the experience. And in time a book accumulates and must be rewritten and assembled to look like a unified, scholarly, respectable opus. Such is my resentment of these two types of confinement that have overtaken an outdoor boyhood, that I feel at the end of each book I should be entitled to please myself. And this of course means to say what I mean, which in turn implies to make a fool of oneself, to embarrass one's friends and give one's enemies a good tooth-hold on the hamstrings. I remember how Adrian Stokes begged me to change the silly phrase ‘sermons to siblings’. And I heard that Winnicott, at a scientific meeting, held up a copy of The Psychoanalytical Process to praise it, adding that of course the last chapter was complete nonsense.
I know Mrs. Harris Williams will forgive me for dragging her along in this dubious tradition. But up to this point the book has been saying what psycho-analysis means by aesthetic conflict. I will, despite the cries of anguish from friends and the slavering of enemies, proceed now to say what I mean. It will be embarrassingly personal, of course, so the reader is forgiven if he prefers to skip over to the addendum.
Melville's dissection of the heart of man confronted by the mystery of nature, and by implication the mystery of woma