Introduction

The transformation of an emotional experience into words is a worthwhile endeavor, but to do it in the form of a scientific paper seems to put it beyond the reach or interest of anyone except a few other specialists in the field.

The protagonists in the nine stories have all impressed their personalities on me in an unforgettable way. None of them would have wanted anything to do with psycho-analysis in its formal sense, and I cannot think why out of the melee of busy urban practice over nearly four decades, these nine lives, rather than any others, have come to be recorded in this way.

They have in common the fact that at their moment of need, I also had a need. I have tried to convey in these stories the nature of their vulnerability and sense of incompleteness. My neediness, the desire to respond and to record comes from the other side of the equation.

When, as a medical student, I first opened Samson Wright's Applied Physiology textbook, I discovered this epigraph inside,

“Rabbi Akiba (in Roman captivity) to his favourite pupil Simeon ben Yochai: ‘My son, more than the calf wishes to suck, does the cow yearn to suckle.’”

I had forgotten about it, until I re-opened the book after many years. I experienced the same sense of integration of cultures when, during the war years, a psycho-analyst was temporarily and mysteriously appointed to the staff of the psychiatry faculty, and for a term a refreshing zephyr of humanity suffused the arid lecture theatre. Then he disappeared back to London as mysteriously as he had arrived.

I subsequently learned during the course of my own analysis how extremely complicated, but how rewarding, the field of psychoanalysis can be, and in particular that the mystery of the connection between bodily illness and mental illness might not be explained, but could be studied. The technique for communicating this