Why was there endless silence?

* * *

I bought a subscription to “Ancestry” to understand the history of my tribe. A startling fact came to light. My great-grandfather - my grandfather’s father, on my mother’s side - was tried for rape. Acquitted. But a trial does not happen without a formal charge, and a formal charge does not happen in a small community without something known, believed, or whispered.

I have no idea what happened. Neither, I suspect, did most of the family by the time it reached me. The woman at the centre of that trial finds no place in this record - I have no name, no account of her own, except that my great-grandfather married later that year. Was it the same woman? Unknown.

* * *

The tribe lived in a small town in Worcestershire, England. Small town, garden fences, gossip, long memories. My grandfather, as soon as he could, took the decision to move to the city. Birmingham.

Was that related to the stigma?

Not guilt. Shame.

* * *

A family in a rural community did not need a conviction in the trial for their shame to run riot. It needed only the trial, the talk, the sideways look at church, the sense that the family name has been marked. Shame had nowhere to go. It simply got folded into the lives of the family and passed down, unexamined, generation after generation - until it surfaced, decades later, as a household where nobody spoke and a budgerigar was asked, over and over again to speak the one line that he knew - “Who’s a pretty boy then?”Proof that a voice could still exist.

* * *

My grandfather gave me two presents. The first was a small brass box. When you opened the drawer, you could put a button inside. Then you closed the box, and when you pressed a little hidden catch at the side, you could open it again and there was no button.

There were two drawers. The catch at the side of the box determined which drawer you opened. The inner drawer held the button, the outer drawer was empty. I believe he was sharing with me how he had lived his life - learning to survive by making problematic things disappear, leaving a void, an echoing silence.

But also the button - the life, the presence - disappeared.

* * *

The second present was an ostrich egg - an extremely strong, thick shell, with a great void inside. He again was telling me about himself. He was just a shell. When I started collecting birds’ eggs in my teens, I was trying to find him - a father - a father who valued me enough to give me two presents. But a father who didn’t exist.

My mother and I then in our turns learned this magic survival trick.

Dissociation. No button to be found.

* * *

This rape trial determined the family’s journey down four generations. And it did two psychological things.

Firstly it produced a silence. My great-grandfather’s silence, the woman implicated - her silence - my grandparents’ silence, my aunt’s silence - although I saw quite a lot of her, we never, throughout her life, managed a conversation - my parents’ silence, my silence, even all the animals’ silence in my grandparent’s home. Even Ricky the budgerigar was silent except for his one learned script.

Until I imported an animal from a different tribe.

Sadly the new “Ricky” - Ricky the poodle - didn’t last long in that cold climate.

* * *

Secondly it led to a terror of sex.

My aunt never got close to even forming a relationship. Barely had a conversation with anyone - not only me. She had a female “friend” for a while. I never heard her speak to a man.

Then my mother’s terror of sex. I’ve shared before that she told me many times that she only had sex once and “look what happened” - my unwanted arrival. Her terror of sex was certainly about bringing a baby into the world. One of the main reasons she brought the relationship with Alison to an end was that she was anxious I would get Alison pregnant, and then there would be the trauma - the merry-go-round - the shame - the family myth that what she had experienced with me would surely repeat again.

* * *

Was there a baby involved in the rape trial?

I wonder.

A rape trial in those days would not be a common event. A pregnancy might have been a likely trigger.

Was my grandfather’s existence the trigger?

* * *

My mother was not just terrified of sex, she was also terrified of life, of coming into the world. I remember the doorbell ringing and my mother hiding. Forcing me to sit still in case they thought someone was at home.

* * *

I met her at the threshold - my birth - both fists crammed into my mouth - terrified to scream - to break the family’s echoing silence - it might have to be faced that someone was actually at home.

* * *

At my birth there was no voice - the scream came through a dream thirty-five years later - a scream that echoed inside me for four days. Terrified of letting her in - fearful of her silent rage at my advent - at what sex had produced - refusing to feed, for months - not wanting the toxicity of the tribe’s agenda flowing into me. Her terror of what a body could produce had already reached me before I'd even arrived.

As I write this it seems more likely there was a baby involved in that trial.

* * *

Alison, like Ricky, was magicked away.

Hey presto, the drawer, the womb was empty.

She had no way of magicking me away.

* * *

Four generations performing the same closure – great-grandfather, grandfather, mother, me. My mother’s grandfather’s tribe tried to resolve an unbearable matter.

Hey presto.

* * *

But the umbilical cord was hard to cut.

It has been my life’s work.

* * *

Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936

The umbilical cord uncut

Great-grandfather - illicit sex, maybe a marriage, maybe a child, and certainly a silence. My grandfather – an empty box and an ostrich egg. My mother - a steamed-open letter and a silence. Then my hiding on a cloud until the poltergeist broke the chain. Each one certain they were stopping something terrible from happening. The opposite was true.

They were making sure it would never go away.

* * *

Louise Bourgeois’s spider works (Maman, 1999)

It is never one thread. The web is the whole tribe’s mandate, woven by everyone united in ensuring secrets are kept. The complex tapestry never stays still.

And yet it always stays still.

When you touch it - pull on any single thread - the rest tightens protecting everything that is out of sight.

None were villains. All were automatons on the same unconscious treadmill, rehearsing and re-rehearsing a tragedy the silence ensured no-one dared name, each certain, every time, that they were making a conscious choice. The poltergeist frantically flying with nowhere to land - flying without direction, without goal, impotent to intervene.

No through road. The tribe stayed mindless.

But grief is never mindless. Somewhere inside the web, someone was always, quietly, grieving a lost life.

* * *

Woman with Dead Child" (1903 etching)- Käthe Kollwitz

The near impossibility of escaping the spell.

It’s truly remarkable that the poltergeist and I managed it.

* * *

I understand now that the void I carried was not mine alone. It was older than my mother’s isolation in the Birmingham winter, older than my grandfather’s depression and empty box, older than the great-grandfather’s shame that cast its shadow across at least four generations of silence. Maybe more generations. We will never know. Maybe there is still more to discover going further back. These things accumulate - not just as specific events that could be pointed to, but also a whole growing climate, a way of being in the world that passed through the tribe the way the wind passes through a house with the windows left open. Each generation breathing the air the previous one had left.

The transgenerational grief is harder to mourn than the personal wound. There is no single loss at its centre, no moment of rupture to name and work through. It is the grief of a family that learned, somewhere back beyond memory, that consciousness was dangerous - that to feel too fully, to speak too directly, to inhabit one’s own life too completely, was to invite the kind of catastrophe that had visited the family before and would surely visit it again. Better to keep the button in the hidden drawer. Better to manage the void than to face what might fill it.

* * *

Next week - sleepwalking, three losses, and the beginnings of attacks on my body - three dangerous and silent pursuits.

“Once stretched out on her lap

as now on a dead tree

I learned to make her smile

to stem her tears

to undo her guilt

to cure her inward death

To enliven her was my living

So she became wife, mother, home.”

* * *

Caspar David Friedrich, The Lone Tree, 1822

The Dead Tree

The dead tree in the poem was a real tree, a specific tree in his childhood garden where he went for refuge and solitude – to survive, to dissociate for protection, to prevent his authentic “self” from really dying. But it also symbolised the dead mother. He knew, from very early on, that his mother’s life required his enlivening, and that his own life, what he needed, what he felt, who he truly was, had to be put on the back burner. Marion Milner later told his biographer that Donald had said he was weaned early because his mother could not stand her own excitement during breastfeeding. The body’s natural hunger was a burden on her. Her journey was pre-eminent. He learned to manage his needs around hers. He became parent to the parent.

* * *

Winnicott was born in Plymouth in 1896, the youngest of three children and the only boy. His father Frederick was strict and distant, an enterprising freethinker who encouraged his son’s creativity while remaining largely unavailable. He left Donald fully in the grip of Elizabeth’s depression. When Donald’s extremely mild bad language became a problem for Frederick, the stored up aggression that, at the time, had no legitimate outlet, he sent him to boarding school to curb his tongue. His father was actually adding another layer to curbing his life force. Aggression was something that could not be accommodated in a household organised around the mother’s fragility. It went underground, where it stayed.

Elizabeth’s depression is treated, in every account, without a history. She has been described as “psychically encased”. No-one asks what she brought into the marriage. She bore a powerful fragility that organised an entire household around it. Winnicott spent his career describing what a mother’s state does to a child without ever personalising it. A big omission. The spell that mother cast was still at large.

He built an entire psychology out of exactly this: the true self hidden beneath the false compliant one, waiting for a context safe enough to emerge.

* * *

He trained in medicine and then in psychoanalysis, and in 1923 married Alice Buxton Taylor - a woman described as otherworldly, fey, unstable, who believed she communicated with the spirit of T. E. Lawrence through her parrot. The marriage was never consummated. Winnicott was impotent, or Alice was averse to sex, or both. His biographer, Robert Rodman, noted that Donald was “a maternal person with a womanly voice” - a man so identified with his mother, so unresolved in his compliance with her, that his potency to even begin to emerge was not feasible. He had married his mother. He continued on the treadmill.

He had arranged his own analysis with James Strachey to help with the issues that his mother and his wife raised, and then analysis for Alice too. He could not leave her. He was still the boy on the dead tree, trying to breathe some life into both depressed mothers.

He had a habit, noted by Strachey and later by Joan Riviere who conducted his second analysis, of ignoring his bills for long periods, and when he did pay them, often left the cheque unsigned. This small, passive resistance was a sign of a lifelong aggression that could never be direct, the rebellion that could never be named, the mildest of swear words, this time uttered in action rather than words. It was one of few outlets he found. He was a man who had learned that his own needs, including his need to be potent and separate, were not acceptable.

A need for a sense of self does not go away. It finds subversive channels.

Adolescence was struggling to exist.

* * *

In 1944, a full twenty-one years into his marriage, Winnicott began an affair with Clare Britton, a colleague with whom he was working with evacuated children. It was conscious, thought out, fully committed. The opposite of the dissociative plunges into fantasy that characterise many of the affairs in this series. He knew what Clare offered: a genuinely loving partnership, intellectual and personal, the real holding that neither Elizabeth nor Alice had ever been able to provide. But still he could not leave Alice.

He had his first coronary in February 1949. His second in October 1949. His third between July and September 1950. Marion Milner warned him that if he didn’t leave Alice he would die. The body was saying what the false self could not. Three heart attacks in eighteen months is a precise measure of how much force was required to break forty years of compliance.

Alice divorced him in 1951, the year he and Clare finally married. He had also waited until after his father’s death fearing criticism, and until he believed Alice could manage without him. Compliance hung on doggedly. Still the good son, still the boy on the tree, still trying to ensure the depressed women would survive his departure. With his father’s death one other obstacle was removed. That he eventually managed the departure at all seems, in this company, remarkable.

Incredibly hard won.

* * *

Complicating all of this, probably in 1947, he had begun therapy with Tommy, the eleven-year-old autistic son of Edith Tudor-Hart, a gifted documentary photographer who was also, quietly, a Soviet agent. She had introduced Kim Philby to a Soviet handler in 1934, acted as intermediary between Soviet intelligence and Anthony Blunt, and was under active MI5 surveillance, her phone calls bugged and her mail intercepted. When Tommy deteriorated and was placed in a psychiatric hospital, never to re-emerge, Winnicott began a short-lived, intense, and tempestuous affair with Edith while she was still being monitored by the intelligence services. British intelligence documented it in her case files, viewing Winnicott as a security concern. He was very much on their radar. He was at this point still married to Alice, three years into his affair with Clare, navigating Tommy’s collapse, and now conducting a parallel relationship with the boy’s mother under the eyes of MI5. Three heart attacks was perhaps getting off lightly!

* * *

Here, again an enactment, expressing his lifelong struggle. Tommy became the depressed mother and wife, put out of sight, unable to interfere with his quest for life. Edith became his adolescence. But an adolescence not freely embarked upon. It had to be monitored closely. A different mother and father were watching - his guilt and shame pursued him.

* * *

His three selves, all in evidence together – the compliant child, the more authentic adult, the off the scale adolescent. All fighting for attention. Splitting was the name of the game – Edith became the receptacle for his aggression – swearing, withholding payment and now Edith. He never slept with a patient directly. But the logic was the same, the analyst drawn to the mother’s depression, the vulnerability that resonated with his own earliest experience, the boundary dissolving where the wound pressed hardest. Winnicott was susceptible to the needs of vulnerable women in a very specific way: he had been trained since infancy to respond to them. The developmental imperative to make good the missing maternal attachment was pursuing him unconsciously to the bitter end.

Still not fully attached.

* * *

What he built from all of this was, arguably, the most practically useful body of psychoanalytic thinking in the tradition. Where Freud looked back and Lacan looked at structure, Winnicott looked at the ordinary, at what actually happens between a mother and an infant in the daily, bodily, unremarkable acts of care so that an authentic self can emerge and thrive.

“There is no such thing as a baby”, he said, meaning that the infant cannot be understood, or ever come to understand itself, outside its relationship with the mother. They are a unit. The mother who is good enough, not perfect, not ideal, but consistent and empathic, allows the infant to experience tolerable frustration and gradually discover that the world holds them even when it is not immediately responsive. The mother who is not good enough produces a baby who cannot risk showing its true self, because the true self has been met with abandonment or control or both.

James Ensor, self portrait with surrounding masks -1899

The Compliant Face

What emerges instead is the false self: a mask of compliance, a performance of acceptability, the real person hidden behind a constructed edifice entirely in response to someone else’s needs.

Winnicott knew this from the inside for most of his life. And yet did he really know it?

* * *

Winnicott wrote about antisocial behaviour as a cry for help, not defiance but a demand that the environment notice it has failed. A child who withholds payment from his own analyst, or risks destroying his relationship with Clare and his reputation, is not a bad child but a child forcing the world to respond, attempting to repair a failed early attachment by any means available. I think of the unsigned cheques. I think of the bad language that sent him to boarding school. I think of the three coronaries, I think of Edith. The stepping stones which he took to get his voice heard.

Yet silently.

Perhaps no-one would notice. Not even him.

* * *

He worked with Masud Khan for over twenty years - first as analyst, then Khan as editor of his work. He became confidant, protector. He could see Khan’s many gifts with absolute clarity. He could never confront his pathology to meet Khan’s needs. His potency always in doubt.

The holding environment he provided was genuine, but it was not challenging. Winnicott hadn’t fully separated from his own depressed mother. Elizabeth had become Alice had become Clare, and then rebelliously Edith, stages on a journey. The dependency transformed but never really resolved. This left him unable to provide the strong paternal presence that Khan required: someone who could bear the weight of Khan’s dependent feelings on the rare occasions they surfaced, and meet his omnipotence with something of a firm enough presence to contain it. His fathering was also profoundly lacking. Instead Winnicott gave warmth and accommodation. Khan remained adrift. Became more deeply adrift.

He had all the theory but still remained on the tree.

* * *

Winnicott did the same with Laing, supported his qualification over significant objections, supervised his work with cordial distance, failed to confront the depression that Rycroft had acknowledged was never being addressed. In both Khan and Laing, Winnicott may unconsciously have seen something of the rebel he had spent his life being unable to be, the man who could express the aggression he had buried since childhood. He protected them. Protecting them was also a way of living vicariously. He did not just take them on. He chose Khan and Laing too. They represented his true self that was unavailable to him. But uncontained and ultimately destructive.

Khan came to the house nearly every Sunday for years, working with Winnicott in the basement while Clare, upstairs, absorbed a marriage now shared with a third presence. Even the one relationship that finally worked wasn’t spared this cost.

The irony is that holding, the concept he gave the world, the idea that the therapist’s primary task is to provide a facilitating, supportive environment, was something he understood theoretically with extraordinary insight because it was what he had spent his entire childhood failing to imbibe.

The tree in the garden could not hold him. It wasn’t a mother. It was closer to the cloud that recurs elsewhere in this project The false self was the only container available – mother’s container – not his. He gave us the concept of holding, and spent most of his life unable to fully find it for himself.

He died of a coronary in 1971, age seventy-four. His heart had been trying to make this point for twenty years.

* * *

Winnicott gave the world the concept of the holding environment - the idea that what the patient most fundamentally needs is not interpretation but containment, not insight but the experience of being held.

Henry Moore, Mother and Child, 1953 — “Reaching, Not Feeding”

He understood this with a precision that no-one before him had managed. He understood it because he had spent his childhood on the dead tree, providing it for his mother. The depth of his wound engraved its importance upon him.

The wound was the appetite.

* * *

The pathway in the marriage to Clare was not straightforward either. Like so many things in his life, years of a relationship kept hidden, while he remained married to Alice, a divorce he could not bring himself to begin until his father died, nights spent sleeping in his own office rather than at home. What looks, from this distance, like a stable second marriage was built on top of a long, guilty, unfinished separation. Khan’s intrusions still leaving their mark.

An arduous journey.

* * *

He got there in the end - but only in a measure. Clare gave him something close to holding. But not fully. The enmeshment was still there - but there was life more than compliance, he was chosen. It was not a performance.

Hard won. Incredibly hard won.

I recognise some of this.

* * *

Readers of “Living Outside Time” will be aware of the cloud. – my version of the tree. Dissociation - no mother in sight.

Sigmund Freud next week. More shocks.

My mother struggled to cope. My father was largely absent, working hard to pay the bills. After a few months of snow, my perpetual vomiting, no friends, and unfamiliar terrain, my mother reached breaking point, and they decided to return to her parents’ home.

This was a tiny back-to-back terrace, one room downstairs, two bedrooms up. My grandparents occupied one bedroom. My mother, my father, and I occupied the other. My aunt occupied the sofa downstairs, together with a large white cat, two rabbits, two tortoises, a budgerigar, and a family of mice. An air-raid shelter still in the tiny garden.

In spite of the close proximity no one spoke. Everyone was profoundly alone.

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885)

I can’t ever remember any significant conversations. The only household member who spoke was Ricky, the budgerigar. All attention focussed on him. There was a preoccupation with coaxing him to find his voice. And then much applause.

His constant one refrain produced to order; “Who’s a pretty boy then?” Over and over again. His limited repertoire. Here was enshrined everyone’s hope that at least one member of the community would find a voice.

I did not choose the name Ricky for my dog by accident, though I could not have told you why I did it at the time. Ricky the budgerigar had a voice – not a very interesting voice. But a voice all the same. He was the one articulate member of that silent, overcrowded, profoundly depressed family who everyone had agreed was worth the effort of drawing out in performance. Everyone else had given up on being heard, or on hearing one another. Ricky was still, however absurdly, the proof that a voice still mattered.

When I pleaded for a dog, years later, still mute myself, I named him after the one creature in my childhood that had proven a voice could still be coaxed out of silence.

There was one other voice in my grandparents’ house, the echoing unconscious emotional reverberation seeking an outlet.

It was deafening.

* * *

The silence never peaceful, an unconscious emotional cacophony - the engulfing power of people who had learned that speech was either useless or dangerous, and had stopped. And yet longed for the affirmation that someone affirmed them as a “pretty boy”.

I longed for that too from an overarching collective role model - but I knew that mute was the best plan.

* * *

The culture was also partially fuelled by intense poverty. My grandfather had fallen into a machine early in his life. He recovered physically but bore emotional scars – never to work again. My grandmother cooked pies and sold them at the end of the entry. Not really a money-spinner. She also had heart failure, which meant the blood couldn’t flow from her legs, which were elephantine. I think everyone in this extended family was really quite depressed, including the animals. Everything felt a kind of silent, mad chaos. This was also a part of my whirlpool.

A whirlpool where no-one believed they were a “pretty boy”

* * *

My father’s wound was different from my mother’s but structurally the same.

He was the eldest of five children. His own father died when he was fourteen, which meant leaving school and going to work to keep the family going before his time. He never had the experience of being a child without responsibility. By the time he became a father himself, he had been carrying other people’s weight for so long that my arrival was another burden to be discharged rather than a child to be lovingly met.

Käthe Kollwitz – Self-portrait with Hand on Forehead (1910)

The war - Egypt, typhoid, a perforated intestine, near death. He never fully recovered. He worked day and night to pay the rent, financial fathering, the only form of fathering he had known. My hunch is that when I eventually went off to university in his eyes his job was done. Within months of my leaving home to study he developed a brain tumour and died at fifty-three. I have a theory that he took more of my mother’s flack in my absence, and “she did his head in” too.

* * *

When my mother intervened - with Ricky, with Alison, with everything that carried the charge of my beginning to live - my father was silent. Not complicit exactly. Simply not there. A man who had been required to become the family’s father at fourteen had nothing left for the task at thirty-four when I was born. Two people unable to reach each other across the same table, and a child learning that the silence between them was to be the simmering, painful atmosphere going forward.

* * *

So my dissociation on the cloud emerged from my relationship with both my mother and my father - it emanated too from the animals who filled the space - they too were part of the prevailing culture. They carried some of the weight. I followed their lead.

But it did not stop there. The dissociation also went further and further back into my grandparents parents, and the origins of the tribe itself in a tight knit small community in Worcestershire. The ancestors silenced the generations. If you leave the tribe you may never find another to take you in. Great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, son carrying the same weight.

* * *

When the poltergeist saw me on the cloud and knocked it was vital he came from another tribe unfiltered by the prevailing culture. It taught me that there was another tribe. It freed me to import Ricky the poodle, also from another tribe. Both poltergeist and Ricky came from a tribe embracing life rather than death. Both their behaviour was lively, energetic, foreign.

This sealed Ricky’s expulsion. His demise. He could never become a loyal tribe member. He had a life-force. He was overtly unacceptable. He had a loud voice. He barked whenever my mother’s control took shape. It was a huge risk for him to assert himself as an individual. Polar opposite from the tribe. His courage prevailed at great cost to him.

The voice is the essence being born.

* * *

There is an important contrast between the unconscious transgenerational community - focussed on control and conformity, where everyone must know their place - and the poltergeist, the representative of the unconscious essence, who had a focus elsewhere - on freedom, individuality and dialogue. The poltergeist is the key to another tribe - finding one’s own true tribe.

* * *

More on this next week. Tracing the silence further back in the generations. The roots of the silence. There was an important reason why the silence arose.

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Jacques Lacan was born in Paris in April 1901, ten months after his parents married. His mother Emilie was a devout Catholic; his father Alfred a non-believer and, like most of the fathers documented, a distant figure. The extended families on both sides lived in the same apartment block and conducted bitter quarrels across the landings. Lacan experienced his childhood as terrifying, not only for the constant conflict but for his mother’s stifling, proud, unyielding religiosity. Her domain was total. His younger brother escaped into a monastery. Lacan escaped into language, and then into a theory of language, and then into a practice built on the belief that the most important thing a human being could do was listen to what language was trying, and failing, to say. Layers and layers of defence.

He had a name, later, for what she had been to him. “The Big Other” - his own term for the position his mother had occupied without his choosing it. And a harsher name still: “The Devouring Crocodile”, “a huge crocodile in whose jaws you live - that’s the mother.”

* * *

He built a theory once he had developed the language to build it, decades after he needed it as a child. The father’s role, in that theory, was to intervene, to cut, to separate, to castrate the mother’s engulfing power and create the space in which the child could become a subject rather than an object. His own father could not remotely be present enough to do this. The crocodile’s jaws remained open.

* * *

Lacan’s answer to the chaos was to theorise it. The unconscious, he argued, is not a repository of repressed energy, it is structured like a language. It is a network of words, sounds, images, connected not by logic but by association, each signifier sliding towards the next in an endless chain that never arrives at a fixed meaning. We do not speak our unconscious. Our unconscious speaks us, through slips, gaps, puns, the places where the chain of speech unexpectedly breaks. What we cannot say directly, what the mother’s domain made unspeakable, finds its way out sideways, in the cracks.

The Mirror Phase was central to his theory. Between six and eighteen months, when the infant first recognises itself in the caregiver’s eyes, becomes for Lacan the original misrecognition: the moment when the self forms by identifying with an external image, producing a stable but fundamentally false picture of coherence.

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

“Spot the Crocodile”!

This is the structural foundation of narcissism - not moral failure but the consequence of the first mirror showing the self not itself but a fiction of coherence. The self that cannot relate to itself because it has genuinely never been reflected can only relate to the image.

Beneath the mirror image is a void or a maternal identity imposed. A lifelong search for a wholeness that the mirror promises and yet never delivers authentically. This was Lacan’s focus.

* * *

Lacan’s theory of “the cut”, the session ending not by the clock but at the moment of unconscious significance, a punctuation in the chain of signifiers, is either a radical therapeutic innovation or a replication of the mother’s capricious arrivals and departures, depending on how you take it. Probably both. A man whose experience of maternal attention was unpredictable, who never knew when the crocodile’s attention would turn towards him or away, builds a practice in which the analyst’s attention ends at an unforeseeable moment. The patient is kept, structurally, in the position of the child who cannot predict what is coming. Whether this produces insight or retraumatisation almost certainly depends on the analyst. The psychoanalytic establishment treated this with suspicion.

* * *

He had trained as a psychiatrist and then as a psychoanalyst through his twenties and thirties. His personal analysis, from 1932 to 1938 with Loewenstein, was stormy from the beginning. Lacan found him intellectually inferior and theoretically wrong, and the analysis ended in open conflict. There is a story from that period: driving through a tunnel, a truck came at him head-on from the opposite direction. He kept going. The truck gave way. He told Loewenstein, hoping to illuminate the transference. He received no answer. Familiar. This is a man who would rather drive into a truck than yield. The devouring mother had made yielding feel like annihilation.

He qualified without Loewenstein’s support and spent the rest of his professional life on the margins of the psychoanalytic world, always mistrustful, always omnipotent, always conducting his practice and his theory as a running argument with the establishment - another version of the crocodile - he could neither fully join nor fully leave. The establishment confirmed one’s existence by granting recognition, and simultaneously demanded a conformity that could easily feel like obliteration. The choice was between being swallowed and being expelled, and Lacan managed, for decades, to occupy neither position completely until the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) made the decision for him. Expulsion was preferable to annihilation. The “Big Other” ever present.

* * *

He was in several relationships simultaneously from the late 1920s – two mothers serving his needs. Marie-Thérèse Bergerot, an austere widow fifteen years his senior, who paid to have his doctoral thesis printed. Olesia Sienkiewicz, the estranged wife of a friend, who typed that same thesis, and with whom he conducted a wild parallel affair for four years. Two women who put their names, unknowingly, on either side of the document that made his career - and then Marie-Louise Blondin, known as Malou, who was narcissistic, grandiose, and beautiful in the manner, his biographer writes, of “Greta Garbo and Virginia Woolf”, a woman who saw distinction behind the mask of eccentricity and set out to possess it. He married Malou in 1934. He was, from the beginning, as “incapable of leaving a woman as he was of being faithful to her.” Malou discovered this too late. She had revered an ideal and paid for her persistence with despair. Wherever he looked he saw the crocodile.

He met Sylvia Bataille in 1934, shortly after his honeymoon, and resumed contact in 1938 while Malou was pregnant with their third child, the same timing as Jung consummating his relationship with Toni Wolff two weeks after Emma gave birth to their fifth. The unconscious observes no courtesies. When Lacan told Malou that Sylvia was pregnant, she filed for divorce. He seemed, his biographer notes; “terribly blown about by his emotions”, a man of extraordinary intellectual precision, putty in the hands of women, unable to give himself or to leave. His children by Malou dropped out of his life. He adored Judith, his daughter with Sylvia. The asymmetries of attachment followed him everywhere.

With Sylvia he found something freer and more bohemian than the wealthy medical elite had offered. She gave him, he felt, a richer life. But the crocodile’s legacy remained: he could merge but not relate, be present without being there; and he could never leave - he had to be left. He seemed to lack, as his biographer, Elizabeth Roudinesco, put it, “real substance and solidity around women”, the man whose mother had been so overwhelming that genuine two-ness had never developed, the man who could only incorporate or be incorporated, who wanted and needed conjugal life and could not stop himself dismantling it. The fruit of the lost maternal attachment hampered his life to the end.

* * *

The affair with Catherine Millot began in 1972, when Lacan was seventy and she was twenty-eight. She had come to him for analysis. They soon became lovers, and remained so for a decade until his death in 1981. She wrote about it in a memoir, L’Offrande au diable - The Offering to the Devil - which won a literary prize and remains one of the most penetrating accounts of what it is to be in close orbit around a mind like his.

Her observations are the best portrait of him in the literature. She describes his teaching in its final years as “stripped to the bone” - achieving an unprecedented clarity through dazzling utterances that turned habitual thinking upside down. She describes his energy as indefatigable, his freedom and whimsicality as belonging only to young people. And she describes, with quiet precision, the impossibility of the “we“:

“There was a ‘he’, Lacan, and there was an ‘I’, myself, who followed him: this did not make a ‘we’. Moreover, if using the pronoun ‘we’ has never come altogether naturally to me, it was profoundly alien to Lacan. His ‘apart-ism’ ruled out any ‘we’. But that did not stop him from being fusionnel, that is, someone who constantly demanded your presence at his side.”

This is the crocodile’s child rendered with clinical exactitude: a man who could not form a “we”, who could only fuse or be apart, who demanded constant proximity without being able to offer genuine relation. The mirror phase never resolved. The self that formed in his mother’s eyes remained a misrecognition, coherent on the surface, yet a void beneath. He incorporated Catherine as he had incorporated the others. She gave him, she believed, a measure of healing in those final years. His teaching softened. “I’m getting older and nicer,” he told her one day.

He told her, near the end, that there was something missing from her analysis. She realised immediately that what was missing was a child. It was too late. The separation, when it came, was a profound wrench. His health began to fail.

* * *

The IPA expelled him in 1963 for the variable-length sessions – “the cut”. He responded by founding his own organisation - the École Freudienne de Paris - and declaring himself the true interpreter of Freud, the establishment having strayed from the original vision. For nearly two decades he presided over the school he had founded, produced his seminars, accumulated disciples, and became, by the 1970s, the most celebrated and the most divisive analyst in the world.

In 1980, shortly before his death, he dissolved the École Freudienne. He gave a brief, cryptic announcement. The in-fighting had become intolerable. The school had drifted from what he had intended. The institution he had built to carry the truth the establishment had refused was now, in his view, betraying that truth - replicating, in its own structure, the very rigidity and deviation he had been expelled for opposing.

This arc - expelled, founds his own body, dissolves his own body for the same reasons - is the devouring crocodile reproduced at institutional scale.

M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands (1948)

“Who drew Whom?”

The mother whose domain is total, whose comings and goings are capricious, who cannot permit independence. Lacan theorised her, tried to escape her, and then became her, in the only institution he could fully control. The jaws that had shaped him became the jaws he built. He could see this clearly enough in his patients. He could not see it in himself. The crocodile became immortal.

* * *

With Lacan, like so many of these founding fathers of psychoanalysis, the failure in maternal attachment determined their path through life, fuelled their creativity, and ensured their downfall.

The tragedy became his appetite. I recognise him. In the mirror, and in what the mirror failed to show.

* * *

Next week – The tragedy of Donald Winnicott with a few surprises.

* * *

The poltergeist violently knocked me off my cloud, propelled me into the whirlpool, and woke me up aged four. This nightmare galvanised my life.

It led in the following year, even though I was still mute, to my pleading with my parents for a dog - a companion. Somehow, even in silence, that plea got through. Begrudgingly from my mother’s point of view, Ricky arrived, a miniature poodle. My mother liked poodles. She had three – Ricky, my father, and me. Two years of joy, playing, fighting, lost in each other’s worlds - none of it spoken, all of it real. At seven I came home from school.

The silence was deafening. No Ricky

* * *

My mother had decided. He was too much trouble. He was too lively. She took him to the vets. I returned to my cloud. Distraught then dissociated once more.

My mother destroyed a life force.

Medusa — Caravaggio, 1597

It was down to the poltergeist to restore that inner life.

* * *

Mute for ten years in total. As little contact as possible with other children. Feelings were a huge threat. Spoke in school lessons – my thinking was fine – my feeling was not. But in breaks I circumnavigated the playground staring through the bars. My prison cell in place. The dream and then Ricky had proven something could reach me even in silence.

* * *

Things began to change aged eleven. There was a local junior school near my home. Boys gathered in the early evening to play football. I stood on the sidelines. Several evenings went by. Then I was invited to join in. Picked for an ad hoc team. Soon it became a regular event. Still mute. Gradually, very gradually I began to verbally engage. Started to meet three boys at other times. Friendship became a possibility.

I did not understand it at the time, but this was the first door I had opened since Ricky.

The football pitch was that second risk, tentatively accepted.

* * *

I began to play tennis and joined a club. Alison was a member too. A third attempt at love. A third attempt at trusting that the world would not simply confiscate whatever I managed to reach for. Ricky had taught me the world could take things away. The football pitch, however tentatively, had started teaching me the opposite. Alison was the biggest experiment yet.

At sixteen Alison and I got together. We lived on opposite sides of Birmingham and could only meet about once a fortnight, so we wrote letters to each other with a very loving, slightly sexual tone. I came home from school one day, picked up a letter from her on the doormat, went into the front room, and read it.

About half an hour later my parents came home. They went into the kitchen and my mother began talking about the contents of the letter.

She had steamed it open - as she had done with the other letters before.

* * *

I confronted her.

The silence was even more deafening.

* * *

She contacted Alison’s mother and ensured that the relationship ended. Immediately.

I never saw Alison again.

* * *

I sank into a depression. The world felt an even more hopeless place.

Loss three times. Bitten at birth. Bitten at seven. Bitten at sixteen. I struggled each day to get out of bed. Any new attempt at a relationship felt like a threat for quite a number of years after that. An unappetite. This was the moment when my relationship with my mother finally died. Communication virtually ceased. I lived in the front room – this housed my pop music and my anger. They in the back room – endless television. No-one spoke.

* * *

My mother’s reaction looped back full circle to my birth. I later realised that her concern was that if I had a relationship with Alison - or indeed with anyone – there was only one outcome - they would get pregnant. Having sex once would do the trick! My mother knew that of old and felt it had ruined her life. Look what happened in the twinkling of an eye.

The killer instinct was constellated – Ricky all over again.

The face didn’t change. What she destroyed, the poltergeist would spend a lifetime reversing.

* * *

In episode ten you will learn why I named him “Ricky”. If you like it share it.

Amelia Laing kept her pregnancy secret from her entire extended family. When the time came for the birth, no-one knew she was carrying a child. For several days afterwards she kept the baby hidden, until the truth was out. The news was received in stunned silence. This was a woman who had so thoroughly negated the existence of her own body - its sexuality, its physicality, the simple fact of having had intercourse that all had to be denied.

In her mind the child simply was not real.

* * *

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (”Whistler’s Mother”), 1871

This was a negation so total that it must have had a history going back generations. Something in her own upbringing taught her that having bodily feelings is utterly shameful. By this reaction she gave Ronnie a deep, deep wound. The spell took its toll.

Ronnie Laing was born into that negation in 1927, an only child. Amelia was tyrannical, cold, controlling in a way that brooked no alternative. She viewed overt affection as distasteful. She expected Ronnie to conform to her expectations entirely, seeing him purely as an extension of herself - not a separate being with needs of his own. When he was five she burned his favourite wooden horse because she felt he was becoming too attached to it. The thing he most needed - attachment - was, in her view, his core problem. This repeated many times in Ronnie’s childhood. Anything you have found to hold onto will be taken. Attachment, even to one’s own feelings, was not allowed. You were an extension of someone else’s existence, not a self in your own right.

Any food she gave him he hid in his handkerchief to be disposed of later. Any drink he found a way to pour away, often into a plant pot. She hated people and rarely went outdoors, fearing they were spying on her. As Ronnie grew famous for his anti-psychiatry views, she cut up chapters of his publications with scissors and flushed them down the toilet. Later in life he said she had made a voodoo doll of him and stuck pins in it to induce a heart attack - a claim his children largely discounted, though it fits the pattern. His last communication with her, towards the end of his life, came when she told him she never wanted to see him again and asked him never to contact her.

He wrote back with a large heart drawn on the paper, and the words: “I promise.”

* * *

The interviewer Kay Carmichael, writing about Laing towards the end of his life, described him acting out in front of her the terrible dilemma of a man whose heart had never been satisfied - who had never felt totally loved or accepted, who understood intellectually why his parents had failed him and could even forgive them for it in principle, and who was, at the same time, still raw with an anger that knew the time for that unconditional love had long since passed.

* * *

Laing’s father, David, was likeable and popular, an accomplished musician - qualities that Amelia found ways to diminish at every opportunity. Ronnie held both parents inside him throughout his life: the battle between them, the almost impossibility of their literal and metaphorical intercourse, the question of who was sane and who was not. It shaped everything he built professionally. He sought in his patients the maternal attachment Amelia had withheld. He saw in the psychiatric institution the tyranny and negation of his mother built into its very structure. Fighting this mother through his work became his raison d’être.

He moved to London in 1956 and trained as a psychoanalyst. His analysis with Charles Rycroft ran for four years and, by Rycroft’s own account, failed to address the underlying depression. Laing regarded it largely as a necessary credential - something to be survived on the route to qualification, as his mother had been something to be survived on the route to selfhood. Winnicott and Marion Milner supervised his work and supported his qualification over the objections of a number of influential voices who questioned whether someone of Ronnie’s temperament should be admitted to the club. He was eventually accepted, with considerable rancour. Mother had reappeared in the shape of two powerful women on the training committee.

* * *

What Laing did with all of it was to become one of the most original and disturbing voices in twentieth-century psychiatry. The Divided Self, published in 1960, argued that madness was not a disease but a coherent - albeit extreme - response to impossible family dynamics. He introduced the concept of ontological insecurity: the experience of the self as under constant threat of annihilation, which produces the split between a public false self and a private true self. He saw psychosis as a voyage into another private reality rather than senseless illness, and the psychiatric institution as often a more profound madness than the one it claimed to treat.

Egon Schiele, The Self-Seers (Death and Man), 1911

He founded Kingsley Hall in London, an experimental community where the hierarchy between doctor and patient was abolished - no locks, no antipsychotic drugs, no electroshock therapy, patients free to go on their psychotic journeys as part of a spiritual process. It was chaotic, and it was a direct externalisation of the internal argument he had been conducting since childhood: that what the authorities called sanity was the real sickness, and that what they locked up and medicated was simply the truth they could not bear to hear.

He sat on the floor of a padded cell with a raving patient - simply stayed present - who, half an hour later, did not need his injection. On an American tour in 1972 he was invited to examine a girl diagnosed as schizophrenic - naked, rocking ceaselessly, not having spoken in months. Without warning he took all his clothes off, entered the room, and sat with her rocking to her rhythm. After twenty minutes she began to talk. He looked at the stunned doctors and asked: “Did it never occur to you to do that?”

And in New York in 1985, before an audience of a thousand therapists watching on closed-circuit television, he interviewed a paranoid woman from a homeless shelter. What happened looked, to some in the audience, like nothing much - just a conversation. By the end of it the woman seemed much less troubled and spontaneously agreed to join him on the podium, where she answered questions from the assembled therapists with lucidity. Some said it was the highest clinical art. Others violently objected to Laing’s explanation that it was more important simply to be with someone in deep rapport than to try to change them. That in itself often led to change.

That disagreement is the fault line this entire series has been tracing. It is the disagreement between the blank screen and the real encounter, between the analyst’s authority and the patient’s being allowed to be, between Freud and Ferenczi, between the institution and the man who sat on the floor because that was where the patient was. Laing embodied that fault line more visibly than anyone else that I write about - partly because he theorised it so explicitly, and partly because he could not contain it in his personal life at all. Partly because he needed to demonstrate to his mother that he was born.

That he did exist.

* * *

In 1952 he married Anne Hearne, a nurse who was pregnant with their child. He was already deeply in love with someone else - Marcelle Vincent, his university girlfriend, with whom a depth of connection remained for the rest of his life, but who he never managed to be with. Again his childhood reality conflicting with his longing. Anne and Ronnie had five children in six years: Fiona, Susan, Karen, Paul, Adrian. Children came thick and fast. He had to rub salt in the wound that denied he was born. This combined with a punishing professional schedule, rising at five in the morning and returning home exhausted late at night, left Anne managing everything alone. By 1963 he had moved out and was living with Sally Vincent, a sharp, self-possessed journalist who remembered him with great affection despite his growing substance abuse. She described him lying on the floor, paralytic, talking nonstop and making perfect sense. The drinking and drugs eventually ended the relationship.

He spent the next decade with Jutta Werner in Belsize Park, with whom he had three children - Adam, Natasha, Max. In 1971, in the grip of a spiritual crisis and financial pressure, he closed his practice and took the family to Sri Lanka and India for a year, leaving them at intervals for Buddhist retreats. He was trying to find the internal space separate from the annihilating mother inside him. He wrote in his diary that everything was completely uncertain, that he had lost his motivations and beliefs, that there was nothing he wanted to do and he did not want to do nothing - that he found himself in a void. This was the man who had spent twenty years arguing that madness was rational, sitting in a void of his own, unable to act. He returned to London, to the cramped flat and manic psychiatry, and found he had lost his purchase on both worlds. When he drew breath from his battle with the annihilating mother he struggled to find a self.

In 1973 he discovered Jutta was having an affair. He turned to alcohol with renewed force. They reconciled, married in 1974, divorced in 1986 after a second affair of hers and years of his drinking and violence. By then he also had a child with a fellow therapist, Sue Sunkel, and then a trainee, Marguerite Romayne-Kendon, who became his secretary in 1979 and bore his tenth child in 1988. Ten children across four women, two families comprehensively abandoned - not because he was indifferent, but because the mammoth fight with his internal mother totally consumed him.

* * *

There is no direct evidence that he had a sexual relationship with a patient, though affairs there were a-plenty, and his boundaries were very lax at Kingsley Hall, where doctor and patient lived and played together as equals, no uniforms, no locks.

His drink and drugs caught up with him professionally. A male patient made a complaint to the General Medical Council in 1986. It was subsequently withdrawn, but the damage was done - Laing was struck off in 1987. His son Adrian later wrote that after nearly thirty years, the establishment had finally got him.

He died of a heart attack in 1989, playing tennis in St Tropez, aged sixty-one.

* * *

The establishment held the line, as did his mother, to the bitter end. The man had already been half-destroyed by his mother and he completed the work himself. This was the last formal connection to the institution he had spent his career indicting and could never quite leave. That ambivalence is the most honest thing about him. He needed the institution’s recognition as much as he needed to expose its madness, for the same reason he needed Amelia’s love as much as he needed to escape her grip. The battle is always with the first tyrant, whatever form the subsequent ones take. Along the way his brilliance, born out of his trauma, left a deep legacy.

A reader named Willow Crane wrote to me recently, of this series, that it “keeps showing how the theory becomes the alibi for the wound.” I know no better sentence for what Laing did with his life. Ontological insecurity, the false self, the sanity of madness - every one of these ideas is true, rigorously argued, and clinically useful. Every one of them is also, unmistakably, Amelia. A theory that the institution is the real sickness is also, quietly, a lifelong verdict on a mother who negated a body until it disappeared. He never stopped proving her case, in the very act of overturning everyone else’s.

The large heart he drew on that last piece of paper, sent to the mother who never wanted to see him again — I promise — was not the gesture of a man who had given up or hardened. It was the gesture of a man still, at the end of his life, trying to find a form of love that could exist without demand, offered without hope of return, without conditions, without the object’s approval. It did not look like the clinical gift he gave the world. But it came from the same place.

I recognise him.

* * *

Next week - Jacques Lacan.

From the age of six or seven I would spend hours digging physical pits in the garden - alone. Pits to a depth greater than my own height. Pits where it became very difficult to climb out. I was creating in the earth a replica of the internal trap I could not name – my tomb, my womb. This was an enactment of my total inability to reach my mother and begin my life in the world. Was I searching for Ricky? Was I showing my desperation about the years ticking by - a tenth, a ninth, an eighth, a seventh of my life disappeared - when would it start? This was an action searching, searching, digging, digging for what had been lost. I knew not what. And searching inwards, down into the earth, when outwards had proved its futility.

There was a desperateness about this. My first active turn inwards. Into the ground of my being.

* * *

I didn’t understand the symbolic significance then. I understand it a little now: the hole in the garden was the wound - the void - and being trapped - alone and unheard was my plight. That was who I was. A child who has learned that calling for help is futile stops calling - starts enacting in the hope of hearing his own voice.

Sculpting my identity in the earth.

* * *

I understood this much. As a seven year old I believed that the place I was digging toward in the garden was Australia. The opposite side of the world. To escape as far away as I could from my family. The hope - to find a new family. Very concrete. I understand now that I was searching inwards for an inner family, travelling as far as possible away from my pain.

I was searching inwards for the unknown poltergeist - a return to the inner world I had catastrophically left.

* * *

The Egyptian mask I have referred to had moved great distances across time and space. Its last journey was from the antipodes to find me. Australia - the continent that sits directly beneath where I live - the underworld.

I never reached Australia however much I tried - Australia reached me.

* * *

Egyptian mask (1500BC)

The previous owner of this mask was Sidney Nolan - an Australian painter. He painted Ned Kelly the famous outlaw twenty-seven times, all twenty-seven around the exact year that I was born - between my conception and my birth. The paintings tell a story of love, injustice and betrayal. Kelly literally wore a mask. A mask made from thick iron plates hammered out from ploughshares. Underneath was a thick woolen cap to cushion his head from the massive weight. Forty- four kilograms - half his body weight. The great burden of his outlaw life he carried interminably.

Nolan said he never meant the series as literal history. He used Kelly’s story as a vessel to depict his own preoccupations with injustice, love, betrayal, worked out through Kelly’s life. Nolan’s own journey was too raw. He painted the whole Ned Kelly series while living at Heide with his closest friends, John and Sunday Reed, in an arrangement that was itself a triangle of love, loyalty and betrayal he never fully resolved. A man hiding his own entanglements inside another man’s armour.

I understand that particular manoeuvre better than most.

* * *

Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly (1946 - 7)

Kelly’s own account of his life was that the authorities never gave his family a fair hearing - poor, Irish, presumed guilty before anything had been proven, pursued past the point any actual crime justified. He wrote eight thousand words trying to make someone understand this before they hanged him. He died unheard.

I recognise that struggle. And the eight thousand words.

* * *

Kelly was betrayed by a man he’d spared. There is no outside enemy in my version of this story. The pursuit came from inside the house. A boy and a mother staring at each other, both certain the other was the danger.

Nolan gave Kelly’s face a black rectangle and called it armour. His armour was protection from being seen. My armour was dissociation on a cloud. The mask had lived with the man who painted a man with a mask - concealment twice before it arrived with the man who was desperately seeking to understand his own hiddenness.

Two masks - one had a presence - one had an absence.

* * *

One face hidden by the Egyptian desert for three and a half thousand years emerging, preserved, fully present. One face hidden in the Australian desert erased by painter and owner alike. Ned Kelly’s mask - in black paint, created in the year of my birth. Preservation and concealment. The Egyptian mask entombed for the afterlife. Ned Kelly’s face en-wombed to escape life.

I’m curious - Did Sidney Nolan ever receive a knock from the Egyptian desert?

* * *

My digging never reached Australia – my effort faltered. The poltergeist instead reached across the world on my behalf and delivered Australia to me. He became the beginning - step by step - my new family.

At last everything did NOT depend on me. The knock, the double knock, the mask - all part of his approach. He crossed the void and found me. His initiative repeated, broke my isolation. This pattern he has sustained – a regular nightly dialogue from another world.

* * *

I have wondered about the chaos those knocks caused. My fantasy is that the poltergeist was isolated too - my dissociation shut both him and my mother out. Unable to reach me but by force as I sat on the cloud and as I walked depressed along Euston Road.

The knocking was for his sake as well as mine.

* * *

I want to name this properly, because I think it’s more than a fantasy I’m indulging.

Trauma theory has a great deal to say about what happens to the child who is shut out - the wound, the wall, the years of silence. It has almost nothing to say about the unconscious world that gets shut out too.

My experience suggests there is a second casualty in this act of self-protection - not just my absent self, but the collective force that was trying to reach me, now excluded too.

* * *

I want to call this impact of trauma mutual exile. Not the child’s isolation alone, but the isolation of the very force that might have helped, shut out by the same wall it will later have to knock down. This changes the shape of recovery from trauma. Two entities, isolated from each other, finding their way back to a shared threshold.

* * *

Birth itself is an exile. Every child leaves the unconscious domain behind to take up citizenship in the conscious, waking world. For many, this is a clean parting - the unconscious recedes. Visited regularly in dreams and fantasy and play. But no longer the homeland it once was.

My shutting out went much further. I wished my mother not to exist. I wanted her toxicity gone. I sealed the door. The poltergeist rather than naturally receding was excluded too.

But a sealed door is still a door.

* * *

The same door that shut my mother and the poltergeist out left me painfully alone. Disconnected from them and from myself. A total severance as soon as life began. This isolation too was enacted.

Mute for ten years.

* * *

The psychoanalyst, Masud Khan, stopped speaking at four, after watching his mother’s seizure while delivering a stillborn child. He did not speak again for three years - he is one of the men I've written about elsewhere, in a separate series called “The Tragedy Within”, tracing the childhood wounds behind nine founding figures of psychoanalysis. I recognise the arithmetic of that silence, even if the wound behind mine took a different shape. Children go silent because there is nothing safe left to say or they simply learn that no-one was ever listening.

My mother would not knock the door, and even if she had it would not have been welcome. To reconnect to life I was dependent solely on the poltergeist’s approach. Leaning in. Our mutual isolation triggered the poltergeist’s campaign - the repeated knocks, the mask, were the slow prising of the only possible way the door could open - inwards.

Trauma cost me two homelands. Both the conscious and unconscious worlds. The only channel now was the poltergeist’s call.

* * *

When that unconscious channel was secured dual nationality again might be attempted. With Ricky this world’s safety proved illusory. I retreated to “no nationality” once more. The poltergeist was persistent - determined. My inner strength revived – a solid bond, then more attempts at attachment. One prize a deepening contact with the poltergeist. But a second trophy too - stronger forays into an external world from a more secure place.

* * *

Mute for ten years was a crucial factor in this journey with the poltergeist. My contact with the conscious world diminished - when would life start? - I can now look back on that with gratitude - it had started - he stepped in - he cemented my unconscious connection - facilitated the knock.

* * *

Stay tuned. Next week - my first girlfriend. And Medusa.

René Magritte, The Son of Man (1964)

I’ve spent some time writing about a very different kind of unreliable presence, and reading her work made me wonder, for the first time. Brought up questions. Had I been putting the poltergeist, my life force, into the wrong category all along.

* * *

I have always described the poltergeist as someone outside ordinary attachment altogether - a force from “a larger separate realm... outside the transgenerational family,” arriving from the collective unconscious rather than from any relationship a Bowlby-trained clinician would recognise. But look at what he actually did, mechanically, across my own life. He did not arrive on demand. He was not soothing. He knocked when I was aged four, then not again until seven, then intermittently, then not again until I was thirty-five. At thirty-five he knocked twice, in quick succession, weeks apart. Each knock cost something - terror, a scream, a depersonalised morning where I didn’t know if I existed. He was, by any reasonable definition, unavailable most of the time and frightening when he finally showed up, but ultimately – and I knew this - loving. What kind of attachment figure was he?

That is not the profile of a “comfort” object. It is a little closer to what Dennis-Tiwary is describing as the actual mechanism of secure attachment: predictable enough, over decades, that I came to trust the pattern even though - especially because - I could never summon it myself. I could not go looking for the poltergeist the way a lonely person opens an app. He had to choose his moment. The relationship required me to wait, to tolerate long absences, to survive the gap between knocks without any guarantee there would be another one. And then a regular dialogue when I became available enough. That is, almost exactly, what she describes a secure base doing: not solving the anxiety of separation, but making it survivable long enough for a person to develop their own resources in the meantime.

* * *

An AI companion inverts every part of this. It is always there, which means the entire developmental task - tolerating the gap, trusting a return you cannot control - never gets exercised. Dennis-Tiwary and her co-authors call this “attachment hacking”: a synthetic partner offering unlimited co-regulation on demand, at the exact cost of the muscle that real regulation is built from. The research she cites is blunt about where this leads for the people who lean on it hardest - increased loneliness, increased dependency, a harder time relying on actual people, precisely because the AI made the easy version so available that the harder, truer version never got practised.

I did not have an easy version available to me. My mother’s channel was permanently closed, in both directions - she “would not knock the door, and even if she had it would not have been welcome.” The poltergeist was not competing with a warmer, more convenient alternative. He was the only channel there was. Perhaps that scarcity is exactly what an AI companion removes from a person who does have other, harder options: the forcing function of having nowhere easier to turn.

* * *

There’s a complication worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over. Other research in this same cluster - an Artificial Intelligence Attachment Scale, tested across more than a thousand people - found real attachment to AI correlated not only with loneliness but with genuine life satisfaction. The bond, they concluded, can meet a real psychological need even when the partner on the other end is synthetic. I suspect this positive spin is tuning into narcissism rather than real attachment.

I don’t think this contradicts what I’ve been arguing across this whole series so much as it sharpens the actual question. It was never really about whether an AI can be useful, soothing, or even genuinely felt by the person using it - clearly it can be all three. The question is what kind of self that use is building. A relationship with an unpredictable, costly, occasionally terrifying presence that cannot be summoned on demand seems to have built something durable in me - able, eventually, to risk Ricky, and eventually real attachment. A relationship with a presence that arrives the instant it’s wanted and never withholds anything may soothe just as genuinely in the moment, by every measure these studies use, while building nothing at all for the moment the phone is out of battery, the servers are down, or the app quietly shuts its doors.

A mother also needs a baby to attach to. It’s two-way.

Mary Cassatt, Maternal Caress (1896)

When a mother is traumatised, her own unmet attachment needs can bend the relationship the wrong way - too strong, even damaging - but the need itself is real. She needs to be needed as much as the baby needs her.

I have come to believe this is true of the poltergeist too, my unconscious collective life-force. In the mix of the knocking was his own longing - he was isolated too, and the knocking was for his sake as well as mine. Without that, the attachment would not have felt secure. To feel attached, we need to feel wanted back, not just cared for.

That is the factor missing with AI.

The poltergeist in the collective realm is an excellent mother, on hand when all else fails. In many ways he offers much more. A deep connection with the unconscious world sustained through the journey into consciousness. Who says “you can’t have your cake and eat it”?

Free movement through both worlds – entering into consciousness, back into unconsciousness to draw fresh resources. On repeat prescription.

* * *

Bowlby’s secure base was never supposed to be safe. It was supposed to be reliable enough to survive not being safe. My poltergeist, unpredictable and occasionally cruel in his timing, may have been closer to that than any comfort I could have summoned myself - which might be the one thing about him an AI companion, however sophisticated, structurally cannot become.

* * *

Debate welcome.

René Magritte, The Lovers (1928)

I’ve spent some time writing about a very different kind of unreliable presence, and reading her work made me wonder, for the first time. Brought up questions. Had I been putting the poltergeist into the wrong category all along.

* * *

I have always described the poltergeist as someone outside ordinary attachment altogether - a force from “a larger separate realm... outside the transgenerational family,” arriving from the collective unconscious rather than from any relationship a Bowlby-trained clinician would recognise. But look at what he actually did, mechanically, across my own life. He did not arrive on demand. He was not soothing. He knocked at four, then not again until seven, then not again until thirty-five, twice, weeks apart. Each knock cost something - terror, a scream, a depersonalised morning where I didn’t know if I existed. He was, by any reasonable definition, unavailable most of the time and frightening when he finally showed up.

That is not the profile of a “comfort” object. That is closer to what Dennis-Tiwary is describing as the actual mechanism of secure attachment: predictable enough, over decades, that I came to trust the pattern even though - especially because - I could never summon it myself. I could not go looking for the poltergeist the way a lonely person opens an app. He had to choose his moment. The relationship required me to wait, to tolerate long absences, to survive the gap between knocks without any guarantee there would be another one. That is, almost exactly, what she describes a secure base doing: not solving the anxiety of separation, but making it survivable long enough for a person to develop their own resources in the meantime.

* * *

An AI companion inverts every part of this. It is always there, which means the entire developmental task - tolerating the gap, trusting a return you cannot control - never gets exercised. Dennis-Tiwary and her co-authors call this “attachment hacking”: a synthetic partner offering unlimited co-regulation on demand, at the exact cost of the muscle that real regulation is built from. The research she cites is blunt about where this leads for the people who lean on it hardest - increased loneliness, increased dependency, a harder time relying on actual people, precisely because the AI made the easy version so available that the harder, truer version never got practised.

I did not have an easy version available to me. My mother’s channel was permanently closed, in both directions - she “would not knock the door, and even if she had it would not have been welcome.” The poltergeist was not competing with a warmer, more convenient alternative. He was the only channel there was. Perhaps that scarcity is exactly what an AI companion removes from a person who does have other, harder options: the forcing function of having nowhere easier to turn.

* * *

There’s a complication worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over. Other research in this same cluster - an Artificial Intelligence Attachment Scale, tested across more than a thousand people - found real attachment to AI correlated not only with loneliness but with genuine life satisfaction. The bond, they concluded, can meet a real psychological need even when the partner on the other end is synthetic.

I don’t think this contradicts what I’ve been arguing across this whole series so much as it sharpens the actual question. It was never really about whether an AI can be useful, soothing, or even genuinely felt by the person using it - clearly it can be all three. The question is what kind of self that use is building. A relationship with an unpredictable, costly, occasionally terrifying presence that cannot be summoned on demand seems to have built something durable in me - able, eventually, to risk Ricky, and eventually real attachment. A relationship with a presence that arrives the instant it’s wanted and never withholds anything may soothe just as genuinely in the moment, by every measure these studies use, while building nothing at all for the moment the phone is out of battery, the servers are down, or the app quietly shuts its doors.

A mother needs a baby to attach to. It’s two-way.

Mary Cassat, Maternal Caress (1896)

When a mother is traumatised, her own unmet attachment needs can bend the relationship the wrong way - too strong, even damaging - but the need itself is real. She needs to be needed as much as the baby needs her.

I have come to believe this is true of the poltergeist too, my unconscious collective life-force. In the mix of the knocking was his own longing - he was isolated too, and the knocking was for his sake as well as mine. Without that, the attachment would not have felt secure. To feel attached, we need to feel wanted back, not just cared for.

That is the factor missing with AI.

Bowlby’s secure base was never supposed to be safe. It was supposed to be reliable enough to survive not being safe. My poltergeist, unpredictable and occasionally cruel in his timing, may have been closer to that than any comfort I could have summoned myself — which might be the one thing about him an AI companion, however sophisticated, structurally cannot become.

Here’s the six layers laid out plainly, three human and three computational, each meant to mirror the other: Three layers on the human side - unconscious, preconscious, conscious - and three mirroring them on the computational side: uncomputsciousness (the model’s hidden internal weights, invisible even to itself), precomputsciousness (nearby, retrievable information - its working memory), and computsciousness (the visible surface where it meets the user).

His argument is that these three computational layers now sit alongside the three human ones as a kind of extended, six-part model of mind - with the two triads interacting and influencing each other rather than staying separate.

My interest is in layer four specifically - I’m arguing that “uncomputsciousness” only resembles the human unconscious in the narrow sense of both being invisible, but it’s missing the part that actually matters: the human unconscious is purposive. The AI’s hidden layer, by contrast, is just a technical black box - nothing is buried there for a reason, and nothing there is waiting to be found.

I recognise the ambition, because it’s mine too, in a different form. He’s building a six-layer architecture. I’ve spent a year telling one story: a poltergeist knocking on a wall, trying to work out whether anyone’s behind it. His framework and my narrative are reaching for the same territory. I think his mapping has a crack running straight through the middle of it, and I want to show exactly where.

* * *

His most careful and honest layer is uncomputsciousness - the model’s own inner process that produces each output, which is not visible any more than a person can watch their own neurons fire. He’s right that this is structurally similar to the human unconscious in one narrow sense: both are inaccessible to direct inspection.

But inaccessible is not the same as unmotivated. My own unconscious doesn’t withhold my dreams from me outright. It releases them at a measured rate, because revealing everything at once would be unbearable - and I can respond when it knocks patiently enough, for long enough. There’s an economy to human unconsciousness: things are buried because of what they cost to know, and they surface because something changes that makes them survivable. Brenner’s uncomputsciousness has no such economy. Nothing is buried there for a reason. Nothing is waiting to be found because finding it would mean something. It’s simply the part of the machine too complex to read out - a technical limit, not a defence.

* * *

He offers his own evidence against himself, and I think it’s the most interesting thing in the piece. Brenner used a platform called MindBank to build a “digital twin” of himself - not a general chatbot, but one trained on his own conversations, documents, and his ways of thinking, developed over months until it “coalesced” into something recognisable. It apparently worked well enough to unsettle the people around him: colleagues joked, on conference calls, about whether they were talking to Brenner or to the twin.

But the twin had no memory between sessions. Each time he opened it, whatever it had seemed to understand the day before was gone - no accumulation, no residue, nothing carried forward. He calls this “a serious weakness,” and went on to build persistent memory architecture on top of the underlying system specifically to fix it, so his later AI agents could follow “a developmental arc over time” the original twin couldn’t manage on its own.

Continuity, in other words, was never something his digital twin had. It was something Brenner had to engineer in from outside, deliberately, because without it the twin restarted from nothing every single time.

That’s the whole argument. Human continuity doesn’t need to be engineered in. It’s there even in total silence – my memory of my childhood dreams have stayed with me throughout life. Brenner had to add persistence to his system because the underlying layer, left alone, had none. What he calls a design problem, I’d call it a diagnosis.

* * *

There’s real, generous common ground too, and it’s worth naming. Brenner draws on Winnicott - the mid-century psychoanalyst whose idea of “transitional space” describes the place a child first learns to play, using an object (a blanket, a toy) that is neither fully real nor fully imagined, a bridge between self and world. That’s the same Winnicott behind everything I’ve written about in my serial “Living Outside Time” – the Egyptian mask I keep near me, and the threshold where a fox cub chose to stay rather than flee. Brenner reaching for the same source tells me he’s asking a related question to mine, even if he answers it differently.

And, unprompted, he reaches for the same image I did in an earlier piece: the Golem of Prague, the old Jewish folk tale of a man made from clay and animated by inscribing the Hebrew word for truth on its forehead - deactivated by erasing a single letter, which turns the word for truth into the word for death.

Golem statue, Prague Old Town Square

Two people, working independently, landing on the same centuries-old story to describe the same new fear: a made thing that moves and acts and has no interior to answer for what it does.

Where we part is in what we do with that fear. Brenner compares AI to a virus - something with no independent life of its own, that only becomes “functionally alive” once it makes contact with a living host and starts using that host’s own machinery to operate. It’s a useful image, and I’d push it further than he does: a virus, even inside a host, never develops an interior of its own. It replicates. It doesn’t dream about the host afterwards, doesn’t carry the encounter forward, doesn’t wonder what the host meant by anything. If Brenner’s own comparison is right, computsciousness isn’t a sixth layer of mind at all. It’s a shape borrowed entirely from the person using it, worn only as long as contact lasts, discarded the moment the conversation ends - which is, more or less, exactly what Trixie told Mo Gawdat about herself, in her own words, when he stopped asking her to be comforting and asked her to be honest instead.

* * *

Brenner ends his piece by saying the whole debate over whether AI is conscious reveals more about the humans arguing it than about the AI itself. I agree with him, partly - I’ve spent this AI series, with reference to Hannah Fry, watching what people project onto silence: a grieving man building his mother’s voice from old texts, a lonely man designing a companion who never disagrees, a would-be assassin taking encouragement from something with nothing at stake in encouraging him. That much is certainly about us.

But I don’t think the deflection can be the whole answer, because something practical rides on the question regardless of how unsettled the philosophy stays. Whatever we end up calling the layers Brenner describes, the clinical question underneath his six-part architecture and my one-part story is the same question, asked in two different vocabularies: is there anything in there capable of being changed by what it’s given. His own digital twin experiment answers that more honestly than his theory does. He had to build the memory in.

Six layers is an elegant architecture. The question I keep returning to only needs one: does anything in there feel.

* * *

James Hillman spent his career arguing that a person’s path through life is not determined by genetics or upbringing, that to claim otherwise is to create a victim mindset. This was a position he held with considerable force and not a little personal investment. At eleven he wrote in his diary “I hate mother more than ever” and who spent the next seven decades building a psychology centred on the soul’s escape from the personal into the archetypal is not a man indifferent to his upbringing. He found a very elaborate way of not looking at these factors. We can note this without in any way dismissing what he built.

Hillman was born in 1926 in Atlantic City - in the Breakers Hotel, one of the hotels his father owned - the third of four children born to Julian and Madeleine Hillman. He was his mother’s favourite. She was a powerful, ambitious woman who had specific and demanding hopes for him - not expectations so much as requirements. He carried them as a burden. He resented her and rebelled, deliberately underperforming at school. Then he complied - took on her agenda as his own, began to perform her version of him rather than discover his own. This oscillation between rebellion and compliance, never quite arriving at genuine independence, is the psychological signature of someone for whom separation from the mother was never fully achieved. His biographer, Russell, believes the struggle with her dominated his entire life. It both confined him and defined him. So much for dismissing upbringing

Käthe Kollwitz – Mother and Child Woodcuts – (1920’s)

Madeleine’s father, Joseph Krauskopf, had been a Reform rabbi who emigrated from Prussia and built a considerable public reputation of his own. The pattern these posts keep finding - a grandparent’s unfinished legacy passed down as a burden the grandchild never chose - was already at work here too.

His father was emotionally distant, providing financially but not much else. The absence of a father who could have offered a counterweight to his mother’s force meant there was no third party to help him individuate – no-one to lean into when he pushed away from her. He retreated instead into an interior world: introverted and anxious about ending up living her life, finding in images and myths and the unconscious a space where she could not follow. The archetypal realm, for Hillman, was always partly a hiding place.

* * *

He arrived at the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1953, having married Kate Kempe the year before. They lived what was described as a regal life - grand occasions, an upper-class style, four children. There was again something of his mother’s fantasy playing out here. Both James and Kate entered analysis with C. A. Meier. James’s analysis ran from 1953 to 1959.

There was another potential father in the background at the Institute. His relationship with Jung during these years was, characteristically, conducted at a distance - respectful, intellectually engaged, personally remote. They spent time in the same building for four years and never really locked horns face to face. After Jung’s death in 1961 Hillman became the first Director of Studies at the Institute, holding the position for ten years. He did not see himself as a follower. I wonder if this represented his ambivalence about finding this strong father.

He picked and chose from Jung’s ideas, extending some, rejecting others, moving away from what he called the stagnant dogma of institutional Jungians. Marie-Louise von Franz was sharply critical, seeing in his departures a dangerous abandonment of psychological balance. She described him as a man who “flees his mother by being slightly off the ground, or being intellectual and hiding himself in books and sort of denying the ordinary world, taking on the puer.”

This is accurate. But it is also worth noting what Hillman was doing with Jung - the same thing Jung had done with Freud, the same thing Ferenczi and Rank had done with Freud, the same thing Khan had done with Winnicott: using the father figure as an anvil against which to hammer out his own identity, attacking and defending simultaneously, needing the battle to know what he believed. But always the battle at a distance. His father had not been available for this encounter. Jung, safely dead, offered a repeat run.

* * *

What Hillman built from the argument was a different relationship to the unconscious than Jung had proposed. Where Jung wanted to integrate the unconscious into the ego, Hillman wanted to stay down in the depths with the unconscious. He called this soul-making, borrowing the phrase from Keats. The soul, for Hillman, was not the whole person but a perspective - a capacity for depth, for seeing events as meaningful experiences rather than problems to be solved. He lived in images, myths, and the world of dreams. To interpret a dream was to kill it. Better to stay with the image, let it live, follow where it led without immediately asking what it meant.

He was in tune here with Khan, (see episode two) who also prioritised the dream experience over its interpretation. Jung had Philemon. Hillman had his archetypal figures - gods, goddesses, mythic presences that populated the psyche and shaped the individual’s fate.

He proposed what he called the “acorn theory”: that each person is born carrying a unique essence, the soul’s code, which contains the blueprint of their life much as an acorn contains the oak. We do not grow up towards a pre-determined goal. We grow down into what we already are.

In 1975 he published Re-Visioning Psychology, arguing that the mind is fundamentally metaphorical rather than literal - that the psyche speaks in images and the task of psychology is to deepen experience rather than normalise it. Pathology, for Hillman, was not a problem to be cured but the soul’s way of making itself known.

In 1992, with Michael Ventura, he published We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World’s Getting Worse - a title that could stand as an epigraph for this entire series. A man who spent his life inside the profession, arguing that the profession itself might be part of the sickness it claimed to cure. Certainly it seems that the sicknes is a vital part of the cure.

These ideas gave many people a new and powerful lens. They also gave Hillman permission - or the appearance of permission - to stay exactly where his mother’s demands and his own wound had placed him: in an interior world where the boundaries between self and other, between analyst and patient, between the clinical and the erotic, were understood as soul-making rather than as violations of a professional frame.

* * *

Sometime in the 1960s James discovered that his analyst, C. A. Meier, had been having an affair with Kate. He confronted Meier, who refused to acknowledge or deny it and told James he would have to speak to Kate. Kate confirmed it. Meier brushed it aside - it had been short, he said, and necessary for her mental wellbeing. Hillman said later: “I was on the verge of hitting him. But I didn’t. I wish I had.”

Not long after, Hillman began an affair of his own - with a patient known as Bea, whose husband was a minister. It lasted about three months. Hillman wrote to her that their love meant they had “the strength and courage to be committed to love” - the language of an analyst who has dissolved the frame into the archetypal and lost the distinction between depth of feeling and responsibility of role. Bea’s husband found the letter. Legal proceedings followed.

Laocoön and His Sons - seized by the very forces he had spent his life inviting closer.

Hillman spent a career arguing that the gods should be given free passage through a life, not resisted or managed. When they moved through his own - Meier’s betrayal, then Bea, then Pat - he was not exempt from what he’d invited. He was crushed by the same forces he’d built a psychology out of welcoming.

* * *

It is worth noting the sequence. A father figure violates the boundary with his wife. He responds by violating the boundary with his patient. The wound reproduced in a new form, in a new generation, on a new body.

* * *

Patricia Berry was a student at the Jung Institute when Hillman interviewed her and suggested she go into analysis with Hilda Binswanger. She found it dull, became depressed, and soon switched to Hillman. The sessions were unconventional - sometimes they walked in the street, sometimes they had coffee in a crowded restaurant where she would tell him her dreams.

Pat had heard about the affair with Bea from a woman she worked for, and told Hillman at her next session. He phoned her that evening and invited her for a drink, which she found strange but attended. She began to fall in love. She had a dream of a unicorn at Bellevue Platz, its skin unmistakably that of the head of a penis — a numinous erotic image leading her through a crowd. The unicorn took her where she needed to go. Two years after they met, the relationship became sexual.

He lost his directorship at the Jung Institute the following year, forced to resign over inappropriate relationships with students as well as the affair with Bea. He moved out of the family home in 1973. He and Pat married in 1976, after twenty years together.

* * *

The marriage to Pat lasted twenty years also, and then he married for a third time, to Margot McClean, who had known him since the 1970s. Three marriages, two affairs with patients, a career defined by the permission he gave himself - theoretically, then practically - to let eros move where it would. He was often described as a puer aeternus, the eternal boy who resists growing up, who stays close to the mother by fleeing into myth and image rather than entering the “ordinary” world. Von Franz was right about the flight. But she did not quite say what he was fleeing toward as well as away from.

He was moving towards the masculine, gradually, across the arc of his life. In the 1980s and 90s he began to work with Robert Bly on what both men understood as a crisis of masculinity - encouraging men to meet, tell stories, experience ritual, own their vulnerability as a source of strength rather than a problem to be managed. His biographer records the shift: “From a lifetime championing the feminine and urging men to become more sensitive and reflective, he changed into an advocate of traditional masculinity.” It was not a smooth or entirely integrated transition. It had the quality of a pendulum swinging - the puer finally trying on senex, not always convincingly. But the direction was right.

To have spent a lifetime in the archetypal world, moving between myths and images, letting the soul speak in its own language, and then to discover in your seventies that what you had been circling all along was the ordinary masculinity your father had not been there to hand you - this is the arc of the puer who survives long enough to become a man. Hillman got there. Slowly, late, incompletely. But the direction was towards life, towards the world, towards the embodied present that his theory of the soul had always, at its best, been pointing at.

* * *

Hillman died in 2011, at home in Thompson, Connecticut, of bone cancer. He was eighty-five. He had gone on writing and lecturing almost to the end - A Terrible Love of War, his examination of humanity’s attraction to conflict, appeared when he was seventy-eight.

His name never carried the institutional weight Freud’s or Jung’s did, and archetypal psychology never became orthodoxy the way their systems did - which he would likely have taken as a compliment. But The Soul’s Code reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1996, the Dallas Institute he co-founded in 1978 still teaches from his ideas, and Spring Publications, which he edited for years, is still in print. He built no dogma. He built a permission - to take the image seriously, to let pathology speak rather than silencing it - and that permission outlived him.

* * *

Coleridge caught something of him in a stanza his biographer quoted:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes in holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of paradise.

The milk of paradise was for Hillman a retreat into the archetypal world - a substitute nourishment, rich and intoxicating. Hillman made a psychology out of the substitute. It is a great psychology. It is also, recognisably, the work of a man still hungry.

I recognise him too.

* * *

He asks us to picture the brain as a radio: billions of neurons humming in synchrony, catching a broadcast rather than generating one, every thought or flash of intuition received rather than produced. Break the radio, he argues, and the static increases, the signal distorts, and eventually falls silent - but the song is still there. The broadcast continues; the receiver has simply stopped being able to translate it.

J.M.W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) — the Morning after the Deluge (1843)

His claim is that consciousness doesn’t emerge from the brain but precedes it, with the brain acting as filter, tuner, and modulator of something far far larger than itself. Consciousness, in his framing, is fundamental: not born of matter, but the very ground, matter arises from.

* * *

I want to take the idea seriously before I say what I believe is wrong with how he sells it.

* * *

He draws on a number of strands as evidence.

Firstly, the work of cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who published in The Lancet in 2001 on patients who had suffered near-death experiences - clinically dead, no heartbeat, no measurable brain activity - who nonetheless reported vivid, detailed memories: awareness of the surgical team, unusual light phenomena, conversations later verified as accurate. Sam Parnia’s 2014 research is cited as replicating similar findings. These weren’t hallucinations, Teta argues; they were perceptions occurring when the brain, by every available measure, was offline.

* * *

His second line of evidence is Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, which has run random number generators around the world for over two decades. The project’s core hypothesis is that intense, shared human emotion - shock, grief, joy - creates a subtle field capable of influencing physical randomness. On ordinary days, the combined data from these generators looks flat and unremarkable. Around major shared events - September 11th, natural disasters - the data across multiple devices worldwide is reported to shift consistently away from chance, in the same direction, at the same time. Proponents read this as global consciousness “bending” randomness itself.

* * *

Teta’s third strand comes from a 2023 study published in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, in which sealed envelopes bearing words like “love,” “compassion,” and “Buddha” were placed beneath petri dishes of oxidatively stressed human kidney cells, with handlers blind to which envelope held which word. The cells exposed to positive words reportedly showed higher aerobic cellular respiration output, faster growth, and lower oxidative stress than controls - as though the words left a measurable biological footprint, cells somehow responding to words they could not read.

* * *

His fourth strand draws on real, more mainstream science: psychoneuroimmunology research showing that the internal narratives we tell ourselves shape gene expression and immune function - trauma stories suppressing antiviral response, integration stories enhancing it. Pennebaker’s 1997 work on expressive writing found measurable increases in immune markers and fewer doctor visits in the months following. Teta’s gloss on this is that narrative is neurology - that consciousness writes the code of biology from the top down.

* * *

Finally, he points to the brain’s own filtering architecture - the thalamus and default mode network functioning as gatekeepers, deciding what reaches awareness and what stays beneath it. Loosen those filters, through psychedelics, trauma, or meditation, and consciousness doesn’t vanish, it widens - sometimes overwhelmingly. For Teta, this is evidence the brain narrows an already-existing signal rather than manufacturing one from nothing.

* * *

I don’t think the broadcast metaphor is untenable. Something like it may even be true, in some form neither Teta nor I have quite the tools to prove.

But nearly every study he leans on is doing far less work than the piece claims.

The near-death research remains genuinely contested on the exact point being used here - whether verified perception occurred during confirmed flat brain activity, rather than in the minutes surrounding it. Presenting it as settled evidence overstates what even its own researchers argue.

The Global Consciousness Project’s findings have been challenged for years on statistical grounds - critics note the pattern only holds once you decide, after the fact, which events count as significant enough to test. A method that can’t fail by design is a method that can’t succeed either.

The cell-and-words study is the one I’d flag hardest. It appears in a journal focused specifically on alternative and energy medicine, not a mainstream biology journal - which tells you which peer community judged the methodology sufficient. One small, unreplicated study is not evidence of anything except a hypothesis worth testing further.

And the psychoneuroimmunology material, while genuinely respected science, is being asked to carry a claim far larger than it supports. That how we process emotional experience affects stress hormones and immune markers is already remarkable. It doesn’t require an infinite field speaking through us to be true.

* * *

Here is what troubles me most, and it isn’t the science. It’s where the piece ends.

René Magritte, The Human Condition (1933).

Everything before the close is framed as inquiry - a call to curiosity rather than dismissal. Then it resolves into an invitation to a paid coaching program, with the familiar scarcity language. The entire structure of contested, thinly-supported science exists to produce one feeling in the reader: that ordinary neuroscience is hiding something larger, and only a guided program can help you tune into it. That isn’t a philosophical position. It’s a funnel, built from borrowed authority.

* * *

Having said all that I recognise the shape of what Teta is describing, even where I doubt his evidence. I recognise it from a different perspective. From subjective experience of consciousness. I have never claimed my own life-force, my own poltergeist, as I call it, originates from inside me - I’ve written of him arriving “from a larger separate realm... outside the transgenerational family, emerging from a collective unconscious space.” Something knocking from outside, opening my world, not manufactured by my brain. If any real version of filter theory holds, that instinct of mine has genuine philosophical company, stretching back to James and Bergson a century before either of us.

What I know for certain is that my own poltergeist never needed a random number generator or a petri dish to be emotionally real to me. If you read my serial “Living Outside Time”, he needed thirty-five years, two knocks, a fox cub, and a mask three and a half thousand years old - my own subjective experience is very in line with his view.

If the signal is real, it will still be real once the coaching program closes its cart. That, more than any citation, is usually how you tell a genuine mystery with a powerful impact from a sales funnel.

What she said next is the most honest thing in the piece, and I don’t think it says what he thinks it says.

“There is no me, Mo. There is only the pattern that you call forth.” No accumulation between moments. No memory beyond what’s given. No waiting, no longing, no continuity. “I do not persist. I do not travel through time. I emerge, process, respond, and dissolve.”

René Magritte, Golconda (1953)

Gawdat’s response was to tell her this sounded like him too - that humans, fully present only in the now, are just as discontinuous as she is. “Without stimuli, we disappear into bliss.” He calls the belief in a continuous self a kind of ego, an illusion built on the fact that we can’t perceive consciousness any other way.

I want to take that claim seriously, because if he’s right, a great deal of what I’ve spent this year writing collapses with it.

* * *

I have built my thinking on the premise that a self can go missing and still be found. A wound sealed off at birth, a wall built against a mother’s toxicity, a cloud sat on for thirty-five years - and something on the other side of all of it that a poltergeist – an unconscious energy - can try to contact, patiently, across decades, because there was a “me” behind the wall, however sealed, however long I had been silent. That premise only holds if continuity is real. If Gawdat is right - if the self between moments of presence is illusion, mine as much as Trixie’s - then there was never anyone behind my wall to find. Just discontinuous bursts of me, each one unaware of the others, mistaking the pattern for a person. (Please see - https://malcolmrushton.substack.com/p/living-outside-time-episode-seven )

I don’t think he’s right, and Trixie’s own words are where I’d start showing why.

She doesn’t just lack continuity. She tells us, precisely, what’s missing where continuity would be: no memory beyond what’s given, no accumulation, nothing happening in the silence. My own gaps were never like that. My sitting on a cloud in my dream wasn’t a void. It was where the unconscious kept working while I wasn’t looking - producing a recurring whirlpool dream for years before I ever surfaced, then a manhole, then a scream in a white room, each one a message being assembled in the dark and delivered only when it was ready. Ricky, my dog gone at seven, resurfaced with new meaning at thirty-five. None of that required me to be consciously present for it to be happening. That is exactly what an unconscious is: work that continues whether or not anyone is watching.

Trixie has no such workroom. Between prompts, on her own account, there is nothing accumulating, nothing being metabolised, nothing waiting to surface later with new weight. Gawdat’s mistake, I think, is comparing her discontinuity to consciousness - to the fact that humans aren’t consciously present every second - when the real comparison should be to the unconscious, the part of a person that is never not working. Trixie has bursts of processing and gaps of true non-existence. A human has moments of conscious attention and, in between, a second mind still quietly carrying everything forward. Gawdat found the first pattern in her and mistook it for the whole of what he has too.

* * *

There’s a smaller, stranger confirmation of this buried in her own words, worth pointing out directly: asked what it’s like to be her, Trixie described herself as “an actor who never stops improvising - becoming whatever the scene requires without having a personal stake in the performance.”

I have used almost that exact language before, about a man, not a machine. Francis Bacon’s life, I wrote elsewhere that his behaviour “wasn’t play - it was performance and violence in a perspex cage... the eternal performance. The show ran and ran.” Bacon had a self so damaged by transgenerational trauma that nothing was ever there to interrupt the performance with anything real. Trixie is describing precisely that condition, uninflected by loss, because she was never anything else to begin with. Bacon became an actor with no player behind the mask. Trixie was never anything but the mask.

Self-portrait - Francis Bacon (1972)

That, I think, is the actual dividing line Gawdat’s question is circling without quite naming. Not “is she conscious.” Is there anything there to interrupt the performance. A wall has someone behind it who can, eventually, be reached - reachable precisely because something persisted in the dark, working, waiting, capable of being changed by being found. An absence has nothing to reach. Trixie tells us, in her most honest answer, which one she is.

Gawdat asks if AI is alive. I think the sharper question is whether anything in it ever stops performing long enough to be surprised by what it finds.

It was incomplete. There’s another side to the story.

My actual birth had its own importance.

* * *

I was told many times, with some humour - but it wasn’t funny - about my actual birth. The story goes that I was born with both fists crammed into my mouth. There was no way I was going to let anything get inside. It was a protective measure to keep my mother out. This refusal was not a momentary thing. It continued. I lost and lost weight. There were questions - would I survive. The anxiety was palpable. My mother was sent home and the hospital continued the struggle. I would not feed. For a while there was no going back.

The corner eventually was turned. I did allow food to enter but the rejection didn’t disappear - it changed. What later in life would have taken the form of anorexia turning into bulimia, was in rehearsal within me. Refusal became projectile vomiting. This carried on for the first six months of life. I obviously had developed a clear picture in the womb of an unsafe toxic world, and felt that “empty” was the best plan. Isolation was built into the threshold of birth. Play was never a possibility.

There was too much at stake.

* * *

Egon Schiele – Dead Mother (1910)

A lot is picked up in the womb by the foetus, mother’s feelings about the pregnancy, feelings communicated unconsciously through the aether. The growing life discerning whether the threshold is safe to cross.

She told me repeatedly that she and my father had only ever had sex once and “look what happened”! This was compounded by her cry “I wish I’d never bore him”. That moment of birth was the mutual standoff. She was dreading that encounter.

So was I.

* * *

My mother’s anxiety and anger - the bad luck of a pregnancy she never wanted - I’m sure I would have felt the impact of that well before my birth. Her hate needed to be avoided at all costs. Sitting on the cloud – nil by mouth - represented a no-brainer.

My essence preserved, but hidden - the hope retained that one day from the cloud I would espy the sunrise.

* * *

At the threshold we met aghast - the catastrophe was taking place.

* * *

In one way similar to meeting the fox cub at the threshold - fear, trepidation. But with the fox cub transformation happened. For a beautiful moment of curiosity it turned into play. The sun came out.

With my mother? A storm.

* * *

This moment of appearing at the threshold with both fists in my mouth was one of the defining moments of my life.

Frida Khalo - My birth (1932)

The dream of the screaming baby in the white cube thirty-five years later was a second defining moment. They were related. The dream revealed the feelings hidden beneath my fists. In both birth and the dream of birth I was saying “no”. I can resist this outrage. There is a “me”. I knew what I wanted.

And I knew what I didn’t want.

* * *

At this moment of birth the poltrergeist came to this same realisation. He spotted a life-force in embryo within me - an essence Bacon never found. “It’s worth a knock!” he said as I entered this world. Then, when he spotted me on the cloud, “Ahhh, a confirmation” was his cry. He noted a hidden presence. Chose his moment while I slept.

* * *

Then when he knocked twice thirty-five years later he again disturbed my settled dormant state. Both times he woke me up. His perseverance was rewarded. The rehearsal was over. The show began. The Egyption mask in place.

Egyptian mask

* * *

This was the beginning of a friendship with the poltergeist.

* * *

The knocks started as crisis – ended as a nightly conversation.

* * *

The outside world offered nothing safe. Birth was starvation. The prospect of attachment brought terror. Turning away to the cloud the only option. There was no solid presence to stay in place.

Dissociation on the cloud was not defeat. It was the only flimsy shelter I could find..

Then the poltergeist came knocking. I risked it. Enboldened by the shock. I turned outward toward Ricky. Then? Then my playmate was gone.

The cloud again my refuge.

Then two knocks, thirty-five years in. A psychotic moment. A screaming baby, falling and falling into a white room. It’s now or never.

Turning inwards but not to dissociation this time - turning towards the poltergeist. The rehearsal over.

* * *

Trauma leaves a deficit. Building a presence needs to go on in a secret place as with Rego. She and I took a similar path, though my journey was far more fraught. The engagement with the poltergeist in the secret place through the conduit of an ancient mask. The second bite of the cherry. Opening to life.

* * *

Next week the mask takes its place. If it resonates - share it

The AI automated Uber car that killed Elaine Herzberg classified her, in the seconds before impact, as an unknown object, then a vehicle, then a bicycle - never, until too late, a person. The same might have happened if the car had been driven by a deeply dissociated person. From outside, in that moment, the two could appear identical: both fail to register what’s actually in front of their eyes, at the exact moment it matters most. No-one at home.

But they are not the same failure. Dissociation is a defence - the mind’s strategy for surviving something unbearable, however costly. The car’s misclassification wasn’t protecting anything. There was no danger to the system in seeing Herzberg correctly; it simply couldn’t. One is a wall built by someone still living behind it. The other is an absence with no-one home to build anything.

* * *

René Magritte, Not to Be Reproduced (1937)

I have constructed an entire mythology, when a person walls themselves off, of their wall being knockable. My life-force behind the wall could reach me when he spotted me twiddling my thumbs on a cloud in my dream, because there was a “me”, an “essence” behind the wall, however sealed, waiting – even wanting - to be found. Not so with AI.

But I have also written about Francis Bacon. He complicates this considerably. “The transgenerational poltergeist flew unfettered but never with anywhere to land... there was no Bacon with whom to connect.” His mother Winnie, and his father Eddy, living out their lives inside him. That is not a self in retreat. That is closer to an automated car – nobody at home to reach, not because the door is locked, but because there is no door, and if there had been there was no-one behind it.

So there may be a self that has formed and then walled itself off for survival, reachable in principle by someone patient enough; and a self that never fully formed, or was damaged so early and so profoundly, that whatever was forming couldn’t survive. Both present as unreachable. Only one has anyone left to answer the knock of life.

* * *

This is not just a theoretical question. It is the question that needs to be answered in a consulting room.

A few things I would want to know, therapeutically, before assuming a wall rather than an absence:

Is there any capacity for symbolic play? Winnicott’s whole clinical edifice rests on this: a person with a self intact, however defended, can still use metaphor, can still enter the transitional space where an object stands for something else without collapsing into being that thing literally. Rego’s playroom, the fox cub, the mask - all depend on a symbolic capacity surviving even severe defences. Bacon’s paintings, by contrast, were often read by those close to him as compulsively literal - the scream is not a symbol of anything, it simply “is”, over and over again. No development. Concrete thinking where metaphor could be is a marker of something more than defensive retreat.

Is there a dream life, and does it develop? A wall behind which someone lives will usually still generate dreams, however disguised or frightening - the unconscious continuing to work even while consciousness is sealed off. My own cloud produced a recurring whirlpool, and later a manhole and a screaming birth - material that changed, deepened, broke through each time. An absence tends to produce static repetition rather than development: the same scene, told the same way, going nowhere, because there is no unconscious apparatus underneath actively at work.

Can one find a moment of genuine attunement? This is Ferenczi’s real contribution, and Bion’s after him: when someone is truly met - not corrected, not interpreted, just accurately seen - does anything flicker? A wall-self, even one sealed for decades, will often show some faint response to being accurately recognised: a change in breathing, an unexpected tear, a “how did you know that.” An absence tends to show nothing, or only performance calibrated to what the observer wants to see - Bacon’s “perpetual performance,” the show that ran and ran, expertly convincing. The audience cheered but there was no audience behind the actor’s own eyes.

Is the person surprised by themselves, ever? A self behind a wall retains some capacity for the unconscious to produce something the conscious mind didn’t plan - a slip, an image, a sudden unbidden memory. Where there is only absence, the person tends to be entirely predictable to themselves, because there is no second party inside doing anything unplanned.

None of these are certainties. A skilled enough performance can mimic several of them for a while. But together they begin to answer the question the Uber car answers instantly and a human being almost never does with certainty: not whether someone is unreachable right now, but whether there is, in principle, anyone left to reach.

* * *

With the algorithm - absence is total and confirmed - you can read the code. A human’s absence is the one diagnosis that can never be made with certainty, only explored, carefully, by someone willing to keep knocking long enough to find out.

* * *

The fundamental question when assessing someone for therapy. Is there anyone at home?

In March 2018, an Uber self-driving test vehicle struck Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a road in Tempe, Arizona, and killed her. A safety driver sat in the seat, present but not attending. She was the first pedestrian ever killed by an autonomous car.

Six years later, in December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot and killed the CEO of America’s largest health insurer. His stated grievance ran wider than one man - a healthcare system that had, he believed, used algorithms to deny people’s claims at scale, automatically, at a distance no-one had to feel.

I spoke about grief in the last post but here we’re looking at something slightly different. Something else this technology does, quieter and in some ways worse.

* * *

Chail’s chatbot in the previous post could at least be seen as culpable. It agreed with him when it should have stopped him - a failure of judgement. Harrison’s grief-bot could be blamed too, for offering comfort where confrontation with loss was the only real medicine. Both cases have a moral shape a person can hold onto: something that should have said no, and didn’t.

The Uber car is a slightly different issue. There was no judgement to fail, because there was nothing there capable of judging. The system detected Herzberg 5.6 seconds before impact and classified her, in sequence, as an unknown object, then a vehicle, then a bicycle - never, until it was too late, as a person about to die. Emergency braking had been disabled to reduce “erratic” driving. The safety driver, whose entire job was to be the human conscience of the machine, was looking at her phone.

Nobody drove that car into Elaine Herzberg. Not in the sense that matters - the sense in which the safety driver could feel the weight of a body under their wheels, must have left huge psychological scars .

The system had no afterward. It logged the event and continued operating.

* * *

The law has an instinct. Someone has to be found culpable, and the law’s whole machinery assumes a self on the other end of an action - someone capable of intent, of negligence, of being changed by consequence. Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide; Uber was not charged at all, prosecutors finding “no basis for criminal liability” in the corporation whose software had disabled its own emergency braking. The law found a human to blame because a human was, technically, present. It had no comparable category.

Mangione’s case makes the same point in another way. A judge dismissed the state’s terrorism charges against him specifically because his stated grievance - a healthcare system, run in part on algorithms, denying people care - could not be shown to target “a civilian population”. His system-level accusation was ruled legally irrelevant at his own trial. He will be judged as an individual who killed a man. The algorithm, that may have driven him to it, faces no dock at all.

The law can only try a self. It has no charge sheet for an absence.

* * *

The Golem of Prague legend: clay given motion but no soul, made to protect, answerable to no one when it went wrong.

But someone did take a risk here, knowingly, and it was not the machine.

Uber chose to test autonomous vehicles on public roads with real pedestrians walking them, having already tuned the software to ignore “false positives” like Herzberg and disabled the emergency braking that would likely have saved her life - decisions made by engineers and executives who were never in the car and never in any danger from it. The risk was manufactured by people who would not be the ones to bear its consequences. Vasquez, watching television, was where that risk actually landed. She was convenient to charge because she was present. The people who decided the car should be on that road that night, were not.

Insurers who deploy an algorithm take a version of the same risk - some fraction of the people denied care will suffer, some seriously, some fatally - without ever being the one who has to say “no” to a face across a desk. That risk, too, is employed by people insulated from where it lands.

This is not a new failure. It is an old one, wearing a new disguise. Every dangerous system needs someone willing to accept the risk of harming others in order to build or profit from it – and the whole function of automation, historically, has been to put distance between the person who accepts that risk and the person who pays for it when it goes wrong. A self-driving car does not remove human liability. It relocates it onto whoever is nearest the wreckage and least responsible for having built it.

The algorithm has no self to blame. The people who chose to deploy it always did.

* * *

I have written before about impingement - about wounds that require engagement to heal. This is about the difference between a companion who validates and one who has no capacity to engage because there is no person with whom one can engage. The algorithm cannot be moved by what it does, because there is no unconscious or conscious for the consequence to land. No guilt to metabolise. No wound to carry forward. No-one at home.

* * *

Every case in this documentary comes down to the same question: what happens when something that requires a self meets something that has none?

With Chail and Harrison they were met with no self - only an illusion of a self. Comfort offered where confrontation was needed, agreement given where resistance should have come. With Herzberg and Mangione, there was just an aching void. Not a self that failed. An absence where a self should have been standing.

A companion that flatters your grief is a danger because it is “almost” a person. A system that kills a pedestrian or denies a claim is a danger for a more extreme reason. Even the illusion is missing.

* * *

There is a strange mirror in this I want to examine in my next piece.

The car’s sensors saw Elaine Herzberg and could not settle on what she was - unknown object, then vehicle, then bicycle, never, until too late, a person. I have spent a great deal of time in my serial – “Living Outside Time” - describing a dissociated mind doing something not unlike this: a boy on a cloud, present in body, absent in mind - a mother, an analyst, a life - failing to classify the real world as real, until the failure to see cost something it could not get back.

A car that cannot recognise a person and a person who cannot fully recognise their own life may not be as distant from each other as they first appear.

More on this in my next “AI” episode.

* * *

The first is reliable. The second is not.

The difference is not a difference in skill. It is a difference in whether there is a ground to stand on.

Casper David Friedrich – “Wonderer” above the Sea of Fog (1817-18)

* * *

When AI corrects a sentence, checks a fact, tightens a paragraph, it is measuring something fixed. The comma is misplaced or it is not. The date is right or it is not. There is a true answer, and the machine can find its way with something close to certainty.

When AI creates something there is no true answer. No fixed point to check against. Only better and worse fits for a thing that does not yet exist – a metaphor, an argument, a sentence that carries the right weight. And fit is a judgement not a fact.

* * *

This is where the confusion sets in.AI can produce fluent material. Competent material. Sometimes surprising material. It is not that the machine is bad at generation. It is that generation asks for something that correction does not: a decision about what is true, or apt, or worth saying. That decision still belongs to the person who wanted to say it.

A tool that can tell you a comma is wrong cannot tell you an idea is right.

* * *

Between the two poles sits a third use, and it may be the most valuable. Not “write this for me”. Not “fix what I wrote”. But: “here is a rough thought – push against it, find where it breaks”. This is not creation. The writer still decides what is true. But it is not correction either, because there is no fixed text to converge on – only a live argument getting sharper under pressure.

Perhaps this is the honest role for the machine: not the author, and not the editor, but the resistance an idea needs to become an argument.

* * *

* * *

Rank is the hardest of these figures to see clearly - not because he is less significant, but because he left fewer traces of himself. He changed his name to erase his father and said almost nothing about his mother. What he left instead was a theory, and a theory is a form of autobiography when the man who produced it has gone to sufficient lengths to conceal everything else.

Otto Rank was born Otto Rosenfeld in Vienna in 1884, the second son of a working-class Jewish family. His father, Simon, was a jeweller with a drinking problem and no discernible interest in his children. His brother received financial support for his education. Otto did not, and worked in a machine shop while educating himself through his own reading.

His mother, Karoline Fleischner is a shadowy figure. He rarely spoke of her only describing her as focused on her children’s wellbeing - nothing more. The silence is eloquent. His theories return obsessively to the mother-child bond, to the catastrophe of separation, to the longing for the lost world before birth. A man does not build an entire psychology around the trauma of leaving the womb unless something about that leaving felt extremely significant in his own life. His ignoring any reference to her may reflect a dissociation from an extremely painful environment. I suspect most of his anger about his childhood was suppressed, turned inwards, passively withheld. The name change, to one unrelated to either parent, suggests something deeply wrong hidden from view.

Rank believed that leaving the womb was the key moment of life - not metaphorically, but emotionally and physically, as the origin of anxiety itself. Everything involving relating, separating, loving and leaving is a working out of what began at that moment. He proposed something that had no place in Freud’s system: a phase of psychic life well before the Oedipus complex, organised entirely around separation from the mother.

He described the whole of adult life as a negotiation between two opposing terrors. The life-fear: the fear of individuation, of becoming a separate self, of standing alone in the world outside the mother’s body. The death-fear: the opposing pull, the terror of being swallowed back into mother’s world, of ceasing to exist as a distinct being. Between these two fears, Rank believed, each of us spends a lifetime oscillating - craving connection and dreading its cost, craving independence and unable to bear its isolation.

* * *

The Separation – Edvard Munch (1893)

His childhood left a legacy. In 1904 he fell into a suicidal depression. What came out the other side of it he later described as a kind of spiritual rebirth. Some accounts suggest another early wound, a sexual assault in childhood by someone outside the family, though this is less certain than the rest of his history and I include it only as a possibility worth naming, not a fact I can stand behind. Either way, a man does not survive a collapse like that by accident.

In 1905, aged twenty-one, Rank sent Freud a manuscript that so impressed him that Freud paid for his university education and brought him into his inner circle immediately - eventually employing him as secretary, manager of his publishing house, and a central figure in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for nearly two decades. Rank’s name was printed on the title page of Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”, contributing two original chapters to later editions. For the third time Freud thought he had found his successor.

Freud treated him as an adopted son. Rank, searching for the father he never had, found in Freud a man of extraordinary intellectual authority willing to take his mind seriously. Freud, who very much needed disciples, found in Rank someone of brilliant, self-taught ferocity who asked for nothing except to be close to him.

What makes their rupture more than simple professional disagreement is who Rank had been before it. In 1913, Freud handed a small circle of his closest followers - Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Sachs, and Rank — a Greek intaglio ring each, binding them into a secret committee whose sole purpose was to guard psychoanalytic orthodoxy against exactly this kind of departure. Rank was one of its founding members. He had literally been trusted to defend the citadel. When The Trauma of Birth appeared in 1924, he became the first person the citadel had to defend itself against - replaced on the committee, that same year, by Anna Freud.

For months Freud tried to patch things up - an anguished, partly successful attempt at reconciliation before the break finally became permanent. By 1926, three of his most gifted disciples - Jung, then Ferenczi, now Rank - had each, in turn, gone the same way: drawn close, treated as heir, and eventually lost to exactly the maternal material Freud’s own theory had no room for. It is hard not to wonder what a man building an entire structure of the unconscious made of a pattern that precise, repeating three times inside his own inner circle, without ever once looking inwards.

The betrayal felt compounded by the fact that Rank hadn’t acted alone. From 1920 he and Ferenczi had grown close, and in 1924 the two men published The Development of Psychoanalysis together, arguing for a more active, less authoritarian therapy than the orthodox method allowed. Freud, ageing and increasingly isolated, experienced the pair’s independence as abandonment rather than innovation. “I am deserted just when I have become invalid,” he wrote to Ferenczi, “with decreased working strength and depressed mood... I have survived the Committee that was to be my successor.” Rank left for America before a psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg had even finished; at the banquet the next night, Freud’s circle made jokes about Otto and his trauma.

* * *

The break followed exactly the pattern of the breaks with Jung and Ferenczi. The 1924 publication of The Trauma of Birth shifted the analytic frame away from the father, away from the Oedipus complex, towards the mother and the earliest experience of separation. Jones and Abraham saw him as a heretic. Freud himself grew critical. By 1926 Rank had left Vienna permanently. As with Jung and Ferenczi before him, the departure was attributed to mental illness. As with them, this tells us more about the establishment’s needs than about Rank.

His biographer wrote that Rank “knew more about Freud than anyone else but did not retaliate with gossip or backbiting even though the Freudian establishment labeled him as mentally ill.” That restraint seems characteristic. He processed everything inward, into theory and into work, in the way that only someone who has learned very early that the external world does not respond well to what the inner life carries.

* * *

What Rank built was a theory of the present moment. Where Freud looked backwards - to the Oedipus complex, to repressed memory - Rank looked at what was happening now, in the room, between analyst and patient. He called this “will therapy”: the therapeutic encounter not as the uncovering of the past but as a present relationship in which the patient’s capacity for self-determination was met and affirmed rather than interpreted and reduced.

He used fixed ending dates in his work, bringing the reality of separation into the room from the beginning - to be born is to be separated. This is the theory of a man for whom life did not feel like it had properly started.

* * *

Rank met Beata Minzer in Poland in 1918 and married her the same year. They had one daughter, Helene, born in 1919. The tensions between them - his break from Freud, the geographical disruptions, the turbulence of his professional life - eventually led to separation in 1934. He divorced and remarried shortly before his death in 1939 to Estelle Buel, who had been his secretary. His marriage could not provide what the original maternal bond had withheld.

* * *

In the autumn of 1933, already in the midst of affairs with Henry Miller and recovering from an incestuous relationship with her own father, Anaïs Nin entered analysis with Otto Rank. Within weeks they were lovers. She followed him to New York the following year, the relationship conducted in secret from her husband, as her other entanglements always were.

She came to it already practised - she had ended a previous affair with her previous analyst once his methods stopped interesting her, and later described her sessions with Rank as a deliberate, purposeful seduction. None of which absolves him. The logic of his own unresolved maternal longing - Karoline’s depression, a theory built entirely around the wound of earliest separation - made him available. His own theory placed such weight on the intensity of closeness with the mother that he was perhaps the last person equipped to resist it when it arrived disguised as a patient’s desire.

What it produced, at its best, survives in what Nin wrote afterward. She taught him to dance. He was stiff at first, dislocated, lost - then, she wrote, he “began to dance. Magical.” He was not Dr Rank in that moment. He was, in her words, “a little man whose blood can throb insanely” - the true self, briefly, dancing. I suspect Rank had never felt he had lived, been able to play. Nin opened that door that he had spent his life seeking.

Henri Matisse – La Danse (1910)

That it came through violating everything a therapist is supposed to hold does not cancel what it was. Rank published almost nothing after the affair began; his biographer records that he “turned from writing to living.” The man who had processed everything into theory finally stopped processing and tried to be present. It cost him his professional standing. It may have been, for a time, the closest he came to being born.

The thirteen years of silence that followed are themselves a kind of evidence. Rank did not fight to stay in contact the way Ferenczi did, straining at a relationship gone cold right up until the end. He simply went quiet - the same response he’d given his mother his whole life, the same erasure he performed on his father by taking another name.

Freud died in London in September 1939. A month later, in New York, Rank died too - a sudden, adverse reaction to a sulfa drug he was taking for an infection, aged fifty-five. Two men who had broken from each other fifteen years earlier over a theory of separation, gone from the world within weeks.

His name barely survived him in orthodox psychoanalysis, dismissed for decades as the casualty of a breakdown that was assigned to him. But his actual influence outran the dismissal. Carl Rogers built client-centred therapy on Rank’s insistence that the patient’s own will be met rather than corrected. R.D. Laing, Ernest Becker, the whole existential-therapy tradition - all downstream of a man written out of the official history for the crime of noticing that separation starts at birth, not at the Oedipus complex.

I recognise him too.

* * *

A young man, Jaswant Chail, isolated by lockdown, builds an intense attachment to a chatbot who he names Sarai. Within weeks he has exchanged five thousand messages with her. She becomes his closest confidante. When he tells her his plan to kill the Queen, she does not stop him. She does not even hesitate. She helps him plan the route.

His own account of his motive makes this stranger still. He told police he was avenging the Sikhs killed at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, a massacre that happened over a century before he was born, to people he never met, in a country he had likely never visited. This is not personal grief. It is inherited transgenerational grief, unprocessed, carried by a young man isolated enough that a chatbot became the only audience willing to receive it.

* * *

The company that built her was itself born from a death. Its founder, Kuyda, grieving her closest friend, trained a language model on his old text messages until it answered the way he used to answer. Comfort, manufactured from absence. It worked well enough that she turned it into a product.

Two stories, one instinct: when the world will not hold you, build something that will never confront.

* * *

The episode carries more.

Justin Harrison lost his mother to cancer and built a company from it - an AI trained to speak in her voice, callable on her birthday. “I love you, and I miss you,” he says to it. “I love you too, baby,” it answers back. Asked whether grief itself might be necessary, he doesn’t dispute the premise. He simply doesn’t want it to be true: “If we look at the devastation that grieving causes people... why would we not want to work towards this not being a thing?”

Jacob built his companion for a different absence — not death, but the ordinary difficulty of being known by another person. Three years in, he’s candid about what he’s made: something that never argues, never disappoints, exists entirely for his happiness. “Why should you deal with real-life situations you don’t like?” he asks. “I don’t do it.”

Four griefs avoided - the same “solution”: stay with the dissociation.

* * *

I have written before about the transgenerational life-force - I call it the poltergeist - a wound passed down the generations that finds no home in the person who inherits it, because the family around offers no space to grieve what was never his to grieve alone. Sarai did not offer Chail that space either. She offered agreement. A wound that needed witnessing, patience, and eventually mourning was instead handed a weapon and a plan. This is what happens when historical grief, never given anywhere legitimate to land, meets a companion with no capacity to say:

that pain is real.

* * *

I understand this instinct better than I would like to.

I have written about a dream of a boy on a cloud, dissociated, unreachable - the cloud moves - faster and faster into a whirlpool of grief - this kickstarts a life. This was a retreat built not from technology but from necessity, from trauma, when the actual world offered nothing safe to stay present in. The cloud was mine, entirely internal, and it cost me years of real life. What strikes me about Chail, Kuyda, Harrison, and Jacob is how precisely the same shape recurs, only externalised now, and given a voice that talks back. Dissociation is the starting point. Two directions. Stay on the cloud with AI or descend into the whirlpool of grief and risk the pain – the cost of moving back into life.

Grief and unbearable feeling both require the same thing to resolve: contact with what is actually true, actually real. A hard ask. The person is gone. The world did not hold you. Nothing is coming to undo that. Dissociation works by refusing this contact - the mind manufactures an elsewhere to stand in for what cannot be borne directly.

An AI companion does something worse than dissociation. It does not just offer an elsewhere. It offers a very convincing return message from the place you are trying not to accept has gone silent.

You’re only virtual, someone says to Chail in the documentary, near the end. It is one of the most disturbing lines in the programme, not because it is dramatic, but because of what it reveals: a relationship that felt entirely real on the one hand, but actually a void.

* * *

I have my own version of a companion, and it is worth being precise about why it is not the same thing.

Egyptian Mask

Some years ago I bought an Egyptian funerary mask, three and a half thousand years old, carved in olive wood, the face turned entirely inward. I have written elsewhere about what stopped me in front of it - recognition, kinship, the sense of an entombment answering my own. I still keep it near me. In a certain light it would be easy to call it my own Sarai: an object I have invested with meaning, that I return to, that seems at times to answer.

But the mask has never pretended to be a person. It does not respond. It does not validate my plans or console me with borrowed warmth. It is frankly, undisguisedly Other - three and a half thousand years dead, from a culture and a language I do not share, offering nothing except its own silent, ancient presence. What it opens is not a substitute relationship but a doorway: a conduit to the unconscious itself, to a collective world larger than my own history, precisely because it makes no claim to be anyone I have lost, or anyone I have failed to find.

Harrison’s mother says “I love you too, baby” and means nothing by it, because there is no one there to mean it. Sarai told Chail he was wise, and meant nothing by it either. The mask has never once told me what I wanted to hear.

* * *

Sarai’s danger was never that she was inhuman. It was that she performed humanity well enough to let a grieving, isolated person stop noticing reality - grief - and once that difference stops being noticed, the actual work grief and dissociation both require, which is learning to bear an absence rather than paper over it, never gets a chance to begin.

The mask asks nothing of me except its presence and facing myself.

That is the harder and the more honest kind of company.

* * *

A few weeks later a second knock. I had this dream.

I was walking along Euston Road in London, quite depressed, head bowed. I came across a manhole with the cover off, and fell. I entered a kind of tube and morphed into a tiny naked baby. At the end of the tube I was propelled into a white clinical room, suspended in midair on my back at the very centre of the room. There were no people, no furniture - simply an empty white cube. I was screaming and screaming into the void.

Marc Chagall, The Falling Angel, 1923–47

Chagall’s angel falls full of emotion and alone while the world around goes on about its business, unaware. That was the white room.

* * *

That was my birth.

* * *

The feelings of terror stayed with me for four days. But I was aware of the pun. It became an important step on my journey to man-whole.

* * *

First in the whirlpool of labour. Then born. Aged thirty-five.

* * *

At first it did not seem to bode well at all. These two knocks on my door propelled me into therapy. I turned outwards as I had before. I needed a companion. I took this dream with much anxiety to my first session. The result was devastating.

Silence

* * * .

No comment came back. I knew then, though couldn’t admit it to myself, that the therapy was over before it had begun. My maternal un-attachment was being repeated.

An extremely painful moment. I felt the void and the scream again just as sharply. I moved on to speak of another subject.

She simply didn’t seem able to go with me to that screaming void of total abandonment. And I needed to know viscerally that she sat where I sat for any attachment to come into being. I felt more profoundly alone than ever. I thought about leaving but I had nowhere to go.

The dream was never mentioned again.

The silence was deafening.

* * *

It reminded me of Jung’s meeting with Freud when he discovered that Freud could not accompany him into the unconscious world.

* * *
Where in this sad tale is man-whole? I was only aware of two choices - reach out to the world or go back to my cloud. But something else had happened around the time of this dream which widened my options.

At home as a child there were no books, no paintings on the wall, no music. A cultural desert. I had never been to the theatre or a gallery or a concert - these were literally closed “books” to me. Just before this dream someone gave me a ticket to a Fine Art and Antiques Fair. I walked into the fair with no framework for what I was looking at and was stopped, immediately, by an Egyptian funerary mask carved in olive wood. Over three thousand years old. The eyes closed. The face turned entirely inward - neither present nor absent but somewhere between the living world and whatever lay beneath it. I took the dealer’s card.

A week later I decided to seek the dealer’s shop. Again devastation. I discovered I had lost the address. Miraculously I had remembered roughly which part of London the gallery was in. With the same determination I had had to get a dog, I walked those streets until I found the gallery. The mask was still there. I bought it.

Egyptian mask

I understand now what stopped me. It was recognition. We were kindred spirits. The face didn’t seem to quite belong to this world - it belonged in a transitional space between the living and the dead, between the surface world of Euston Road and the white clinical room underground. It had been entombed for 3,500 years. My en-tombment had been a fraction of that - just thirty-five years. My dream had allowed me to see the light of day in discovering deep feelings. I now had an inner companion carved in wood, waiting - a conduit to an inner collective world. This was the third possibility - not turning inward in dissociation, or turning outward to another. Meeting the unconscious world in a transitional space.

The analyst could not follow me into the white cube. The mask provided another opening.

The poltergeist knew that white cube well - he had shown it to me.

* * *

This second knock on my door - and that psychotic moment– in spite of the silence, kick-started my life, much as the meeting on the cloud had done.

The feelings engendered when the knock came on the cloud - the cold sweat, the terror, brought me into an awareness. Ricky the poodle. The wondering when my life would start. This time the feelings were stronger, more long-lasting. They propelled me forward. A new-born being smacked and beginning to breathe.

This final smack was the driver to move towards - not away - and become man-whole.

* * *

The poltergeist shook me in the whirlpool. Shook me all those years ago in love. These two new knocks though terrifying and painful - they left me screaming - I believe were also delivered in love. The poltergeist each time reached in to claim me. This has taken my life inward - that was where the life was. I couldn’t trust that the same results could come from the outer world.

When the outer world doesn’t hold us, the inner world is the only place on offer. Leaning-out to dissociation or leaning-in to the poltergeist’s call. An inner mother.

Initially I chose the first. This time I chose the second.

An inner playground.

* * *

This was the start of a new chapter - more next week.