I never understood it.

You see, there are other things, and this maybe I did have, though I don't know.

You see, I think the most important thing, and I don't quite know how to express it, is you have a sense for the truth.

And you have a real sense for the truth in relation to yourself.

And be prepared to know, or to try to find out what's going on, and how things are hitting you.

Because only that is going to enable you, really, to face what's going on in other people.

And I think that's the fundamental thing.

And I think somewhere I must have had that.

You see.

And I think that's how I developed.

I think I became dissatisfied when I felt I was becoming sort of mechanical.

The other thing I think one needs, and which I would certainly not have said I had, I hope I have by now, is something about imagination.

Something about an ability to move one's mind in different directions.

So if you're listening to a patient and you get stuck, can you let your mind move and think, or feel?

Maybe I'm talking in the wrong way, or to a different bit, or different part of the patient.

Can I have the kind of flexibility to move in one's thinking?

I think that's a very important quality.

That, I'm sure, could be helped with analysis, terrifically, you see.

But that kind of thing, I think, is absolutely essential.

And that one has to put up with being a bad analyst.

I'm sorry, but it's true.

You can have little signs of development and goodness.

I remember when Ella Shroff supervised me for a time, she was a marvellous analyst.

I remember her saying, that was a nice interpretation.

My heart rose.

And I think one just has to, you see, if you can't bear being bad, and being dumb and mechanical, you'll never be good, is my feeling.

I do think that the way my own thinking, and I hope your thinking is going to develop, is really that when you get stuck or feel bored, you see that the fact that you're stuck or bored, there's something interesting in the room going on, that there are two people in the room and one's stuck.

Why is one stuck, you see?

Not to feel, oh God, what a patient, or to feel, or to be interested in why it is so awful.

That's what you'll be.

You see, remember there's a famous remark that Bierne made about a patient.

This patient is so boring, it's positively fascinating.

And it's true, you see.

You see, how is it that some patients make you feel so stuck?

And what is it?

What are they doing?

Or what is one doing that one can't bear it and see what's underneath?

Because that's another thing about what makes a decent analyst.

You see, only, I think, if you can get, if you can bear what is going on, what goes on in yourself, in your own mind, can you bear what is going on in your patient?

And tolerating our patients, without coming in prematurely, in a way that I think Ali McGinley was talking about, is without coming in prematurely or mechanically.

But tolerating what they bring out in us, or what they stir up in us, is absolutely, going to be absolutely essential.

Can one do that?

Very early on, Bierne had a feeling for this.

Really a feeling for facing the counter-transference, allowing oneself to think about it and use it.

Now that was certainly not in the air.

It wasn't in the air, and of course it is an area that has been enormously developed in our time, and I happen to think is one of the most important areas for the development of analysis, you see.

This whole question of what is going on between the analyst and the patient, or the patient and the analyst, both ways, you know.

And I think it's one of the most important developments.

You see, I mean, Freud knew there was a thing called counter-transference, but he couldn't quite use it, though he was using it up to a point.

But he got the idea, and his whole notion of transference is, to my mind, still basic to us.

That and this stress on working in a very detailed way is very much developed by the British Society.

You see, there's not any...

And by yourself.

By myself, but by the British Society, and then some of the work of Joe Sandler was very interesting in terms of analyst response.

So it is very much, and always when one does seminars or lectures abroad, you can see how important the awareness is abroad, that we've got something about this, about following stuff in detail and recognising the importance of the relationship between analyst and patient.

Things going on in a child, actually, that only go on in the adult with words, is extraordinary.

I don't mean just, say, violence, which is very striking, you see.

But to be able to see a child actually show you what a manic mechanism is like.

I mean, let's give you an example.

I remember a child who was very, very wild, terribly disturbed, very anxious, difficult with food, violent, and very unhappy.

Now, he, at one point, developed a phobia of the trees.

I had a playroom which looked onto my garden, and in the garden, a bit of the garden just outside the window, there was some little azaleas.

One of the azaleas, as all azaleas grow like that, you know, how there was this terrible fear that the tree was going to come in, get through the window, come in and grab him and touch him.

Now, you can see what an interesting thing that is.

That child, in his behaviour with me, would grab me, touch me, bite me, kick me, and you know, the tree was going to come in and grab and tear at you.

Now, you see, seeing this in a child is such a psychotic notion, and yet you can see one element, one way in which it's got built up.

It's a remarkable experience, you see, and then you could see how useless it's going to be when you're an adult, reassuring one, because I would try in my slightly naive way, trying to link his biting and tearing, and show him, so to speak, as a projection.

Could he hear it?

It was much too concrete.

So you understand then about concrete thinking, and you understand about projective mechanisms, because you see them happening.

That is terribly helpful.

A year or two ago, the attacks on analysis in the papers were quite extraordinary.

Now, I don't find that very worrying, really.

Well, because if a thing's good enough, it will draw attacks.

And you don't attack something which hasn't really held your attention.

And I don't think, I mean, I think there is something so fundamentally right about analysis.

Whatever goes this way or that way, you can't destroy it.

It's kind of indestructible.

I'm against neutrality.

What I mean by that is, allow yourself to be affected.

Therefore, for that second, you're not neutral.

That's what I mean.

Once you allow yourself and you think, God, I could beat him, that's terribly helpful.

Don't be neutral.

Then you get a dead, flat mechanical analysis.

You see, once you know, God, I could beat him, then you think, is that my nastiness, or is he asking for it?

Then you can start to soak him.

And it's as easy, i.e., difficult as that.

But you see, this is such an important thing when you're dealing with any kind of destructiveness, aggressiveness, is really trying to see how much it is a masochistic thing.

How much the patient is politely and nicely trying to destroy you.

How much, say the masochism, which makes you feel sadistic, say cruel with the patient, how much that can help you to show the patient what's going on.

You see, if you could say to that patient, you know that you're, or can you see that you're trying to, or you're expecting me to get hostile, to get nasty, as if I would really beat you up.

You see, this comes as something new to a patient.

It will take years.

But it's a terribly interesting and terribly important area, you see.

And it's the same, not when we haven't got to say the masochistic side of the thing, but with the patient who is difficult to reach.

We've got the same basic thought, haven't we?

What I'm interested in is not just the words, but why the patient is talking in that way to me at that time, and whether that won't be indicative of the way we can help him most, you see.

And I think that is what has been developed rather well here.

And contrast to what I dislike enormously, which is when the analyst tries to describe what got stirred up in him, and how this must be due to the patient, and then he acknowledges all kinds of things, I find it absolutely contaminates analysis.

What I think we want is not neutrality, but not contamination.

When you know you're contaminated, use it, you see.

That's really what I'm saying.

Use it for your thinking.

And it's so difficult, and none of us succeed with that.

And that's why the moment you get stuck, you go and talk to a friend.

You see, we say in our workshop, which is now very, very experienced analysts, mostly training analysts, we all notice still that where people get stuck with material is nearly always that they've got slightly drawn in, they're a bit too compliant with the patient or something.

I'm very inspired, actually, to see how much you seem to still enjoy the work, and how I was thinking of Nina Coulthard's book, How to Survive, as an analyst.

But it's not about survival, it's how to flourish, probably, as an analyst.

It is a problem, because you see, if you don't enjoy it, then you should give up early.

The point is that it is so extraordinary that after nearly 60 years, to be honest, after 60 years, beings are always different.

I've never understood how this works.

They've all got oedipus complexes, but they're all different.

Well, thank you very, very much for agreeing to meet with us.

Well, I enjoy myself very much.

I'm so pleased, thank you.

And I shall know some of your faces now when I meet you around.

Thank you.

And thank you for joining.