PRIZE ESSAY

The Arrival of the Bee Box: Poetry and Mental Mechanism

Melanie Hart

In Jeremy Holmes's interesting paper `The language of psychotherapy: metaphor,ambiguity and wholeness' (Holmes 1985) he illustrates the characteristics of analyticlanguage by comparing poetry and psychoanalysis. The context of his discussion is theview ... `that psychoanalysis, whatever its scientific aspirations, is fundamentally alinguistic or interpretive discipline, primarily concerned with meaning rather thanmechanism'. He suggests further that '... metaphor, standing transitionally (Winnicott 1971)between the entirely unspoken private thought and the generalisation, is poetic and analytictruth.... A consequence of this viewpoint is that analytic theory becomes not so much abody of objective knowledge as a set of rules and guidelines for interpreting transferentialmetaphors ... theory is a language for describing the experience of therapy'.

Considering these ideas in relation to my work with a very disturbed young patient, Iwondered whether it might be possible, through an interpretation of metaphor, to locate incertain sorts of poetry some of the mental mechanisms described in analytic theory whichseemed relevant to her way of being. Those that interested me are central to the hypothesesabout mental functioning in the paranoid-schizoid position and manic depression putforward by Melanie Klein (Klein, from 1935 onwards) and Wilfred Bion's amplification ofthese. In particular, I was interested to explore Bion's observations of psychotic processes,especially his descriptions, so difficult to grasp, of the vicissitudes of the senses and ofverbal thought (mutilation, compression and agglomeration) under the impact of projectiveidentification (Bion 1956, 1957 and elsewhere), and the notion of the need for containment.Since the writing of poetry presupposes at the very least a facility for verbal thought, I wasnot very sanguine about this enterprise. However, knowledge of Sylvia Plath's biographyprompted the idea that such theoretical reference points might be recognisable in her work.I could not guess at the way in which they seem to me to illuminate each other. The poem Ihave chosen was written towards the end of her life and is called The Arrival of the BeeBox.

The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, this clean wood boxSquare as a chair and almost too heavy to liftI would say it was the coffin of a midgetOr a square babyWere there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.I have to live with it overnightAnd I can't keep away from it.

Address for correspondence: 13 Sibella Road, London SW4.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 5(4), 1989© The author

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There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.It is dark, dark,With the swarmy feel of African handsMinute and shrunk for export,Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?It is the noise that appals me most of all,The unintelligible syllables.It is like a Roman mob,Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!I lay my ear to the furious Latin.I am not a Caesar.I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.They can be sent back.They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are ...I wonder if they would forget meIf I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediatelyIn my moon suit and funeral veil.I am no source of honeySo why should they turn on me?Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.The box is only temporary.

Speaking of Sylvia Plath's late poems Philip Larkin concluded: `As poems, they are tothe highest degree original and scarcely less effective. How valuable they are depends onhow highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify,and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow' (Larkin 1982). If we try to clarifythe meaning of this poem by reading it as if it were the content of a session, may wediscover something with which it is possible to identify or at least discover the source ofLarkin's disquiet?

The poet announces first of all that something has arrived. It has arrived at, and enteredinto, her private space. She is responsible for its arrival because something issued fromherself which caused it to arrive - she `ordered' it. This implies that the subject initiallysought the object lovingly, expecting to receive something good, and the ordering of foodis suggested. There is a further implication that the structure of this object has someconnection with herself, that she is responsible for the form it takes. The object is acontainer. It contains bees. Bees are highly organised creatures with the capacity to createout of their interaction with objects separate from themselves a third, independent of either- honey. The subject has been hoping to receive through the box-object something of thiscreative quality.

The container and contents are next taken into the subject's mind and appraised theretogether as an affective object. Far from being pleasant, it immediately arouses feelings ofa profoundly disturbing sort with associations to death, disfigurement, dead babies andmeaningless sound, this last being the only sign of life. With these associations allcommon symbolic links are shattered. We are now in an intensely

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personal realm of meaning. It is as though we are being asked to hold in our own minds allthat bees might ordinarily represent and to set against this what they are to the poet.

Associating further to the object, the subject describes it as a sealed unit. It is locked.She cannot get into it nor can the contents get into her. This is fortunate because thecontents are dangerous. However, she has to stay with it. Indeed, the object is inseparablefrom herself. `I can't keep away from it'. Following the zoom-in effect of the poem's inwardmovement, the implication is that the subject experiences the object as a part of herself,inside her, but unassimilated.

There is no way the subject can accurately describe the contents of the `box' becausethey are not available to perception - `I cannot see what is in there'. But they can beapperceived. The feelings produced by the contents are terrifying. They are not onlyfrightening with the sense of compressed rage straining to escape. The images convey adreadful savagery. The contents of the object suffer intensely. Their creative potential isdenied them. They have been sadistically treated. All the horrors of the slave ships areevoked in the subject's picture of

... African handsMinute and shrunk for export.

The contents are wretched, furious and destructive and have somehow been compressedfor their journey into the subject's mind. They are not one thing but myriad - particles,each carrying the same threatening affect.

The subject's immediate response is to consider how to evacuate the contents of theobject. We are now nearly halfway through our poem/session and from an inwardpropulsion an outward one begins to build up, creating formally the idea of a line oftrajectory being retraced in reverse.

The second movement begins with the question `How can I let them out?'. This is astatement as well as a query. First the understanding is that she cannot compassionately letthem out because of the destruction they will cause. The question occurring simultaneouslywith this exclamation of impossibility is how to achieve it all the same? It is necessary toevacuate the contents. The subject feels invaded. The attackers are inside her. She cannotdeal with them there. She tells us that what appals her most is the meaningless noise of thecontents. Words have been broken into syllables (even letters: bees/b's). She can make nosense of them. But the thought of the sense they might make if put together syntactically,made whole, is even more appalling: `but my god, together'. Straining after sense, thesubject lays her ear to the babble. She is confused, for while her ear will intensify thesound it is not the tool to decipher it. She no longer knows what to do to gain a meaningshe will be able to tolerate. Contact with the contents threatens her grasp on reality.

Recognising that she cannot control the contents of the box -'I am not a Caesar' - thepoet tries to improve the situation for herself by attempting magically to deny the anxietythis causes her and she asserts a rising manic omnipotence. With the words -'I have simplyordered a box of maniacs' - she alludes to many aspects of her situation. There is thepoignant denial of its dreadful reality, the urgent wish that this should all turn out to benothing more than a simple-minded or childlike mistake on her part. Nothing serious.Mistakes can be rectified. There is the implication that the situation is a childish one, `ordered' or created by the child in herself. The word maniac with its inner link to mania, orthe manic state, emphatically ties the emotional contents of the box to her own innerpsychic reality.

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The predicament is that, if she tries to rectify her mistake and `simply' try to find abetter box to order (to find a less disordered mind) she will in the process lose somethingintrinsically and vitally her own, however distressing it is. This is expanded in the wordsthat follow. The way to rectify matters is to send the box back. Interestingly she uses thepassive rather than the active tense for this notion -'They can be sent back'. The grammaraids her struggle to deny her connectedness to the box. It helps to distance them. `They candie. I need feed them nothing. I am the owner.' But with this sadistic assertion ofomnipotent control denial fails her, for she owns the contents of the box in the same sensethat Prospero owns Caliban when he says of him ... this thing of darkness I acknowledgemine'. They remain fundamentally inextricable, her predicament unchanged.

The sadism of her imagined attack on the contents of the box leads the subject to re-experience their threatening nature. This has become worse than ever. They are potentiallydevouring. She fears they will devour her. But poignantly embedded in the line - 'I wonderhow hungry they are?' - if we stress the word `they', is the terrible hunger she tooexperiences. The subject not only re-asserts their link to herself since they share the samedesires but, in the unspoken thought - could they possibly be as hungry as I am?' - for thefirst time allows us to sense her own terrible deprivation and longing for goodnourishment, the need that precipitated the original 'ordering' of the box.

From this position of omnipotent ownership the poet reconsiders the possibility ofharbouring the contents herself were she to release them. Would they forget her as theyforage for the source of nourishment? Given the sympathetic bond between the subject andher contents, this is the same as saying, 'Could I forget myself?'. In the face of the anxietyengendered by the idea of their release, she does indeed 'forget' herself. She becomes de-personalised, objectifying herself as a tree for self protection. To remain feeling is to betoo vulnerable. But in this depersonalised state, she cannot decide which tree to become.The idea is divided between the laburnum and the cherry. The two images carry quitedifferent resonance, showing the lines along which her personality is divided. Thelaburnum bears pods with poisonous seed. It is pale. 'Blond' is specifically masculinisedthrough the omission of the final 'e'- an image maintained in the phallic, structural word, 'colonnades', cool and pillared. 'Cherry' carries a common female sexual meaning, referringto the female genitals. The colouring is rosy. The texture juicy. The cherry comes deckedin 'petticoats' which conceal it prettily and there is an allusion to maternity (mother'spetticoats). Although painfully incompatible, these images are rich and speak of vitality.They are also poignant. Ideally a tree might indeed offer a good home to bees. She wouldlike to be able to care for the contents of the box herself. Sadly, it is as she strains toimagine herself in this role that her self image bursts apart. She cannot safely harbour thecontents without splitting her mind. She could not handle them as a whole. She has not theresources to manage.

Yet she tries again. Perhaps she could manage if she could find a way to be ignored bythe bees, of magically making herself nothing, and therefore unassailable. Willing this, shedecks herself with the equipment she would need to handle them painlessly - a beekeeper'soutfit. Instantaneously a further and more catastrophic splitting of herself appears, and thistime a far more depressive quality prevails, as if the liveliness of the earlier images haddrawn on emotional resources which must be ruthlessly denied and suppressed. She is de-vitalised. Gone is any reference to the potential for growth or change that energised thepicture of the trees. She is a pretence of a personality, hoping

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through disguises to be taken for human. She conveys the terrible emptiness within thegarb which delineates this subsequent breaching of her self. In the `suit' she emphasisesmasculinity with associations to the hardness of armour plating, and in the soft veil,femininity. The sexual qualities are abstracted, empty, no longer convincingly linked tonotions of potency and creativity. The sense of the unreality of such an existence isstressed through the association to the moon - a cold, infertile appendage of mother earth,whose appearance at all depends entirely upon light borrowed from the life giving fathersun. Such a moon figure is a lunatic. The veil speaks unequivocally of death.

Something terrible is happening to our patient. The closer she comes to performing themental act which will free her from pain, the more divided is her representation of herselfand the closer she comes to emptying herself of her own vitality. We have reached in thisfinal stanza the equivalent point on the outward trajectory as on the inward, with thecluster of associations to death and madness mirroring the affective qualities with whichthe box was introduced, but with an added intensity.

And the conflict has still to be resolved. She cannot tolerate inside herself the feelingsaroused by the 'ordered' object. She cannot sufficiently integrate her own image to form ahome or caretaker for them, as they require. What they seek is a source of honey, contactwith a fount of nourishment from which they can draw the potency to create the substancewhich gives meaning and purpose to their lives. This she cannot provide herself. She hasno potency of her own. But she knows of the existence of such a source. They will attackand devour this, instead of herself, if she lets them go to it. The implication, formallydescribed through the poem's structure, is that she will send them back to the source fromwhich they came, the solution she has so wished to avoid.

This potential home for the bees somewhere outside her is characterised now as sweet,sustaining. Because it is the only possible alternative accommodation for the pain-inducingbox-contents, the subject is compelled, for sanity's sake, to attack this 'good' source, theexternal object to which the poet originally appealed and from which she hoped to receivesomething valuable. It will be devoured and destroyed. But it is also the source of thesubject's pain and hopelessness. It deserves to be sadistically treated for having so cruellyattacked the subject. 'Why should they turn on me?' implies the two following thoughts: 'since I have nothing of value to them' and 'since I did not start this or provoke it'. Since weknow that the subject feels these contents to be of herself, she will lose in this assault apotential part of herself- the bee part, whose purpose in life is to be creative. And she willlose it for ever, for bees die after an attack. In ejecting them she will set the remaining partof herself free. But what will be left of any worth? She will, then, be able to perceiveherself as 'sweet', just as the outside source, having dumped the bad box on her, is 'sweet'without it. She will be able to feel powerful as God as she omnipotently deals with herproblem. But the cost is terrible.

The last line lets us know just how high it is:

The box is only temporary.

Meaning here is densely compressed through associative links to the body of the poem.The subject feels confident that the desperate pain caused her by the contents of the boxwill cease with her strategy. But the box and contents will, as a result, cease to exist.Moreover, she and the contents share the same hunger and the same source of honey. If thecontents destroy this source, from where will she be fed and how will she ever recoverfrom her deprived, impotent, divided state? If the inner box is only temporary,

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the one that now holds it, her head, is perforce only temporary too, for everythingimportant to life will be lost with it. The subject's dilemma can be resolved only one way. Itis a suicidal line.

Formally this is expressed in the line's detachment from the body of the poem, as sheacknowledges her ultimate detachment from contact with the external source of goodthings. Within the `box' of the poem is contained the essence of her struggle to survive, oneshe can no longer sustain. We come full circle to the idea of a box as a coffin, a place fordead babies, a temporary, yet final, resting place.

It is clear that the poem, this poetic session, has a psychodynamic meaning that isformally ordered with an internal logic, just as any patient's material is. The ordering takesthe shape of an outward, inward, outward movement of thought as the subject grappleswith the intrusion into her mind of an object, originally desired and sought, that provokesdeep and complex feelings, becomes bad, and has to be got rid of. These movementssuggest the psychic mechanisms of introjection and projection. The object handled by thesemechanisms is a container full of particles, of bits. Nor is the patient's self-image whole.The object which is introjected and re-projected contains particles of the subject's self,which are gained from, and lost to, an external object, in the process.

[In view of the discussion to follow, it seems worth stressing the evidence within thepoem for equating this external object, the `source of honey', with the mother or the breast.The original meaning of `source' is the starting point for a river or stream - a spring. It thusalludes to the mysterious, gratuitous, life-sustaining flow that comes from the body of theearth - the body of the mother. In the context of a land that `flows', milk and honey aretraditionally inseparable.]

In his paper on `Projective identification', Herbert Rosenfeld defines the concept likethis:

'Projective identification' relates first of all to a splitting process of the early ego, where eithergood or bad parts of the self are split off from the ego and are as a further step projected in love orhatred into external objects which leads to fusion and identification of the projected parts of theself with the external objects. There are important paranoid anxieties related to these processes asthe objects filled with aggressive parts of the self become persecuting and are experienced by thepatient as threatening to retaliate by forcing themselves and the bad parts of the self which theycontain back again into the ego. (Rosenfeld 1969)

There is a clear relationship between this description and the central, structuring ideas ofthe poem. The process described originates in what Melanie Klein called the paranoidschizoid position - the earliest phase of object relations -which is dominated byomnipotence and part-object relationships.

The function of all projection is to seek an external container for feelings the self findsintolerable. The function of projective identification is to do this too but the containersought is required as well to stay in relationship with the self. It occurs at a stage ofdevelopment when the sense of self is as yet too precarious to manage without. So thecontainer has a function over and above that of simple receptacle. The function of thecontainer that the self seeks is that of feelingly bearing inside itself the unbearable contentsof the self. If this occurs, the self is reassured about its own capacity to tolerate them andcan take them back with less anxiety. It is a way of practising how to manage feelings thatcannot be expressed verbally, and it is an essential feature of learning. This is the functionsought by the poet, and it is her insight that, regardless of the quality of the feelingsprojected, this is a creative process for whose adequate management the external object isresponsible.

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But not all containers function well. Speaking of this in his paper `Attacks on linking',Bion describes a patient thus:

When the patient strove to rid himself of fears of death which were felt to be too powerful for hispersonality to contain he split off his fears and put them into me, the idea apparently being that ifthey were allowed to repose there long enough they would undergo modification by my psycheand could then be safely reintrojected ... (but) ... I evacuated them so quickly that the feelings werenot modified, but had become more painful.

In our session, the `order' that the poet originally issued in hope found the externalobject. But the feelings contained in the order (intense, not-yet-organised feelings clusteredaround anxieties about death and sense-less-ness) could not be metabolised by the externalobject. They were sent back unmodified and hence more terrible and frightening than whenissued in hope of amelioration. Attached to them now were the external object's own fearsand the subject's aroused frustration and hatred.

[Hope may seem too self-aware a word to attach to what is an unconscious partbiologically, part psychologically, determined process. But what the child and the adult areboth unconsciously attempting to gain through the use of projective identification is themeans to fulfil their potential. Its use implies a future tense. Overwhelming failure of thisprocess eliminates the possibility of such a tense. That is, to be, consciously or not, in astate of hope-less-ness.]

The consequences of this for the patient are catastrophic. As we saw, the poet's senseof herself ruptures with her use of projective identification. From the single but vulnerablepersona of the poem's opening, she split into two objects, vital but depersonalised; thensplit again into the emptied, sterile moon figure, unavailable to the growth which dependsupon emotional interaction with another. She expects nothing good back, and in the endshe de-cathects all emotional experience.

Bion (1959) describes it like this:

Projective identification makes it possible for (the child) to investigate his own feelings in apersonality powerful enough to contain them. Denial of the use of this mechanism ... leads to adestruction of the link between infant and breast and ... furthermore ... the conduct of emotionallife, in any case a severe problem, becomes intolerable. Feelings of hatred are thereupon directedagainst all emotion, including hate itself, and external reality which stimulates them. It is a shortstep from hatred of the emotions to hatred of life itself.

Looking more closely, what an extraordinary achievement this poem is. Speaking ofverbal thought and the vicissitudes of its development in patients dominated by paranoid-schizoid processes, Bion (1957) says

At this stage there is no question of verbal thought but only of inchoation of primitive thought ofa preverbal kind ... The attempt to think, which is a central part of the total process of repair of theego, involves the use of these primitive pre-verbal modes which have suffered mutilation andprojective identification. This means that the expelled particles of ego [the bees] and theiraccretions, have to be brought back into control and therefore into the personality. Projectiveidentification is therefore reversed and these objects are brought back by the same route as that bywhich they were expelled ... As these objects ... become infinitely worse after expulsion ... thepatient feels intruded upon, assaulted, and tortured by this re-entry even if willed ]ordered] byhimself ... The senses, as part of the expelled ego, also become painfully compressed [hands,minute and shrunk] on being taken back.

So how is it possible for a highly sophisticated poem whose meaning is embedded insuch processes to be written by a subject who suffers from them, since theoretically

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they lead to profound impoverishment of thought and articulation? In `Notes on the theoryof schizophrenia', Bion (1954) states that `the capacity to form symbols is dependent on: (1) The ability to grasp whole objects. (2) The abandonment of the paranoid-schizoidposition with its attendant splitting. (3) The bringing together of splits and the ushering inof the depressive position'. Only if the depressive position has been reached, he suggests,can language be synthesised to the degree required to symbolise. But what does `usheredin' actually mean? How far along the developmental path is it theoretically necessary tohave travelled in order to write like this?

The only apparently whole object in this poem is the fragile `I' of its beginning, the `I'which disintegrates in the struggle to deal with a bad introjected object. The box is onething but contains fragments. The external object is two, sweet as honey looked at oneway, a slave ship master looked at another. This level of bits, the most inchoate, is theprimary level. In ordinary development the fragments gradually coalesce, through theexperience of successful projective identification, as the child establishes within its ownpsyche a representation of the function of the external containing object. Failure of thisprocess, which creates a frail identification with the container, means that repressioncannot develop and unwanted feelings have to be magically, omnipotently denied (`Theycan die'). These are shaky defences. Denial, omnipotence and splitting enable the child tolive, to develop cognitively and physically, but with a frail psychic structure, dependentupon a very rudimentary model of the container and its function.

In order to achieve a more robust integration of the personality, the subject must beable to deal with the first appearance of whole objects which inaugurates the establishmentof the depressive position. With the line, `Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!',the poet tells us that this is precisely the task she faces. How to put the bits togetherwithout being overwhelmed? This mental act of accepting whole objects can cause thepsyche great anxiety, particularly if, as in this case, the external object has been especiallyfrustrating since, as Bion (1958) describes it, `their presence is felt to be evidence that realand valued objects have been destroyed'. As denial and omnipotence break down there isan urgent need for a containing presence to deal with projections, to reassure the child thatits attacks do not actually murder the object which is becoming real, to help it sort out thephantastic from the solid. If the feelings of guilt and depression aroused by the anxiety arenot adequately held by an auxiliary ego capable of modifying them, the subject runs therisk of suicide or of a final retreat to the paranoid-schizoid position. `It can be stated inanalytic terms as follows. He wishes to love. Feeling incapable of frustration he resorts to amurderous assault as a method of disburdening his psyche of unwanted emotions (whichobstruct loving). The assault is but the outward expression of an explosive projectiveidentification by virtue of which his murderous hatred, together with bits of hispersonality, is scattered far and wide into the real objects ... He now feels free to be loving'(`I will be sweet God'), but ... `the violence of the explosion leaves him denuded also of hisfeelings of love' (Bion 1959). With this, life itself is de-cathected - `The box is onlytemporary'.

The tragedy for our patient, pre-figured in this poem, seems now more explicable. The`I' that writes is a personality whose emotional development has foundered in the face ofthe anxieties aroused by the appearance of whole objects. Negotiation of the depressiveposition has been partial, leaving a distinctly vulnerable core embedded in a neuroticpersonality capable of organised thought. Cognitive functions have not been impaired andlanguage has been achieved. But, lacking a good-enough, properly established internalobject to manage psychic frustrations and conflicts, the `I' is

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vulnerable to the loss of its fragile sense of identity when life's demands become too great.The psychotic core of the personality, the primitive, help-seeking processes of projectiveidentification, will, when rendered sufficiently active in response to inner and outerdifficulties, come to dominate the entire mental apparatus of the adult just as it naturallydid of the child. Without help the insecure good object representation will be lost alongwith the functions it represents - reflection and symbolisation. What is thought about hasthen to be acted out concretely. The poet's fear that she will destroy her good object utterlybecame for her reality. Such a destruction means the destruction of psychic life.

This poem is a plea for assistance which was not available. It fleshes out the primitivemental mechanisms recognised by Bion and experienced by the poet while her capacity towrite remained sufficiently intact to create a transitional object to express them. But it isnot a poem of reflection or symbolisation or even of emotion. Indeed, considering thecontent, it is curiously detached and impersonal in tone. To return to Philip Larkin. Heasks, of the bee poems in particular: `whether Plath is wilfully hyping up this ordinaryevent to make a poem, or whether this is really how she saw it, in which case Plath and thereader are about to part company'. This is the crux of the matter. For the inner psychicstructure she describes here means precisely that `this is really how she saw it'. She haslost the psychic maturity for distinguishing between inner and outer reality. Sheexperiences her bees in their box literally as a part of herself. She is describing somethingwhich for her is concrete, not symbolic. There is no place here for reflection. No states offeeling are expressed because `feeling' is so highly defended against. The poem is aboutwhat happens to her when all feeling except anxiety has to stop. She leaves the reader, thetransferential object of her desperate projective identification, to understand and interpret,to make the links and complete the symbols, to feel her anxiety and fear of madness inourselves. This is the source of Philip Larkin's discomfort. An identification with the poetis possible but not with a mature adult capable of generating the symbolic power of greatart. We cannot use this poem to reflect on ourselves and our own predicament. We have toreflect on hers. We have here to identify with the unbearably distressed child within thepoet, whose life and artistic capacity are both hanging by a thread as the two Kleinianpositions feed and inform each other in their bitter struggle for a more completedisengagement. This is high art of the immature and hopeless. Its success as a poemdepends upon the urgency with which the reader is asked to pay attention and to feel forher. It is a call to action. In speaking so eloquently of such states of mind Sylvia Plath doesspeak for us all but for what we hope never to encounter in ourselves.

To be engaged in a session with a patient using these dynamic mechanisms is to beimmediately in a relationship of a primitive and essential sort from which there can be noparting company, whatever the shock and sorrow. The patient needs to know that thetherapist can feel their projected emotion, think about it and survive, sanity and acceptanceintact. To remember, in terms of the poem, what bees are in reality and help the patientseparate this out from the emotions with which they are suffused. If this renders the re-introjections more kind, the fears and hatred obstructing love may gradually diminish inintensity and permit the patient to establish within a more complete, more forgiving,object. Above all, this poem shows with a dazzling clarity the speed with which dynamicshifts occur within the patient, the complexity of the inner struggle, and the poignant factthat this is a last ditch struggle towards health and connectedness. For her will and abilityto illuminate and communicate her own

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darkness I feel a debt of gratitude to Sylvia Plath from whose experience I hope my ownpatient will gain.

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International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 38.Bion, W.R. (1958) On hallucination. In International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39.Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on linking. In International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40. Bion, W.R. (

1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann Medical.Holmes, J. (1985) The language of psychotherapy: metaphor, ambiguity, wholeness. In British Journal

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Psycho-Analysis, 1921-45. London, Hogarth, 1948.Klein, M. (1940) Mourning and its relation to manic depressive. Ibid.Klein, M. (1946) Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Developments in Psycho-Analysis, ed.

Riviere. London: Hogarth, 1952.Larkin, P. (1982) Horror Poet (Poetry Review). Reprinted in Required Writing, London, Faber &

Faber, 1983.Plath, S. (1965) Ariel. London: Faber & Faber.Rosenfeld, H. (1969) On projective identification. Paper presented at the International Colloquium on

Psychosis, Montreal.Winnicott, D. (1960) The theory of the parent/infant relationship. In The Maturational Processes and

the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth, 1965.Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.