Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2012, 57, 40–56

‘To Paint the Portrait of a Bird’:analytic work from the perspective of a

‘developmental’ Jungian

Helen Morgan, London

Abstract: Jungians who are trained in the so-called ‘Developmental School’ straddle thetwo worlds of psychoanalysis and classical Jungian thinking. This is not always an easyposition in which to be, but if the tensions can be held it is potentially a rich and creativeway of working. In this paper I attempt to explore this position using the poem, ‘To Paintthe Portrait of a Bird’ by Jacques Prevert as a metaphor for the analytic endeavour. Fromthis perspective I hope to illustrate the importance of being able on the one hand to holdand maintain a clear frame for the careful and detailed exploration of the transferencewithin which the more malign aspects of the psyche might be expressed, and, on theother, to allow the alchemical process of mutual transformation that lies outside theconscious understanding of the analytic couple.

Key words: analytic setting, transference, co-transference, creative psyche,Developmental School, faith, individuation, meditation

To Paint the Portrait of a BirdFirst paint a cagewith an open doorthen paintsomething prettysomething simplesomething beautifulsomething usefulfor the birdthen place the canvas against a treein a gardenin a woodor in a foresthide behind the treewithout speakingwithout moving . . .Sometimes the bird comes quicklybut he can just as well spend long yearsbefore decidingDon’t get discouraged

0021-8774/2012/5701/40 C© 2012, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01950.x

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 41

waitwait years if necessarythe swiftness or slowness of the comingof the bird having no rapportwith the success of the pictureWhen the bird comesif he comesobserve the most profound silencewait till the bird enters the cageand when he has enteredgently close the door with a brushthenpaint out all the bars one by onetaking care not to touch any of the feathers of the birdThen paint the portrait of the treechoosing the most beautiful of its branchesfor the birdpaint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshnessthe dust of the sunand the noise of insects in the summer heatand then wait for the bird to decide to singIf the bird doesn’t singit’s a bad signa sign that the painting is badbut if he sings it’s a good signa sign that you can signso then so very gently you pull outone of the feathers of the birdand you write your name in a corner of the picture.

Jacques Prevert(Paroles. 1949 City Light Books. San Francisco; Translation copyright 1958 by

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of City Light Books)

Introduction

The Bird

I was first introduced to this poem by the Zen Master Reb Anderson who usedit as a metaphor for meditation. In this paper I intend to use the poem as aframework on which I might hang some thoughts about how I see the analyticendeavour from the perspective of one trained in what Samuels described as the‘Developmental School’ of Jungian analysis (Samuels 1985, p.15).

Whilst the poem’s title promises instructions on how to paint the portraitof a bird, it makes no reference to doing so throughout. We must paint acage, and later the tree, the wind’s freshness, and so on, but this bird we’resetting out to portray, the bird we hope will sing, is not to be fixed withbrushstroke, with definition or interpretation. The bird images the essentialliberty required for that which is above and beyond—or beneath and greaterthan—the individual ego. This is the human characteristic which drives towards

42 Helen Morgan

wholeness and realization searching for meaning and purpose in life, what itis that makes life worth living. It entails the development of the imaginationand the symbolic attitude of a rich inner life. Consequently the objective ofself-realization is more than clinical, but also implies questions of creativity andspirituality.

The motivation for most people entering analysis is the fact of suffering andof our personal pathology which keeps us trapped in repetitive destructivebehaviour towards ourselves and others. These aspects need careful, closeattention within the containment of a developing analytic relationship in orderthat the pain and the horror, the destructive as well as the loving feelings canbe faced, accepted and, to some degree, understood. However, alongside theimperative to resolve our sorrows and our shadows the process of individuationincludes the urge towards the discovery of meaning and a creative way of being,the lifelong process through which our conscious and unconscious potentialsunfold, leading to a greater wholeness and differentiation of the personality.Although it involves a separation from the crowd rather than compliance orconformity, it is very different from individualism, as it demands and leans onpersonal integrity, freedom and authenticity whatever the cost.

Paradox runs through this apparently simple poem. And paradox and poetryseem apt forms in which to speak of this strange business of analysis, thisodd attention to the deadly and the ill in the service of life and health. Inour trainings, in the books and papers we read, there is much concern withpsychopathology, the varieties of psychic illness and defences that we mightcome across in our consulting rooms. This focus on ill-health can leave theimpression that it is pathology which is complex and elaborate whereas healthis simple. I am with Christopher Bollas in wanting to turn this view on its head.For the deadliness of pathology, of the defensive structures within which webecome imprisoned, is in the rigid simplicity they impose on us. We becomebound and held in arid restraint when we are driven by phobias, neuroses,obsessions, depression, defences, addictions. They drain us of the subtleties ofjoyful aliveness, and hold us captive in dull repetition. As Bollas (1993, p. 48)puts it:

psychological disturbance seems to organize the individual’s self expression in such away as to foreclose contact with the baffling complexity of mental life.

For mental life is baffling. It’s multi-faceted, nuanced, enigmatic and defiesbeing pinned down. Whereas the dark robs the landscape of its features, sunrisereveals a rich and varied panorama with infinite potential for inquiry. Psychichealth means that libidinal energy flows freely. It buzzes with complexityallowing as it does an almost limitless internal space of imagination andcreativity.

Now if optimum psychic health is the goal of therapy, and this includesquestions of creativity and spirituality, we have a conundrum. For we are

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 43

clinicians and not art teachers or theologians. The poem tells us that the successof the painting is to be judged as to whether the bird sings or not. And yetour role is not to teach the art of whistling. Our job, it seems, is to establisha habitat within which the bird will feel sufficiently free to abandon itself toself-expression. Apparently it is our own artistry to which we must attend.

The benign and the malign aspects of the unconscious

The urge towards individuation, the idea of the archetypal processes that movethe psyche towards health and wholeness is central to the Jungian approach andit arises from a different way of perceiving the unconscious from the Freudianview. In her helpful book on The Therapeutic Relationship, Jan Wiener outlinesthe difference between Freud’s focus on the repressed unconscious ‘visualizedas a form of horizontal splitting’ (Wiener 2009, p. 30; ital. added) and Jung’sinterest in the unrepressed, collective unconscious and the tendency towardsdissociated, vertical splits taking the form of sub-personalities or complexes.She quotes Williams: ‘Jung ceded the personal unconscious to Freud, and thecollective unconscious and the archetypes became his province’ (Williams 1963,p. 45; ital. added).

Like Wiener, it seems to me that the either/or nature of this dispute isunhelpful. I do not see the unconscious aspects of myself and of my patients asonly pathological and the result of the process of repression, and I very muchbelieve in the urge towards individuation. However, I am also convinced of thereality of pathological, malignant structures that exist within the psyche, thatthe death instinct as well as the life instinct operates in us all, and that we hateas well as love, destroy as well as create.

For me, the value of a developmental Jungian training is that it struggles tohold these two aspects together. It is a struggle at times—both theoretically andclinically—and it demands a degree of fluency in at least two languages. If webecome too reductive and focused on interpretation of transference dynamics,we lose touch with, and maybe even hinder, the individuation process by failingto recognize when archetypal rather than personal forces are at work. However,there is also a danger in too great a faith in the benign intentions of the Self,which can result in a failure to attend to those damaged and damaging aspectsof the personal unconscious as they appear in the transference.

This difficulty of maintaining a bilingual position I have described elsewhere:

Living in two worlds is not always easy. At worst we can feel confused, muddledand unsure of our identity. The danger is that we end up with a mish-mash, a sortof Franglais which no-one but ourselves can understand. Or we opt for one world,one language to dominate the other, to adopt the vernacular of the streets, and thenspeak our native tongue only when the relatives come to stay. By staying bi-lingual,however, there is the possibility of finding and playing in the spaces between thoughtsand images held within a vivid and living repertoire of theoretical concepts.

(Morgan 2010, p. 37)

44 Helen Morgan

All Jungian Schools of thought, of course, also include the invaluable concept ofthe Shadow. As Warren Colman points out in his paper ‘The analyst in action’:

Although, in theory, the psyche is a self-regulating system, in practice it is subjectto chaos, disorder and conflict just as the body is subject to disease. When the selfis unable to contain the internal tension and the opposites come apart, the primitiveenergies of the self can be monumentally destructive and disintegrative.

(Colman 2010, p. 290)

These ‘monumentally destructive and disintegrative forces’ will emerge in thereport of interactions with figures in the patient’s daily life, but it is whenthey appear in the relationship between the analytic pair that they are mostpowerfully experienced and available in a bare, unfiltered, untranslated formfor exploration and transformation. I do not espouse an attitude that considersthat only the here-and-now transference interpretation is of value, and writeelsewhere of the limitations of this approach (Morgan 2010. pp. 33–49), butI do believe we fail our patients if we are not forever keeping at least oneeye out for where the more shameful aspects of the psyche peep out into theconscious interaction between these two consenting adults, the analyst and theanalysand.

As I have suggested, optimum psychic health entails a free flow, a fluidityalong the vertical axis of the individual psyche where semi-permeable mem-branes differentiate between the levels of conscious ego, personal unconsciousand collective unconscious. I have a trust that the archetypal aspects of theSelf continue to work to bring about an internal transformation and wemust be careful not to block or corrupt such forces through an over rigidand over reductive approach. However, the various forms of defences andpsychopathology serve to dam the current and deaden the aliveness of thepotentially creative psyche. Much of the analytic work requiring the attentionof the analyst’s conscious ego concerns the details of the rigid dark placesthat imprison the individual, holding them captive in tedious repetition andmournful echo.

Recognizing the impact such blockages have on the present relationship withand to the analyst sheds light on them, making possible a freer movementof energy and a sense of new-found aliveness. ‘Freedom from’ the darkerpathological aspects of ourselves takes us out into the daylight, in order thatwe might have ‘freedom to’ express and articulate the Self.

Jan Wiener describes the importance of the ‘both, and’ perspective as follows:

patients need the kind of relationship with their analysts that provides constantattention to process, including the transference, so that the archetypal energy necessaryfor development can be harnessed in the relationship. It is within the framework ofan authentic relationship with the analyst’s ‘unspeakably tender hand’ [quoting Rilke]that new images are likely to surface when the unconscious eventually facilitates aninternal capacity to make meaning.

(Wiener 2009, p. 103)

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 45

The Cage

If the objective is freedom, it does seem odd that the very first instruction thepoem sets us is to paint a cage. According to the Zen teacher, this is exactlywhat we need to do each time we sit to meditate. Each time we turn up at ourcushion, we should be ready to enter the cage and pull the door shut behindus. And then we can relax. This willing commitment decides the debate aboutwhether to be there or not and we can get on with the difficult business of justbreathing.

In painting, the final objective might be an uninhibited expression of theself, requiring a freedom of soul, spirit and gesture, but first you have to keepyour brushes clean. The discipline of preparation, of cleanliness and clarity areessential, as is repeated, patient practice. Otherwise, however artistic the marksmade may be, the work will soon degenerate into brown, shitty sludge.

As therapists we offer the frame as the boundaries of the cage. We committo turning up at certain points in the week for a set period of time with agreedprocedures about fees, cancellations, breaks etc. In the settling of the originalcontract we have an external representation of something much more subtle thatallows us each to enter the consulting room whilst the bird decides whether ornot to join us.

Over the years I have become increasingly convinced of the need for clarityand consistency in the parameters that are established to form the frame to thework. There is nothing magical about any particular parameters, but I do believethey need to have a logical consistency that allows me to have the confidence tokeep working with the analysand’s responses to the boundaries I set, withouthaving to be distracted by an internal argument about their validity. It’s myway of keeping my brushes clean.

Compared to some, I am fairly strict about matters of time, payment, myneutrality etc. From my own experience as an analyst and as a supervisor, oneof the most difficult aspects of this work is making ourselves available to receiveand to stay with the more malign aspects of the psyche as expressed in rageand hatred. If the ‘rules of engagement’ I have set out make sense to me andI am comfortable with them, I am more likely to hold steady if and when theanalysand reacts to them at some point with attack. I am more likely to be clearthat accusations of sadism, indifference, exploitation and cruelty are keys to adynamic within the analysand’s psyche and past history, and stay working withthat, rather than flinching from a natural dislike of being so hated. The needto manage my own resentment and hatred is also imperative, and Winnicott’spaper on ‘Hate and the Countertransference’ is, I believe, a critical chapter inany analyst’s bible (Winnicott 1978, pp. 194–203).

I have noticed from time to time how supervisees can get into quite a muddlewhen, appearing to be doing a kindly act, they deviate from the original contractat a patient’s request. It looks kind, but I think it can often be a way of avoidingthe destructive potential in the work, and the analysand is actually failed by the

46 Helen Morgan

analyst in endorsing an unconscious fear that their own hateful feelings are nottolerable. It can be a form of passivity which is mistaken for gentleness but isactually a pulling back from something festering that needs to be tended.

It is not that the boundaries can never be changed – it is just that thereneeds to be a lot of thought before they are. For me it is about followingthe mantra: ‘Management first, therapy second’ that was prevalent at theTherapeutic Community for very disturbed and damaged adolescent boys whereI used to work. Clear boundaries provide a safe setting in which both analystand analysand can relax. This is why I avoid those more modern means ofcommunication which are so very casual and so have the potential for confusionand a false informality. I don’t give my mobile number so don’t have to dealwith texts. Nor do patients have my email address. Communication outside ofthe session is by phone or letter. It gives me space and time to think about theinteraction and how best to respond. It allows me to stay sitting in my analyst’schair.

Faith and trust

The frame may be set, the cage painted quite skilfully, but the internal entryinto the engagement is not necessarily instant. Sometimes, the poem tells us, thebird comes quickly but it can also take long years before deciding. Somethingenticing may be glimpsed inside the cage and all the boundaries of the framemay have been agreed and accepted, yet somehow neither therapist nor patienthave quite closed the door. It seems to have nothing to do with how initiallycompliant or rebellious the patient is, or whether each likes the other or not,but apparently there has to come a point when the bird arrives, where eachaccepts commitment to the other, for the real analytic work to take place. Thisis an unconscious decision which takes place outside of the conscious volition ofeither party and whose timing is unpredictable. Until that unconscious, mutualcommitment we have to wait assured that the swiftness or slowness of thecoming of the bird will have no bearing on the success of the painting.

I think that what holds us together in this time of waiting is less a matter oftrust than of faith. Whereas trust might be thought of as located in a specificindividual and develops over time, faith is more generalized, implying a certainconfidence in the process of analysis rather than in the analyst him / or herself.This may be no more than a vague, felt sense existing from the start, but needsto be sufficient to bring the patient to the session despite uncertainty about whatthe process is to be and despite wariness and suspicion.

I often notice that, with a patient I have been working with for some time,small thoughts may come into my mind before the session, at the door, on theway up the stairs. These may relate to the patient directly or may seem entirelyunconnected to that particular individual. It is fascinating how often somethingemerges in the material of the session which links back to the thought. It maynot be that the thought is particularly helpful in developing my understanding

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 47

of the interaction, but it does show a sort of attunement at an unconsciouslevel between us. Such thoughts don’t occur before that mutual commitment ismade.

It’s not that once this unconscious commitment is made all resistances anddefences are dropped and henceforth all is cohesion and mutuality – far fromit! If anything, this may be when the deeper defences begin to reveal themselveswithin the transference. It’s just that something changes in the atmosphere inthe room and there is a sense that we are both here now, we have both arrived,we are committed to each other for better or for worse. We have each enteredthe cage and have closed the door gently with a brush.

This hoped for voluntary entering the cage also happens on a daily basis andin each session. With a busy full-time practice I can open and close the door ofmy consulting room many times a day. Each time I face little daily resistancesto being fully available for the other where I’m not quite in the room. Instead,my mind is wandering to a conversation with a friend, to the last session, tothe email I must reply to, to the paper I’m working on . . . Some have used thephrase to settle the self on the self as a way of starting a meditation session,and I think that captures something of the flavour, the smell of what happenswhen I do manage to close myself in to being whole-heartedly with the personwith whom I will spend the next 50 minutes as I physically shut the door of theconsulting room behind us.

Edith

Edith was the only child of Evangelical missionaries. She was of mixed heritage,born abroad, and her father disappeared from the home when she was veryyoung. When she was eight her mother brought her to England and placedher in a boarding school and with guardians whom she stayed with duringthe school holidays. These god-fearing people were strangers to her and, likeher mother, very strict church-goers. The God she was brought up to fear andworship was a terrifying authority, a harsh superego figure ready to damn herfor her sinfulness, as well as the potentially rescuing, loving father who couldprovide succour and comfort.

When I first met Edith she was an elegant, successful professional woman inher mid 50s. From an outer perspective, she was doing well for herself. Afterseveral failed relationships, she was now married to a man who was stable, andloyal. They were financially well-off, content with each other and, apparently,living the good life. What brought her to analysis was that her back seized upcausing her excruciating pain. Her osteopath said he thought that there was alot of emotion ossified in the lower back and suggested she saw a therapist.

Some years earlier she had done some interesting and helpful work onarchetypal images, dream symbols, active imagination etc. with a ClassicalJungian analyst. However, it seemed that little attention had been paid to thetransference. The boundaries of the setting, whilst not unethical in any way,

48 Helen Morgan

seemed to move about a fair amount. The analyst revealed quite a bit aboutherself to the analysand, sessions changed and stretched at times, the analystwould recommend reading, and so on.

I was surprised how readily Edith settled into a structure with me that wasfar more fixed and regular than she had been used to. She soon started comingthree times a week and used the couch. I think she was responding to a senseof containment, although there was also a degree of compliance and a wishto please which I began to interpret in a fairly reductive manner. Once heldwithin this structure, the rage that I believe had been locked inside since veryearly childhood erupted into the relationship between us. She began to fluctuatebetween sessions when she would explode with anger at me, followed by terribleremorse and anxiety that I would throw her out. For a very long time sheclung to her basic position about herself—that she was a sinner and that onlyredemption—by Christ or by me—could save her. This was long, difficult workthat exhausted us both at times, involving as it did a constant replay of infantiletrauma within a powerful and often primitive transference of extremes of loveand hate, extremes which needed to be enacted and endured until they becamegradually thinkable and it was possible to talk about them.

We both had to survive a long time of this reeling between her attempts todestroy me, the relationship and herself. We did get through it, we did survive,but there wasn’t much that seemed benign and life-seeking in the process. Attimes it felt more like a raw, primitive wrestling match and one I had to notlose for both our sakes.

About a year into our work together Edith brought the following dream:

There is a sealed room with no doors or windows. In it is a row of 3 toilets along onewall with no cubicles separating them off from each other. The toilets are old, filthy,and encrusted with dried up shit which had clearly been there for years. In one of thetoilets there’s a dead, once white, but now filthy bird.

This bird is in a very different state indeed from the one in the poem. It is aboutas far as a bird can get from flying free and singing—apart from decomposingand disappearing entirely. If taken as a profile of the patient’s internal world atthat moment in time, we might say that the dream presented two problems: onerequired reductive, interpretative work based on the day to day lived experienceof the transference; the other called for a more teleological approach involvingamplification and exploration of dream symbols.

The former approach is a response to the blocked toilets full of dried upexcrement which captured something of the dreamer’s attitude to her own‘shitty’ feelings which had become numbed and petrified. This also applies tothe failed plumbing, representing the rigid stuck internal defences which couldnot allow a natural ease of movement within her internal world. In terms ofthese matters my task was to don my analytic rubber gloves and attend to thedried up excrement and the faulty plumbing. That work involved attention to,and interpretation of, the here and now transference as it emerged.

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 49

But whilst that work was absolutely essential and at times totally preoccu-pying, it addresses only part of the dream. For while clean toilets and effectiveplumbing are certainly good, they are not, I suggest, the be-all and end-all ofthe analytic endeavour.

So to return to the dream we need to ask, what about the bird? What arewe to do with it? It’s too big to flush away, and because the room is sealed, itcan’t be disposed of by the Local Authority bin men. This stubborn problem ofdisposal forces us to attend to the fact of the pitiful creature dead and decayingin the midst of all this old excrement.

Whereas Edith’s associations to all the other aspects of the dream had per-sonal connections, feeling responses and memories, there were no particularlypersonal associations to the bird. The images that came to her mind were notunusual for an educated individual brought up in Western Judeo-Christianculture, and any brainstorming group of analysts might come up with much thesame: Leda and the swans, the Albatross, flying geese, the Goose girl, Noah’sdove, the Holy Spirit . . . The fact that none of these had specific personalmeaning suggested that this dead, dirty white bird was more of an archetypalimage of the Self.

What if the room is sealed not only through a historical chain of events,but precisely because this might be the only way for the bird to be given theattention it needed rather than just being got rid of? This might lead us to thinkof the sealed room not so much as a problem, but as a necessary condition in theendeavour of individuation. And whilst we might be able to clean up the shit,the room would need to stay sealed until the bird could be ministered to andbrought back to life. The question was how we were to do this in a way thatdidn’t deaden the bird further with heavy interpretations, but might breathe airand life into its plumage?

I felt, therefore, that, rather than struggle to interpret the bird, we neededto stay with the image itself, as it was in the dream and as it developed inEdith’s mind, in my mind and in our joint mind. Alongside all the transferencework, the rages and the remorse, Edith would occasionally return to the bird,speculating how it had got into the toilet and died, wondering what it needed.She developed her associations to the bird following up some of the classicaland cultural references which interested her. I saw my role in this work asproviding a receptive container within which her conscious ego could receive,attend to and play with those aspects which had been denied and forbidden formost of her life. My understanding of this aspect of the work was that whatwas taking place was a sort of transformation driven by a creative aspect of thepsyche which was struggling to live, and which was beyond the conscious reachof either Edith or me.

Inside the cage

There are points of activity, of painting, in the poem but these are interspersedwith times of great stillness—we are asked not to speak, not to move. Wait, it

50 Helen Morgan

says and observe the most profound silence. When one is required to act it is todo so with tremendous care and attention to detail. We must paint ‘the greenfoliage of the trees, the wind’s freshness, the dust of the sun and the noise ofthe insects in the summer heat’. One can hear a call to deep attention to theaesthetic and the wires hum with an intensity of reverie, of concentration andmindfulness.

Here the analyst picks up a familiar sense, a sort of ‘knowing’ based onexperience of the patient. It is as if we need to squint with our ears to get a feelof the shape that lies behind the details of what the patient is saying. Steppingback from specific content and allowing the overarching themes to emerge cansometimes allow us to see the outline of that which lies beneath what the patientis consciously telling us.

Lewis, Amini and Lannon put it thus:

A capable therapist shares much with a good reader: he must willingly suspend hisbelief in the rules he knows and approach a personal universe whose workings shouldbe unimaginable to the uninitiated. If he is able to attain a state of sufficient receptivity,a therapist can allow the other mind to burst onto the scene like great art does – ‘as amore or less shocking surprise’.

(Lewis, Amini, Lannon 2001, p. 183)

They go on to say:

The therapist who cannot engage in this open adventure of exploration will fail tograsp the other’s essence. His every preconception about how a person should feelrisks misleading him as to how that person does feel. When he stops sensing with hislimbic brain, a therapist is fatally apt to substitute inference for resonance.

(ibid.; ital. in original)

Psychoanalytic literature, when considering transference dynamics, refers to thetherapist as object. This has a certain value but its danger is in that it can drawus away from remembering that there is also the therapist as subject to considerwith his or her own intrapsychic life. This reminds us not only of how essentialthe training analysis is, but also of an ongoing requirement to attend to ourown psychic health and development throughout our lives as clinicians. It alsoindicates the need for the safety of a good supervision space to provide us with acontainer for our work. These aspects help us to keep our own internal verticalaxis as open as possible to serve as a conduit through the psyche.

The analytical couple who have made an unconscious commitment to eachother are connected unconscious to unconscious. Here the involvement ofthe therapist is not just responsive and reactive, but also participatory, and,by definition this engagement takes place in the dark. It is a participationmystique, a connection of unconscious activity in which both take part. Themechanisms are similar to those of projective identification, except that this is atwo-way street with a greater mutuality of communication and affect betweencouch and chair. The term ‘co-transference’ is perhaps more apt here thancountertransference. This is the realm which, when we can manage to truly

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 51

allow, humbles our conscious egos by reminding us that we are not masters inour own consulting rooms. For this is the realm beyond our conscious control.Here an archetypal couple, or mix of couples, will impact on and transformthe analytic pair struggling in the conscious arena to form and connect. It is theplace where the transcendent function, when present, is at its most vivid andmost profound. The irony is that any real transformation probably occurs atthis level, a level in which the conscious analyst has no direct say.

What we can do is to stay as attuned as we can to whatever might be beingcommunicated, attend to our own attitude towards it, and work on whatevermay be blocking our internal psychic free flow. As Bollas points out, such anattitude can be found in Freud’s work. He emphasizes Freud’s recommendationthat the analyst needs to:

surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspendedattention . . . .and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious withhis own unconscious.

(Freud 1923, p. 239; ital. added)

Bollas (1993) also reminds us that Freud proposed that the analyst:

turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the ‘transmitting uncon-scious’.

(Freud 1912, p. 115)

This is where I think we need to attend to the minutiae of what goes on inour own minds and bodies when in the room with a patient; the smallestthought, however apparently irrelevant, if amplified and explored playfully inthe analyst’s mind, may well prove an essential key allowing entry into a wholearea of understanding.

Being upright

Reb Anderson, the Zen master I spoke of at the beginning of this paper, has abook entitled Being Upright (Anderson 2001) which he suggests is the centraltask of meditation and also of being. Anyone who has meditated will be familiarwith the swaying and the slumping away from the vertical. We start off well,straight and still in the present moment and, after a little while—and perhapsnot so little a while—we find ourselves leaning ever so slightly forward or everso slightly back from our initial posture. This is both an experienced reality onthe cushion and a metaphor for living and, I would add, for analysis and, inparticular, the stance of the analyst.

We can think of the leaning in terms of that which we may go towards, outof our own attraction, desire, longing and greed. Or we may lean backwardsout of repulsion, or aversion. However slight and mild these pulls, they eachserve to unbalance us from the vertical and we wobble about our axis. Actually

52 Helen Morgan

psychoanalytic psychotherapists are, I think, fairly well-equipped to address thissort of leaning in relation to the patient. The concept of countertransferencegives us a very helpful and important frame for noting and thinking about ourown responses towards the individual before us in the consulting room. Weknow something about the observation of our positive feelings, which might betender, intrigued, erotic . . . Or the negative ones where we are bored, irritated,revengeful . . . We hopefully find a position of equanimity where we are able tothink about these emotions as they arise as ways of deepening our understandingof what is going on. It is this process which will keep us upright with our feelingsrather than being caught up in their enactment.

But there is also the axis of time which can catch us into either a leaningforwards into the future or back into the past. In meditation we come to knowhow our minds are constantly drifting around between the two. Our thoughtsturn to lunch, or a rather difficult task we have before us. Or we might havehad some disagreement with a partner or colleague or someone on the trainthis morning and it’s still rankling. These sorts of thoughts form the backdrop,the wallpaper to the activities of our minds, and in meditation the endeavour isnot to be rid of them but to let them drift across the mind like clouds passingin the sky. Rather than grasping onto the thought and losing ourselves in itsmagnetism, we let it go and return to the breath.

Michael Eigen (1993) has suggested that meditation changes our usual focuson appetite, with its endless demands for satisfaction, to a focus on breath.Taking up this idea, Epstein says of a developing meditation practice:

the emphasis shifts to an appreciation of just how difficult, and yet possible, itis to surrender to the flow of experience. Gradually expanding the foundationsof mindfulness to include feelings, thoughts, emotions and mind, the successfulpractitioner keeps coming up against her own desires to somehow halt the flow,to convert the breath-based experience of fluidity and change to an appetite-based oneof gratification and satisfaction.

(Epstein 2001, p. 146)

Here he could well be describing how hard it is to find and stay in this place ofat-one-ment in the analytic work. This idea of appetite that relates to the workitself is how I understand Bion’s edict to eschew both memory and desire whenwith the patient.

It interferes with analytic work to permit desires for the patient’s cure or well-being,or future to enter the mind. Such desires erode the analyst’s power to analyse and leadto progressive deterioration of his intuition.

(Bion 1984, p. 56)

This sense of appetite shows itself in the work as a desire in the analyst forthe patient to ‘progress’—which can be partly for the patient’s sake but mayalso be for the analyst’s gratification. For this waiting, this observation of themost profound silence demands much of us. To hold steady, to stay seated in

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 53

the analytic chair to simply not know what is going on requires faith of theanalyst as much as the patient. At least the patient isn’t supposed to know.Not knowing, yet maintaining faith in the psyche and in the relationship whilstkeeping on working at what does appear in the room, takes a bit of nerve attimes. In leaning forward, there is an appetite to know, to be certain and to feelthe sweet, gratifying sensation of getting it right.

Instead, the poem tells us, we need to wait, upright, attending to the backdrop,maintaining great silence and working out how best to paint the noise of theinsects in the summer heat, always ready to hear when the bird sings.

As a way of trying to illustrate this I shall return to the work with Edith anda series of sessions which took place after a number of years of intensive work.Much had changed. A few years previously she had left the church altogether,but now was wondering about her spiritual side and was very tentatively startingto approach the matter again but in a far more thoughtful, less terrified manner.She had dropped the number of sessions to twice a week and we were beginningto consider the idea of ending

She arrived after a two week break to tell me that it had been a disastrousperiod. She was angry with me, had acted it out in an almighty row with herpartner on the last weekend, and was furious and disappointed with herself thatshe was still feeling this way about the breaks. She was bad, a failure (and, byimplication, of course, so was I). Edith in her fear and her anger had returned toher early Evangelical upbringing, her wrathful God, and the notion of originalsin that meant she was guilty from birth. This was an inherited badness fromwhich she could only recover by an external act of redemption. These solid,fixed, metallic-hard certainties had dominated her life and the first years ofanalysis.

I found myself feeling irritated. It wasn’t her anger that annoyed me, but thereappearance of old familiar ways of dealing with it, including her insistence ona rigid, harshly critical image of herself. I was anything but free from memoryat this moment. The past sessions of rage and despair came thundering into theroom and it seemed as if we were right back at the beginning again, as if myperception of the work we had done and the transformations that had takenplace were mere self-deception.

I began to notice that, in my irritation, there was also a holding on to a desirefor ‘progress’—for her sake but also for my own gratification. And, whilst notacting out the irritation as such, my interventions were coming from a placethat was motivated by wanting her to ‘get back on track’. This was appetitedriven. When at last I managed to ‘settle the self on the self’, something insideme relaxed into that breath-based fluidity without any loss of concentration.It’s hard to say how my interventions changed, but when I was able to let go ofthe drive for so-called ‘progress’, paradoxically things began to move.

Soon after this Edith brought another dream. Again it was a room with3 toilets. However, this time the toilets were clean and functioning and inseparate cubicles. But the thing that delighted her most about the dream was

54 Helen Morgan

that there was an open door, through which she could see stairs leading to agarden. The bird was out and free—perhaps it was even singing . . . . .

Signing the painting

The very last part of the poem tells us that, if the bird does sing, you can verygently pull out one of the feathers of the bird and write your name in the cornerof the painting. One of the hardest, most poignant aspects of this job is thatone can work very intensively over a long period of time with someone within akind of intimacy that doesn’t occur in any other setting. It is moving to witnessthe growth and expansion that can occur as a result of this work, to the pointwhere the individual is ready to go. It is hard to say goodbye and know verylittle, if anything, from that point on of what happens to them. I think the imageof the signature describes how one’s name is written in a little corner of theperson’s being. I know my own analyst, whom I may not think of consciouslyfor years, has his name written somewhere inside of me.

But it is also interesting that the name is written using one of the bird’s ownfeathers, reminding us of what we also receive from our analysands. When thepatient has gone, it is these imaginary quills that we use to think and writeabout our work.

Whilst I was in the process of writing this paper and was thinking about thisbusiness of ending, I was on a platform in the London underground waitingfor a train. I looked across the tracks and, on the opposite platform I saw apatient I had worked with four times a week for many years who had finishedher analysis a number of years ago. She didn’t see me as she was engaged inan animated discussion with a friend, but it was a poignant moment for me.We had been through a lot together and I guess I knew her in a way no oneelse ever had or ever would. She had sent a couple of Christmas cards lettingme know what she was doing but these had stopped in the last few years—quiterightly—and I imagined I was rarely thought about these days. Yet I knew myname existed somewhere inside of her and I hope it continued to be helpful. Shelooked well.

Her train pulled into the station, she got on and went on her journey towherever it was she was going. And I went home to finish a paper aboutpainting birds.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Les jungiens qui sont formes dans les soi-disant « ecoles developpementales » se trouventa cheval sur les deux univers de la psychanalyse et de la pensee jungienne classique.Ce n’est pas une position facile ou demeurer, mais si l’on peut tenir les tensions,c’est potentiellement une facon riche et creative de travailler. Dans cet article, j’essaied’explorer cette position en m’appuyant sur le poeme « Peindre le Portrait d’un Oiseau »,de Jacques Prevert, comme metaphore du labeur analytique. De ce point de vue, j’espere

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird 55

illustrer l’importance de la capacite a, d’une part, tenir et maintenir un cadre surpour permettre une exploration soigneuse et detaillee du transfert au sein duquel lesaspects les plus negatifs de la psyche peuvent etre exprimes, et, d’autre part, laisseradvenir le processus alchimique de transformation mutuelle qui se situe en dehors de lacomprehension consciente du couple analytique.

Jungianer, die ihre Ausbildung in der sogenannten ‘Developmental School’ erfahrenhaben, verbinden die beiden Welten der Psychoanalyse und des klassischen jungianischenDenkens. Man befindet sich so nicht immer in einer leichten Position, aber wenn dieSpannungen ausgehalten werden konnen ist es moglicherweise eine reiche und kreativeArt zu arbeiten. In diesem Beitrag versuche ich, diese Position anhand des Gedichtes ‘Wieman einen Vogel malt’ von Jaques Prevert als Metapher fur das analytische Bestrebenauszuloten. Aus dieser Perspektive hoffe ich illustrieren zu konnen, wie wichtig es istin der Lage zu sein, einerseits einen klaren Rahmen fur die vorsichtige und genaueUntersuchung der Ubertragung innerhalb der mehr malignen Aspekte des seelischenAusdrucks zu setzen und aufrechtzuerhalten und andererseits den alchimischen Prozeßder gegenseitigen Transformation zuzulassen, der außerhalb des bewußten Verstehensdes analytischen Paares liegt.

Gli junghiani che si formano alla cosiddetta ‘Scuola Evolutiva’ si trovano fra i due mondidella psicoanalisi e del pensiero classico junghiano. Questa non e sempre una posizionefacile nella quale stare, ma se le tensioni possono essere sostenute potenzialmente euna modalita di lavorare ricca e creativa. In questo scritto cerco di analizzare taleposizione utilizzando la poesia di JAcques Prevert ‘Dipingere il ritratto di un uccello’come metafora della fatica analitica. Da tale prospettiva spero di illustrare l’importanzadi essere capaci, da un lato di tenere presente e mantenere una struttura chiara per unaattenta e dettagliata analisi del transfert all’interno del quale potrebbero esprimersigli aspetti piu maligni della psiche, e, dall’altro lato favorire il processo alchemicodella reciproca trasformazione che giace fuori dalla comprensione conscia della coppiaanalitica.

�ngiancy, poluqivxie trening v tak nazyvaemo� «xkole razviti�», sid�t nadvuh stul��h – psihoanaliza i klassiqeskogo �ngianskogo myxleni�. �to nevsegda sama� udobna� pozici� dl� sideni�, no esli vyder�ivat� napr��enie,to to daet potencial�no bogaty� i tvorqeski� sposob raboty. V danno�stat�e � pyta�s� issledovat� to polo�enie, ispol�zu� stihotvorenie akaPrevera «Kak narisovat� pticu» kak metaforu analitiqeskih stremleni�.V tom rakurse � nade�s� proill�strirovat� va�nost� umeni�, s odno�storony, uder�ivat� i sohran�t� �snu� ramku dl� twatel�nogo i podrobnogoissledovani� perenosa, v kotorom mogut otra�at�s� naibolee pagubnyeaspekty psihiki i, s drugo� storony, pozvol�t� tvorit�s� alhimiqeskomuprocessu vzaimno� transformacii, ne vmewa�wemus� v soznatel�noe poni-manie analitiqesko� pary.

56 Helen Morgan

El Jungiano entrenado en la llamada Escuela Desarrollista cabalga los dos mundos,el psicoanalisis y el pensamiento Jungiano clasico. Esto no siempre es una posicionfacil en donde estar, pero si las tensiones pueden ser contenidas es potencialmente unaforma rica y creativa de trabajar. En este trabajo procuro explorar esta posicion usandoel poema, ‘Pintar el Retrato de un Pajaro’ por Jaques Prevert como metafora para elesfuerzo analıtico. En esta perspectiva espero poder ilustrar la importancia de ser capazde tener y mantener en un marco claro para la exploracion cuidadosa y detallada de latransferencia dentro de el para, por una parte la exploracion de los aspectos mas malignosde la psique y, en la otra, para permitir el proceso alquımico de transformacion mutuaque se encuentra fuera la comprension consciente de la pareja analıtica.

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[MS first received March 2010; final version September 2011]