She’s sitting on the couch but I experience her as standing by the door. I feel alarmed. She’s jumping into open space with nobody to catch her, or is it that she’s being thrown? The sense of falling forever leaps up from what I experience as a rush of vertigo. I feel a huge gap in the middle of my body and a momentary brush with the prospect of nausea gathering in free fall.
As in the laboratory, the therapist has a live encounter with how our bodies implicate us in myth and myth implicates us in our bodies. A mythic image, not consciously apprehended, but experienced concretely in my body, summons a feeling for receiving, containing and crafting. The therapist’s body as the organ of
the counter transference registers the experience of compensating for the patient’s temporary state of disassociation. The reflective function containing the experi- ence is moved to re-locate it in association with the mythic image of the Greek god Hephaistos, thrown out of Olympus at birth by his mother (for being ugly) to fall to earth. The mythic image registers the shocking conjunction of violence and terror. Hephaistos was destined to be a worker and fashioner of metals as smith, craftsman and jeweller to the gods, perhaps the misshapen personification of the wounded healer and alchemist.
I ask if she can swim. She says she can’t, but why do I ask? I invite her to imagine what it would be like to enter a swimming pool at the shallow end. Calming down, she’s visibly amused at the prospect. She unfolds her hands and takes off her shoes. We enter the pool side by side very slowly. I attend to the importance of breathing and the sensing of pulse. She’s ‘not used to being aware’ of her breathing. We move slowly: nothing too deep to begin with. She’s begin- ning to enjoy the sensation of kicking water everywhere. We move deeper and she’s still kicking as she would in the shallows even though the (imagined) water is up to our waists. I comment that water is quite dense and heavy. Why not enjoy its resistance and feel its support? She begins to move with the water, enjoying the sensation of leaning into it which allows her to be slow. Exploration is a matter of negotiation and re-negotiation.
There is time for reflection after disengaging from the imaginal pool. She remembers being very difficult as a child. Her mother was ‘never quite sure’, she said, how to ‘handle’ her. She recalls the stories she’s brought many times of her father’s ridicule for her ‘ungainliness’. Towards the end of the session, sitting en
face, she says: ‘I think we’re dancing.’ She mused on the experience of being
supported in the dance and the feeling of water. ‘We were moving in time with a heartbeat. I’ve always been afraid of water. Perhaps I’ll learn to swim and lie on my back and feel the sound of the sea all around me.’
Our work takes us into linking sensations, images and words. In the next few weeks she links her fear of water and difficulties with co-ordination with feeling ashamed and humiliated at home, at school and particularly at work where she is learning to move from a fixed position. She has recognised it would be better to negotiate a redundancy deal rather than trying to save face by a petulant walkout, or fallout, as I experienced it. I find myself becoming more and more aware of the interface between the functions of dramaturge and analyst following the routes to roots of the transference where distinctions between leader and follower are always shifting.
In the theatre the dramaturge reports to the director on what they saw. Assisting in the process of weaving, unweaving and reweaving the dramatic score, the inter- weave of action, text, ‘the floor, the walls, the sources of light, bodies, extending in space to the others of others’, they are free to be alert to what the author represses and what the actor, in a moment of inspiration, reveals through what they appear to avoid. Dramaturgical alertness in the consulting room assists with registering who or what is absent, as well as present, in what is remembered and
forgotten. It prompts the configuration of therapist/patient to re-imagine a stuck situation, which can’t be forgotten, as a defence against remembering what has been forgotten.
Laboratory 3 (continued)
The stuck position rehearsed here in the laboratory is one of not being able to move out of the force field of an internalised ideal and demand, signifying a desperate need to move from an old body to a body still waiting to be found. In role this woman is unconcerned about the physical risks she is taking. She is a skilled, determined and daring performer who is alert to the creative value of aggression in emotional development and clearly in touch with how the environment is ‘discovered and rediscovered’ through movement.
Her performance explores aspirant relationships outside of home and family. There is a clear distinction between self and others. Me and not me are separated by the devices of time, place, age and gender. The persecuting others are located in another time, another place and of a different generation. They are clearly not
me. The dramaturgy is mainly linear with action tending to be subordinate to
narrative, but the piece is informed by an impassioned aspiration to find a way out of the repeated mis-en-scêne of the past by re-entering it as a resource.
Preparations for a second autobiographical performance six months later involve working with leader-follower principles. Three women exchange the roles of leader and follower, enabling each to have multiple experiences of assuming each other’s movement idiom in their own bodies. They are rehearsing moving from one to the other. The movement from improvisation to rehearsal re-defines the process of collaboration allowing us to second sight ‘the borderlands of experience where we feel implicated in the play of me, not me and not not me.’
In the performance we witness an epic struggle between three moving bodies. Though the same performer begins as a clearly delineated protagonist, her two antagonists challenge that status, providing the dynamic for a battle between all three. Power moves from one to the other; alliances form and re-form over and over again. This is a shadow land where integrity is off limits. Playing itself out, it concludes in total exhaustion, but not the death of the actors, who have become more like personified forces than people. All three figures are versions of me; their statuses, but not their actions, are interchangeable. Nothing is disowned. The staging has moved from its previous proscenium arrangement with its projection screen effect and face-on presentation. The action moves in and out of the audience who are allowed to see all sides of the actors’ bodies – to see them from different positions, whilst at the same time removing from the audience the conceit of being able to see everything. The movement from initial research, discovery and disclosure has involved the struggle we have just witnessed in this performance. It evokes the sense of an authentic self whose status is immanent and in the mak- ing – and whose evolution in the life of an individual is the real subject of autobiography.