which has since become a classic in the field of child psychotherapy. With Susan Reid, she edited Autism and Personality, Findings from the Tavistock Autism Workshop. In 2002, there was a book published in her honour, edited by Judith Edwards, entitled Being Alive, building on the work of Anne Alvarez. Her latest book, The Thinking Heart, Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy. with disturbed children was published in April 2012. I've been fortunate to be working with a study group who's been recently reading and I might say relishing chapters from that book over the past few months and our sessions with Anne's work have been particularly lively which I think is due in part to Anne's gift for integrating mind and heart theory and practice.
that the book is laced with vivid illustrations and detailed illustrations of her work with children. I think that capacity is reflected in the lovely title, The Thinking Heart. I should add that most of us actually work with adults, not children, but find the work in theory incredibly relevant. The book, perhaps for those of you who are not so familiar with Anne's work, describes three levels of... interpretation with a focus on how to reach children who exist in affectless, autistic or dissociated states who are quote not hiding but rather lost which is a phrase that's really spoken to me.
She suggests a need to use a vitalizing approach demanding the child's attention something more like a hey rather than an interpretive comment about meaning feelings. Our use of the electronic medium this morning strikes me as, I mean, it may not, it's not the same as having Dr. Alvarez here live in the room, but it strikes me it may be somewhat apt in terms of the content of her talk and her attempt to reach out to us over this vast distance by the digital link. I'd like you to join me in giving her a warm welcome to Dunedin. They don't know we're here.
So over to you, Anne. Okay, thank you, Jo. Thank you for those lovely words.
And it's a great honor to be asked to do this. I've never, I have spoken to people at some distance before, but never all the way around the globe like this. It is just amazing.
Anyway, I hope you will like this paper. It's something I wrote after the book, not the Live Company book, but the Thinking Heart book that Joe was just speaking about. Anyway, see what you think. I hope it's as good as the title. Anyway, many years ago, as Joe mentioned, this issue of somebody else holding this idea about the future.
Many years ago, I listened to a therapist describing a session where an apparently unfosterable young girl, Carol, rejected by her birth family, had brought a photograph to show to her therapist. She said that it was a photo of her uncle. Her therapist understood that this was probably only a photo of an uncle in one of the foster families who had refused to keep her.
The therapist said kindly and sympathetically that she thought Carol would like her to think that that was her uncle, but that they both knew that this was probably an uncle in one of the foster families. I was making similar interpretations to my patients at the time, but either said or implied that the child had a wishful fantasy that was contradicted by a painful external reality. However, I began to think that perhaps sometimes such children need us to take the fantasy more seriously as an expression of a rightful need for a different sort of future.
I think it's very important to distinguish between a wish in a neurotic patient and a rightful need in a more desperate patient. That is, rather than seeing it as a defense, against the truth. It could be seen as containing and expressing a truth.
I think we often have this model in classical analysis. There's the defense, which is a sort of lie, and there's the truth, the underlying and possibly unconscious truth. But actually what I'm saying is there can be a truth contained in the so-called defense. The therapist could say then, I think I should see you as someone who could have and will have a family one day. It seemed to me at the time that certain despairing patients may need someone else to hold the dream for them until they can begin to dream.
Three years later, Carol had become much more friendly, both to other people and to herself, and was able to be fostered. I suggested a name for this function of the therapist of holding the child's dreams for him or her, not the containment. of a type of projective identification, but rather the offering of an inviting function, which offers the possibility of what I chose to call an anticipatory identification. Goethe wrote, let me be attired as an angel until I become one.
I don't know if that phrase anticipatory identification, which I've never used since. actually captures what I was trying to say at that point. This was in the Live Company book, but I was trying to say it's not just a simple projective identification.
Anyway, you might have a better name for it, but this paper is not so much about that kind of issue of the future. In this paper, I want to talk about not only fantasies of the future self, like with Carol, but also of the future world. and to link this with the state of the internal object. This raises questions about hope, but also about anticipation, confident expectation, and determination.
It also raises questions about the function of dreams, daydreams, and the imagination. A while ago, I heard a Canadian novelist, Ted Chamberlain, arguing on the BBC radio. that dreams and the imagination are crucial to our lives.
And to prove his point, he told a story about a nation of native Canadians, what used to be called Indians, in northern British Columbia. During a particularly harsh winter, all 170 of their horses had died. Outsiders said they didn't need them on the reservation. Now they had trucks and cars.
Anyway, it was clear that they could not afford to replace them. By the next winter, they had 120 horses. Why did they need them?
John Grady, the hero of the first volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, I think it's called All the Pretty Horses, he gives one answer. What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran in them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent-hearted, and they would always be so and never be otherwise. So for the native Canadians and for John Grady, horses charge their imagination. For some native Canadians, this isn't simply an individual personal imagination.
It's also to do with their dearly loved cultural... heritage and values. Is this sentimentality? Certainly there are major differences between romantics and classicists in their view of the importance of the imaginative life. For example, even Charlotte Bronte, who wrote the highly romantic Jane Eyre, was bothered by the seeming immorality of her sister Emily's great Wuthering Heights and perhaps actually destroyed Emily's prose.
as she had her own. Apparently she didn't destroy her own, but when I read this they thought she had. Charlotte was suspicious of the lure of fantasy and of its addictive and idolatrous implications.
She felt she herself had been worshipping the creatures of her own imagination, allowing them to compete with God. Now, I think there are some echoes of this issue in the various psychoanalytic attitudes to dreams, the imagination, and to play. When should we tell our friends or children?
to stop dreaming, stop playing about, and when should we respect someone's wildest dreams? When are our own dreams deeply creative, even visionary? When are they at the very least healing? When are they obstructive of development?
And when are they positively perverting of development? Do we sometimes see ideal states as defensive when they are expressing a kind of reality? The Kleinian theory of symbolism is very helpful here and goes some way towards helping us make these distinctions clinically, as does Bion's suggestion rather late in his life that some dreams are creative.
An anthropologist, Crapanzano from New York, has suggested that what seems to have escaped attention in the study of symbolism is its relationship to imaginative possibility. to hope, to the optative, to moods like the subjunctive born by our grammars. He is interested in what he calls the aura offered by imaginative horizons.
And he says the minute we define the beyond, we freeze it. But a new beyond may then arise. He quotes William James, the great psychologist, brother of Henry James.
Every definite image in the mind. is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of when it came to us, the dawning sense of whether it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds it and escorts it, or rather that is fused into one with it. and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh.
I'm wondering today about whether we clinicians always pay enough attention to the daunted sense of where an image might lead. I mean we do get pretty preoccupied with the past and we're better nowadays at concentrating on the present but I'm just trying to introduce this other element. Daniel Stern the psychoanalyst and developmentalist, has been arguing for years that there's no such thing as a pure present moment in the mind, that the present moment always includes both a sense of the very recent past and some anticipation of the immediate future.
And Lou Sander, way back in the 60s, another great developmentalist, had pointed out that it's very important for healthy, infant, mental, and brain development. that newborn babies should have consistency of care so that their days are sufficiently predictable for them to develop what he calls organized states and that involves the idea of expectancy and anticipation of bearable predictabilities. He found the babies in his study that had continuity of care develop durable states of wakefulness, durable states of sleepiness or sleep.
durable states of hunger, durable states of feeding and satiation. Whereas the other babies with much more fragmented care ended up much more fragmented and they didn't really, like they'd have a moment of wakefulness and then sleep and a moment of wakefulness and then sleep, a moment of hunger and eating and then stopping eating. And they were, you know, pretty disorganized.
So he's saying really that the presence of the external object and its stability helps to organize the brain and the sense of timing. We know that smells, familiar voices, familiar tastes, familiar timings all facilitate this. And we've all had patients too fragmented to manage this and whose thoughts do not seem to be going anywhere in particular and who do not connect with each other. Their apparently very free associations are not really associated to each other at all.
They seem to lack the aura of which Crapanzano and William James write, or to put it in Bion's terms, they lack the necessary alpha function that makes thoughts thinkable, adds meaning to experience, and therefore facilitates connections and transitions between thoughts. not only to those behind, but what I'm wanting to stress today is to those that might be ahead. A book by Richard Holmes called The Age of Wonder points out that there was a period between 1761 and 1831 where the division between art and science was not so severe as it is now.
He describes this as the period of romantic science and says that what brought the two together was the sense of wonder and the idea of an often lonely and perilous exploratory voyage of discovery. I'm saying this is closely linked with the emotional state of curiosity. We could be curious about what lies over spatial horizons beyond the next mountain or country, but we could also have intense curiosity about the future.
At the moment, I think in this global situation, we're having dread about the future, but anyway. forgive me, that is temporal as opposed to spatial curiosity. Sometimes we dread the future, sometimes we experience eager anticipation.
Here I want to say something about Bion's concept of K, the desire to get to know someone or something. He thought it was a third emotional link which needed to be added. to the emotional links arising from love and hate.
Fisher, James Fisher, has pointed out that the word curiosity is inadequate to describe Bion's insistence on it as an emotional link between self and object. Certainly K is not about the desire to have knowledge, it's about the desire to get to know, with the acknowledgement that there is no end point. There is no end point. There is mystery, maybe some excitement, as with the romantics, but somewhere also awe about that which is unknown.
It's interesting that the German word for curiosity has much more emotion in it. Neugier means a craving for the new. Fischer discusses the danger when love and hate overwhelm. and Stifle K. And I've had at least one autistic patient who was a sweet, sensuous child, but I came to think because curiosity was being defended against, but more because it seemed to have hardly been awakened. Or if it had been awakened in his early days, it was so disused, it had atrophied.
And he used to come in almost to every session with these couple of puppet dolls that were his that he left in the box, his box that I provided. And he would make them do a little dance in a circle. And at first, when I first started seeing him, I thought it was symbolic play. But it wasn't because it was too repetitive and very unshared and never went anywhere at all.
Never. He never improvised. It was the same old thing.
But on this day, he came in looking at me in a really loving way and in a very loving mood. And he made, instead of the two animals just doing their little dance, he actually made them lay their heads against each other, sort of each cheek against the other's neck. And they were, as it were, kissing each other most tenderly.
It was really very touching to watch. And I felt there was also something happening in the transference. But this tender cuddling went on and on and on. I think it would have gone on. for the whole 50 minutes if I hadn't spoken.
And I started thinking, but even Anthony and Cleopatra got up and went for a cup of coffee and a walk sometime. But because it was loving, I sort of felt I had to respect it. And then I started thinking, no, you don't have to respect anything that goes on forever, as it were. So I did say to him, I think they've had enough kissing now.
Maybe they'd like to walk up the mountain. I pretended the couch was a mountain and he did, actually. separate them and take them up the back of the thing. But then they turned around and looked at me.
But the idea of looking over it to see what might be beyond was, I think, beyond him. He had to check back home, as it were. Many years before, a student who had just brought her new training case of a psychotic boy to me for supervision told me a story quite shamefacedly. She felt she had done something very unpsychoanalytic in the first assessment session. This rigid, terrified, despairing boy.
who seemed to have no idea how to play, suddenly but rather jerkily picked up a little toy racing car which was she provided in the box. He did nothing with it, yet it was the only flicker of interest he had shown in anything. And she found herself saying, perhaps you would like to be a racing driver when you grow up.
She felt she'd been mad and foolish. to have said this but he apparently agreed quite emotionally and indeed as the years of his treatment went on he frequently told her that he had never forgotten that she had said this i think she gave him a future now i want to say a little bit about infant development i am sure that observations of the infant stretching his limbs reaching with his arms grasping with his hands, crawling and walking, can show us that all these activities carry emotional, projective impulses to reach the object. That which was hitherto beyond reach becomes, as the baby progresses, within reach.
Then, as Crapanzano said, the beyond lengthens. All this is fueled by unconscious fantasy, as Isaac suggested, about what lies just beyond today's reach and requires courage, hope, and curiosity, as well as, of course, identification with mother and father and older siblings. I had one girl, very, very OCD, limited girl, a couple of years ago, who agreed with me that she lived in a sort of cave most of the time. but was very, very comfortable there and found it very cozy.
Not so much because it was safe. She wasn't particularly afraid of what was outside. She didn't expect anything outside to be that interesting. So one day I said to her, when you were little and your brother was older and he could walk and you were sitting in your high chair, didn't it ever occur to you that you might want to, you could wish you were down on the floor and could follow him around the corner when he disappeared?
And she looked at me with total disdain and said, I never wanted to get down from my chair. So that's quite a statement. But it confirmed what I was beginning to faintly understand, but not yet, that it was an anxiety that kept her in the cave.
It was just she thought the world out there was boring and wouldn't offer anything. Anyway, beyond has to be sufficiently interesting. pull us on and timidity or depression or narcissism i should add can slow this down why do children love to jump up and forward as well as down does that space above or ahead beckon or forbid it's not simply about safety even as i said or as in carol's case where it was about self-belief and despair it's also about interestingness.
In a recent observation, we heard about a baby engaging in bottom shuffling rather than crawling. Now, there can be many reasons for this, some purely accidental, but in this case, we did wonder if the mother's rather controlling attitude for her daughter's independence had interfered somewhat with the baby's appetite for what lay ahead. The mother never placed her on her tummy on the floor.
that she always placed her seated. This contrasted greatly with another baby of a similar age who crawled forward, whose appetite for the new was evident in his eager crawling and exploration of everything. All these efforts to roll over, to sit up, to become even more vertical by learning to stand up, require courage, hope and curiosity. And as I said before, identification with mother and father and older siblings.
The beyond has to be sufficiently interesting to pull us on. And I don't think I say anything about that in this paper, but I got interested in this thing about when the color comes into the cheeks of some patients. And I'd seen this happen with my autistic patient, Robbie. And I felt it. I read the brain research as much as I could understand, but I didn't feel it was to do with left.
brain and right brain. It was about coming alive and I asked a woman who I didn't know at that point, was a great admirer of Panksepp's. And she said, well, he's written about something called the seeking system, which gets going in the brain when the dopamine system gets aroused.
And she said there are two different responses in the brain of the baby if the mother or the father smiles at the baby and looks lovingly at the baby. The opioids go up from the brainstem, but so also, and the opioids give you the lovely, warm, beloved, tender feeling. Also, so does the dopamine system, which is about eager anticipation and expectation and confidence. So I thought that was very interesting. Anyway, I'm now going to talk about a patient called Jean.
She was 10 years old and she was referred because of her clumsiness, depression and underachievement at school. I've written about her in the Thinking Heart book, the latest book. She was, I say, underachievement.
They were an intelligent middle-class family, so she was managing fine in the local state school. But she was more intelligent than that, and the parents, I don't know about the teachers, but the parents were aware she could have been doing very much better. She had an odd, flat-footed, chaplinesque walk, although it was years before she gave me. or maybe in my timidity I felt I could take an opportunity to discuss it with her. I think I might have found a way earlier nowadays.
We did, however, discuss her clumsiness, which entered into the sessions fairly soon and disappeared entirely within a year. Jean was a very polite, gentle girl. Excuse me. So polite, in fact, that much of her clumsiness seem not to be due to embarrassment on her own behalf, but on other people's. You've met people like that.
If someone else said or did something stupid, she would trip up. There was also a kind of passive projective identification process going on in the clumsiness, where she was silently and apparently totally innocently provoking irritation as she tripped, bumped into things and stepped on my feet. But as I said, this physical clumsiness disappeared fairly early on. Her mental chaos and educational underachievement took much longer to unpick. Sometimes when she tried to tell me something, the sequence of events was so tangled that she appeared almost to suffer from thought disorder.
I was often very confused. It took some years for us to understand together. the many factors in her personality which led to her odd thinking, odd language and odd gait.
In the early years she talked fairly little and preferred to draw endlessly repetitive pictures of bleak narrow houses often with blank windows and blocked doors. They were usually unpeopled and nothing much happened in them anyway. I mean, there was some real depression there in her.
Sometimes she drew railway stations, but none of the trains ever arrived or left. And it was often raining. Even when things began to move slightly, it was always up to me to ask, to push, to pull, which unfortunately confirmed what we gradually saw was Jean's belief.
that other people were somehow inordinately eager for her contribution. Adults were seen as kind, but fragile and silly, and never magnetic enough, safe enough, nor interesting enough to invite her forward into life. I am an old woman now, but I wasn't old when I was treating her, and yet the person who stood for me was always the little old lady in the Baba stories, you know the elephants?
And there's this sort of fragile little old lady who looks after Baba, but she's kind of frail. Anyway, that was me. By the third year of treatment, when she was 12, Jean began to use much more space in the treatment room and to be somewhat more at ease.
She became less exaggeratedly polite. She continued with her house drawings, but the entrances were wider. and gardens began to surround the houses.
I had spent a lot of time worrying about technique with her, how not to ask questions about a drawing too quickly. which seemed to produce claustrophobic panic, and yet not to leave her for too long. If I did leave her too long, she sank into depression, darkness, and genuine misery. As I said, the earlier drawings were often full of miserable, drizzling rain. When the roofs in her drawings kept being shown as collapsing, and I tried to link this with an anxiety about a break.
or some pending external event like an exam. She would agree politely. I never felt these or other explanatory interpretations really reached her at all.
I had to learn that until she could learn to think one thought at a time in any depth. My attempts to make connections between the two were pretty well a waste of time. And she was not stupid. She... could not think about how her unconscious thoughts lay behind her conscious ones until she could learn to think and feel her conscious ones more fully and deeply to explore as it were what I've called her para-conscious, para-conscious and stick by it and own it.
I mean it wasn't always deeply unconscious it was just simply neglected and not dwelt upon. But three years on, as Jean reached the age of 13, there was more light and space in the houses and a sense that movement and life might be possible. I noted, however, that at whatever moment I started to speak, she so easily felt crowded and intruded on that she immediately got stuck and couldn't move forward. She would simply cut off. and only pretend to listen.
So there was no dialogue at all. One day, however, she did a drawing of some amazing shoes that could get electrical power from the floor underneath. There was an electrical magnet in the floor.
Your feet wouldn't need to touch the floor. The shoes would just get the electricity without touching. I pointed out that perhaps she felt that would be a lovely way to have a conversation.
if only my talking didn't produce this terrible friction and slow her down, if only it could just give her a charge and let her go on. She really seemed to understand this. I felt that up to a point she was right. She needed such an object. She needed to find an object in me and in life that unlike her impatient and obstructive internal objects would not obstruct her passage, a passage which was at times highly tentative.
and others unbelievably rapid and spear-like. She herself was very impatient and in some ways quite intrusive. And I might mention that her parents were very friendly, lovely, loving, but quite excitable people.
And when the two of them would come to meet with me, we were interrupting each other all the time, but we could still more or less manage to keep our own thoughts, even if we felt interrupted by the other. But maybe this baby, I think she had a difficult time. birth, maybe there was something that made things a bit more difficult for her.
Anyway, we came to understanding that the confusing, almost thought disorder talk was due in part to her own impatience, but I wish to stress it was also due to what she saw as an implacable impatience on the part of her internal listening object. this was what we learned. She would start to recount some story involving four points.
She would begin with the first, but her mind would jump ahead to the third or fourth, because she feared it wouldn't wait and would disappear if she didn't get to it quickly. It was therefore demanding her attention. So she'd go one, four, three, two, which is why we were both so confused by the end. At other times, she would jump to the third or the fourth.
point because she thought they were the thoughts I was thinking and therefore expecting and wanting her to think. Needless to say, this premature jump ahead interfered with getting through sequentially thoughts one and two on the way to three and four, and the result was conversational chaos. She finally began to slow down.
Beautiful lakes began to appear in her drawings. and our inner world seem to be broadening out. She remembered that on family walks, she had always walked rapidly with her head down, simply to get to the end of the walk, and had never looked to the right or left at the plants and trees on either side of the path.
No exploratory excitement there. She saw that her tunnel vision had been affecting her mind and her learning in a variety of ways. Her conversation became slower and steadier, but...
but paradoxically faster and freer. She was no longer depressed and also much less rigid and more flexible. Finally, one day she began to talk about her flat-footed walk.
She said that she had realized that she was afraid to lift her heel and to push off. She could do it when she ran, but not when she walked. She seemed to be saying that she felt she needed to cling to the earth just as she had always clung mentally to other people's thoughts instead of pursuing and completing her own first.
There was a longing by now, however, for a more coordinated and regulated forward motion. In fact, she began to enjoy dancing and sports and to improve academically to a marked degree. I think she learned to tell those thoughts just to wait their turn. That's what I think happened.
You don't want to be too polite to impatient internal thoughts. Well, I wanted to say a little bit about the development of walking. First, although it's clear that all, or almost all, ordinary, able children learn to walk, a fascinating book by Thalen and Smith on the non-linear elements in learning to walk talk about the point here is that there is no essence of leg movements during the first year. Leg coordination patterns are entirely situation dependent.
That is whether the infant is calm or excited, upright, supine or prone. Deliberately using the legs for exploration or locomotion or on a treadmill, which is a research tool that they used. No child is to walk exactly like any other. We might want to enlarge on this list they've given about the situational conditions. by introducing an object relations perspective and ask excited about what or by whom drawn towards what or whom to explore and what about the feeling of power gained from pushing one's feet down on the floor or earlier in life against a parent's hand and the pleasure and sense of agency that such pushing contact may give and the awareness of playful aggressiveness in the caregivers pushing back.
You know with babies when they're learning to stand, they love to bounce up and down on your side but they love to push down as well as jump up. And you know when kids would play lying on the floor pushing their feet against each other. I got interested in this because I had another patient with walking difficulties and funny attitudes to how to put his feet on the floor and I thought your attitude to your feet. Your foot's relationship to Mother Earth might start with these early interactions with your parents playing with your feet and you having fun pushing back.
I saw a little 13-month-old recently crawling very rapidly towards some goal and suddenly slowing to slap the floor in a very assertive and somehow joyful manner. Two months later... I saw him do the same a few days after he had learned to walk. He stamped his feet in a gloriously triumphant manner. He seemed to be amplifying and enjoying his new amazing skill.
It's important to remember, if you think of the baby back in the cot, to remember that babies do not only smile with their mouths and eyes, they greet us with their hands and feet too. And the relationship between our feet and the world starts long before we try out the ground. Our sense of rhythm and beat does not wait for the one-two, one-two of walking. Of course, it begins with the rests and pauses during sucking, or during the rests and pauses in looking, or as Bruner said, in the alternation between sucking and looking.
The pauses allow us to digest the recent past. We know this. But they also, I think, allow us to anticipate the immediate future.
I think if I were working with Jean now, I might spend more time trying to understand how her obstructive internal object stood in the way of a future that beckoned. At the time I was interested in the link between her thinking and her walking, but now I might also view the lack of a sense of an interesting and accessible future as indicating some deficit in her internal object. If it just wasn't that interesting, it was so busy that it was rushing towards her, that it didn't wait to be found and discovered by her. This is another clinical case, a little autistic boy called Jesse. This illustrates a moment where I think I managed to speak not simply to a distant, dreamed-of future, but to the idea of some immediate possibilities in the immediate future in the session.
Jesse, an eight-year-old autistic boy who had become generally... more related to people in recent months, came back to his first session after the Christmas break. He burst down to the playroom, looked at his toys and said, there are too many toys. I want some others.
I want to get into that cupboard. Now, when he first came to me, he and his parents had been seen as a family by my colleague, Sue Reed, and me. We did the... assessment jointly and then she went on seeing the parents and I saw the child but her playroom has a lot more toys in it than mine did so the first couple of breaks he just was convinced that I was keeping toys for other children that were much better than the ones I gave him in this locked cupboard there was this little low locked cupboard in the room that did contain other children's toys as a matter of fact anyway he had guessed that but that you was the ordinary, you know, rivalrous siblings getting better and stuff and I made that interpretation at the time. But this felt different because he didn't seem so sure of what he wanted and it just wasn't that simple.
So because he was so hesitant and he then said about the cupboard, I know what I need, an axe. Could you get me an axe? Do you have an axe anywhere in this house I could use? There was definitely eagerness and eager anticipation. but also bewilderment.
I felt that he knew he wanted something, but he didn't know what it was. So what I said this time, you know, you write papers about the days when you got it right. There are 400 million days when you get it wrong.
But anyway, this is one day when I thought I got it right with him. What I said was, I think what you want is for me to give you an instrument all right, but one that will help you find a way of having a good time here with me today. He stopped his demands at once and started to play, making good contact for most of the session.
This was another one of these mysterious children who could appear to do symbolic play, and much more elaborate than the other boy, but would never, at the beginning, would never share it. But he had learned to share it with me much more often, and this day he did some sharing with it. I do not think I was being simply evasive when I said that. or inviting the child to be distracted from his desires.
This is because I think the fantasy of the cupboard's contents did not have the deep symbolic meaning it might have in an already connected child who wants more than his share, you know, the usual jealous sibling fantasy. It was closer to a symbolic equation that Siegel wrote about or to an autistic object that Tustin wrote about. And he needed... reminding of the existence of an interpersonal world of human beings and what could be done with them in the immediate future. Where the internal world of human mindful objects does not beckon, that is where there is a deficit of the internal object, we may need to spell out something about the potential, the possibility, the options that could lie ahead.
With somewhat weller patients who have more ego and some degree of imaginative capacity and hope, it may be enough to say something like, it's hard for you to imagine that you might one day. I can think of two adolescent patients for whom a chronic, lifelong underlying depression had left them with practically no sense of a future. They both seem to be walking backwards towards the future, their eyes firmly faced.
their eyes firmly fixed on their lost childhoods. For the girl, Louisa, her future was simply gray. For the boy, Christopher, His future was felt to be terribly short.
He talked about old age and death as though it was imminent and heavy, and that he ought to be preparing for it, but he was only 13. He walked and looked like an old man, too. Both these patients suffered from a degree of apparent narcissism, in that their parents and teachers were not felt to be particularly interesting or compelling as objects of admiration, so they turned... towards them inwards towards themselves depression in their parents had played a part in this if objects do not command our interest and curiosity if they are not particularly inviting then the world of otherness of that which is outside and beyond may not beckon and entice we may need to distinguish the unvalued objects of chronic depression from the devalued ones which inhabit the internal world of disillusioned and relatively normal adolescents.
I mean, that's a very different, you know, with the devalued objects, you can tell these adolescents really mind the fact that you're so stupid. They expect intelligence, whereas these other people just think everybody's stupid. Our relationship to the future, like everything else, is based on internal object relations and mostly on unconscious fantasy.
I had to address the narcissism in both cases, but also the depression and the lack of hope. I found I had to say things like, it's hard for you to believe that you might have many years of life ahead yet. Or to the girl, that your mother and I could survive your being a sexual and intelligent woman.
Finished, I think. Yes. This is...
just another technical issue. This is saying a little bit about Panksepp and the dopamine. He suggested that the dopamine system is connected with states of eager anticipation, as I told you, which he distinguishes from the systems of attachment, lust, and hunger, and also from sexuality, although he says it can accompany any of those.
Sorry, I've just got a cramp. Soames, when I read about this, I started thinking, and I started liking this idea of the dopamine system. I said to this Lucy Bibbon woman, I'm beginning to think that what he's talking about is the drives.
Does this mean we should go back to Freudian psychology after all and start thinking about drives? Because I normally don't. And she said, it's okay, I thought I'd had this really original idea. I'm blaming you.
Yes. Sorry. Anyway, she pointed out Mark Solins had pointed this out already, so every time I've ever thought I had an original idea, it turned out somebody else has had it.
Anyway, he also said, can't accept that without dopamine, only the strongest emotional messages instigate behavior. I myself have previously suggested in my first book that there are certain states of mind and possibly states of brain. where what is required is a more intensive, vitalizing insistence on meaning, because it creates what some developmentalists call a heightened affective moment. That's what Beebe and Lachlan talk about. The pulse and pitch of our voices changes at such moments of urgency where we reclaim our patience into the world of meaning.
Some research has found that the insistent rhythms of music, according to Pangsep, can increase the synthesis of dopamine in animals. And you all know if you're depressed or tired and you put some energetic music on, music can change your mood quicker than just about anything. Some of our patients need awakening to the fact that otherness can be interesting, regardless of whether it is good or bad. It isn't always goodness that wakes them up.
It's them getting in touch with maybe a sense of badness. Lowvald is a psychoanalyst. who has discussed the importance of the sense of the future for mental life.
His view was that it is very much determined by the ego's relationship to the superego. He saw the ego as representing the psychic presence, and the superego with its admonishment and praise as constituting the sense of the future. As far as I can tell, however, he does not go so far as to suggest that the future as exciting and promising is the future as interesting. might have to do with internal objects, which are not so super egoish in the more conscious sense, more to do with the mother's breast. or joyous greeting to her baby's first look, or first smile, or first step, or word, and so on.
But nevertheless, Lowell brings a very interesting perspective. He does mention anticipation and imagination, and a very interesting link with the life instinct. He suggests that the early stages of id psychology made us concentrate on the past, but with the ascendancy of the structural theory, and of object relations, this time perspective has shifted. And I'm quoting from him now, the idea of a life instinct bespeaks an orientation toward a view in which life is not altogether motivated by forces of the past, but is partially motivated by an attraction coming from something ahead of us. He does not identify the source of this attraction, but we might wonder about the liveliness of the original objects.
breast, face, voice of carers, daddy's mobile face, daddy's beard. I think we do notice a deficit in this attraction in the personalities of developmentally delayed children, similar to those treated, well they were treated by beta-ronc and putnam syndrome, but nowadays we're getting them absolutely everywhere. Very profoundly emotionally neglected children, they've never been played with, left in front of the telly if they're lucky.
And so they don't necessarily find human beings as offering anything. Lowalt says that inner ideals, expectations, hopes, demands, and equally inner doubts, fears, guilt, despair concerning oneself, and we might add concerning our objects, all this is either reaching toward or feeling defeated by a future. I'd like to conclude by adding that sometimes we can help our patients to move from an as if to a what if or an if or even to a when and even to the future perfect. By then I will have finished my or by then our government will have changed and they will finally have granted us the right to as my depressed inhibited adolescent patient Christopher who has begun to conceive of a future, said recently, by then, I think he said when I'm 25, by then I would have either been a banker for five years or a social worker.
Okay, thank you, Anne. So questions? Just to add a sort of technical thing.
I don't think I started doing as a result of this paper. I think I started doing it as a result of that patient who said that thing about I never wanted to get down from the high chair. And I found if I just interpreted... her anxiety about what was out there, or even her belief that what was out there was boring, I just was, it sort of confirmed her in her rather comfortable position. And I did start saying to her, and I've started doing it with other patients and encouraging other people to, I started adding in, and you know what, you don't know what you're missing.
And if you stay where you are, you may never know what you're missing. And I think there's something about I think it is to do with this notion of Bion's K, that it's not just whether the object's good or bad or safe or dangerous, it's also whether it's interesting. Just along the lines you're talking there, Anne, do you think that there's a risk that a quiet, listening, reasonably silent approach with a client who perhaps sort of veers towards that more dissociated, autistic end of a continuum?
Is there a risk that it confirms or reinforces that experience of a deadened object or an unvalued object? Yes, yes. There are two lovely papers of people treating Asperger-y patients. that's that talk about that. One is by a lovely woman, a New York relational analyst called Lisa Director, and she's written two papers.
One is called The Enlivening Object, and I'm not sure the other one. One is in psychoanalytic dialogues, and the other one is in contemporary psychoanalysis, and I could maybe find the name of it. I can't remember the name of that one. Anyway, Lisa Director is her name. And she talks about this very withdrawn, sad man.
He was very talented in his own field, which is something like IT or something. But he'd had a divorce and not been able to connect with his grown-up children at all ever since. And she felt he was very empty and did find herself starting to use some of these ideas of reclamation and enlivening and being much more forthcoming with him than she would have to be with him.
ordinary patient. And he did warm up eventually. And it's a very moving account that she has of her work with him. And the other paper is something that's coming out in a book on Jungian child analysis.
I can't remember the name of the editor. And the woman who's written the paper is called Susan Williams. And there's this lovely, he's very withdrawn, and she does a lot of this. She actually says, Anyway, I'll proceed this. I was in Madrid many, many years ago, giving the very first version of my paper on levels, this idea of the different levels of work and at the very most far gone, empty, lost state of mind.
You might need to do something more than classical analysis and be more intensified and urgent in your coaxing them into contact, calling them into contact. And these Spanish analysts said to me. oh, you're talking about seduction. And I said, of course.
And they said, I said, of course, I'm not talking about seduction. Seduction implies betrayal in my language. And they said, no, haven't you read Laplanche on this issue?
He says that the mother is seducing the baby all the time. Anyway, I had a big argument about that with them. And then I looked around the room at these Spanish female analysts, and they were all wearing...
Because I said seduction implies betrayal. Anyway, in our country, and all these women were wearing these really sexy leather trousers. And I thought maybe these Spanish know something I don't. But anyway, Susan Williams does use the concept of seduction with this fellow. And she said he was a sort of 19 year old, very withdrawn, very, I would say, probably undrawn.
both of these patients weren't just withdrawn, they were undrawn as well. Their internal objects had rather abandoned them in both cases. And she did what Lisa did, lots of warm responsiveness to him, really, she said seduce but not sexually is what she did.
Anyway, this is when he's beginning to get a bit better. And he comes in this day, this was not in such a withdrawn state, but he could do that rambling. round the houses taught that Asperger people could go in and he tells her the whole journey he made during the rain and that he had that there wasn't a single shoe shop in sight anywhere in this bit of north London she was seeing him she was she trained in London for a while although she's in California now and she said um it just didn't make any sense and it really drove her mad that he was giving her all the details of this walk through the rain but when she got home she started thinking I think he was telling me that he made because the shoes were uncomfortable and he was looking for a shoe shop on the way but he got there and she realized that he was probably telling her what an effort he'd made to get to the session through the pouring rain so the next day he came in and said he bought himself a watch and he was very proud of it you may know lots of young people don't want bother with watches nowadays because they just use their phones but anyway he'd you He and she had realized he did need a watch and he'd finally gone out to get it and he did this big rambling story About all the shops and all the different watches this time She was onto him and she felt that she had cracked the code So she said something about I think you're telling me that you're really looking after yourself And you knew that I would be pleased as he started phoning her if he was going to be late He'd say I know you'll be worried.
He finally had an object that really cared about him and when he said she said this about you thought I'd be pleased that you're really looking after yourself when you've got yourself a watch he looked at her which she said he absolutely beamed and that she felt he felt that she'd really found him so I think it is quite interesting Anyway. Okay, great. Thank you. Hello, Anne.
Can you hear me okay? Yes, I can. This is marvelous, isn't it?
To be able to talk across the world like this. It is amazing. Totally amazing. My name's Andrew and I'm from Wellington in New Zealand.
I don't really have a question. I was sat there feeling, I was just sort of, you know, just imbibing what you were saying really. really enjoying what you were saying. I'm not a child therapist but I was thinking about my adult clients and can you hear me? You froze then.
Oh did I? Sorry, yeah. I just paused. The connection is a bit unstable at the moment. If I ask, if you don't hear what I say, just check in with me and I'll repeat it.
But I was thinking about my adult clients who are borderline and psychotic and thinking about how some of the ideas where you've worked with children can be so easily applied to my adult clients, particularly thinking about... clients who have trouble with their thinking and I was particularly taken with the comment you made about being able to think one thought at a time and you know I often uh you know I could relate so strongly to your to the client the first client you mentioned who had trouble with the simplest thing of the simplest component of a conversation and how how that It reminds me so much of working with my borderline clients who have so much trouble with simply sitting in the room and having two minds together. And I was just really taken. It's very bionic, isn't it? The idea of being able to link thoughts.
Yes. But I thought you explained that so well when you got into the minutiae of how your client was having trouble with. you know sequencing one two three four yeah yeah yes i had another patient who i had on and off for many many years and she had uh um she was very withdrawn at the beginning and almost autistic which she was very little but then she became she woke up and she got kind of very bubbly and excitable and it was just lovely and charming to see this sort of liveliness but then after a while i started thinking Shouldn't this be being channeled a little bit? Because it sort of wasn't.
Which, you know, kids begin to do. Harry Stack Sullivan wrote about this. When kids go to school, they learn to edit their conversations with the teachers. They realize the teacher doesn't know who Zoe is. Zoe's my aunt, my mother's sister.
But the kid says Zoe's coming to tea and the teacher doesn't know who the hell Zoe is. So he talked about the internal editor that children acquire for conversation when they go to school. And then when they begin to read and write and stuff.
And I was feeling that this should, I should be helping her to channel this bubbliness a little bit by now because it had been going on for a year or two. And I took it to a supervision session that the staff psychotherapist at the Tabby were having with Kit Bolas. And I knew him quite well socially, but I'd never had supervision with him or anything because I worked with children and he didn't. Anyway, he was supervising. And I said, I'm worried about this.
It's not really free association. I don't know what it is. There's something wrong.
And he said, you, he lit into me. You Kleinians, you don't care about free association anymore. What's the matter with you? And he was writing a little book about free association at the time.
And I went away very chastened. And then another six months passed. And I thought, no, it's not real free association.
But it took me a long while to understand why it wasn't. And gradually over the years, and then she came back again as a young adult for a few years. It was still there, but it was much reduced because by then I'd been working on it. She was one of those who didn't allow the alpha function, didn't have enough leisure in her mind to allow alpha function meanings to gather around one thought before she moved on to the next. So she could neither pay attention to her own thoughts nor to mine.
So she had great difficulty learning and had a genuine learning difficulty in the outside world. and learning from me. And one day, a few years ago, she said she could mix her metaphors in a very charming way sometimes.
But anyway, on this particular day, she said there was a lot of... fighting and competition going on between the other teachers in the school where she assisted because of all the terrible cuts we're having in this country. And there was a lot of competition for jobs and stuff.
And she said, it's the battle of the fittest. And I thought, now what's the matter with that? There's something wrong. It's just her being careless again. And then I thought, no, she's taken two phrases, the battle for survival and survival of the fittest.
And she's condensed the two. And this is something we talked about a lot before, this frantic grab. at something, anything, you know, any old way, squash two together if it suits.
So I said this to her and she said, yes, I know, I know what I do. I do do that. She said, it's like a frog that goes out with its tongue and just grabs it. So I think she was talking about the way she interjects. And I think with those sorts of patients, you're starting almost at the beginning and helping them how to, helping them to interject, helping them how to communicate back, how to let that one thought And it wasn't, I have to tell this to kid Bolas, except he's not living in England anymore.
It wasn't real free association because a real association is weighted with meaning. So of course, as Freud said, it can connect with the next thought because they're both weighted with meaning and those underlying meanings connect them. But this was the flotsam and jetsam off the top of her head.
Yes. So I think with those sorts of patients. Even if they're adults, you're often starting from scratch.
And I'm interested in your countertransference and how you manage it because my response is always one of identifying with the internal experience of the client. And I think perhaps there's something about what I've discovered is how I keep myself alive and looking forward. to the next step, you know, instead of sinking into a kind of a mutual complementary countertransference that is unhelpful.
Yes. Giving up, as it were. Yeah.
Yeah. And not imagining that it could change. And it's not easy to change your habits of mind and your habits of thinking or non-thinking.
Very, very difficult. You know, if that got the person through. It's very difficult. Yeah, but it's still very interesting when they begin to, you know, discover their own mind. It's lovely for them.
Thank you, Anne. Okay, thank you. Kia ora, Anne.
My name's Keith. I'm based in Auckland and emigrated here from Sheffield about nine years ago. Oh my goodness.
So I was, I loved your paper. Many thanks. And I particularly appreciated your forthrightness and your lovely sense of humor. So thank you for that. I was particularly interested in your references to grammar at the beginning of the paper and the subjunctive.
And I wondered if you could say a little bit more about the future imperfect. What was that? The future imperfect.
Yeah, I heard you. But what is it? I don't know. Well, I said. I wonder if there's something here about your references to the outside world, because one time you said something, you sort of made it some political reference to, or dreading the future.
And I wonder if there's something, you talk quite a lot about hope and that almost a sort of teleological pull to the future. Yes. But I wonder if you could expand a little bit, perhaps about the dread and the...
Ah, okay. You know, what is the future when it's... and not so much when but more unknown it's that that sort of stuff so i was curious that you ended with an indicative in the sense the future perfect is is somewhat fixed when and so on and by then i will have yeah yes yeah so i wonder if you could expand a little bit on that well i was thinking i hadn't thought of future imperfect it's a wonderful idea um a wonderful concept. I was simply thinking of when there is no sense of the future. So, you know, we could have, let's have a good time here.
Let's, that's a nice, let's go for a walk. The Italians say andiamo or something. Let's go.
It's a kind of shared, let's do something together. But it's also heading for the future, even though it's in the present sense, present tense. there is an anticipation in it let's go for a walk or let's have a party let's meet next week or whatever.
That's much more ordinary future. But this future perfect thing is another step in confidence. By then, I will have finished my PhD.
By then, I will have managed to earn enough money to buy a house. I found the man of my life and got married or something. And there are people who have more of that confidence than others.
And by the way, I mentioned the dopamine system, but I read a paper recently by Lucy Biven, and she says that I didn't know that he thought this sense of agency. I can do it. I will do it.
I will manage to study hard enough for that exam or whatever. I will work hard and do da-da-da-da. But that is connected with this sense of anticipation and looking forward to what's about to happen next.
So I haven't thought of, I wasn't really, I was comparing the lack of a future to the sense of a future. But what you're bringing in is the idea of a dreaded future or a horrifying future. And that can be as, what's the word, as determining and as determined as the kind I was describing. You know, I will have been a banker or a social worker.
I will have been. you know it's pretty confident as opposed to oh by then we'll all be dead because there'll be a world war. Thanks. Yeah okay. That's really helpful in that sense of yeah confidence and indicativeness yeah so I guess yes I'm sort of looking for the subjunctive future.
It also takes bravery to look at the alternative but that's different from no future. Yeah, thanks. Okay.
Suzanne's just getting her glasses. She's coming. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your paper. I found that delightful to imagine being in your room with the children and that beautiful direct interface and interaction and the focus is delightful. Thank you. And I'm thinking about work with people who have been seduced in the betrayal sense.
So working with people who have been sexually abused as small children. So, you know, sometimes the adult will come into the room very regressed. And the first, as you said, we have to begin again. We have to start again, as you were saying to the question. So what I'm interested is your opinion about when a young child has been sort of physically betrayed via sexual abuse and cannot rely on their own bodily senses as an adult.
So they've been. short-circuited or corrupted or I call it sort of even in their sort of nervous system and their erogenous zones. So they can't rely on their own body responses and do you see that we start from scratch again and helping the client locate their own sort of body sensation and or how do you see that the therapy does help the body self emerge?
in the adult or child and you thank you well okay um i was just hearing about a case two nights ago i think they're two different problems but they can be uh what's the word can occur together and one is the problem of the children who i mean this is over simplistic and over schematic but forgive me for a moment where what you've got is the problem of emotional neglect not always physical neglect but emotional neglect which leads to not having been taken to the park to go running and playing with balls and things like that and we get so many of these children nowadays because we only get the illest in the health service here now the very top most disturbed children so they're all you traumatized or neglected and usually both and it's terrible and how ill these children are but what you learn is that I'm just thinking of some cases I just heard this week where there was very little sense of having a body. Now, one of them was not one of these deprived inner city kids with the parents are refugees or something. The young man in America who dropped out of university in his third year, which the analyst who's treating him said is fairly unusual. Most of the kids of that kind he treats drop out of the first year. But this kid made it as far as his third year.
and then had a complete collapse and had to come home and said, he's coming to understand that everything he's done all his life is on behalf of pleasing his parents, really. He doesn't blame them for this, but that he was doing what people expected of him. And he tells this story about walking around some cities and traveling with his parents and going his own way and going into the odd museum or gallery.
and absolutely loving it. And the analyst felt it was just the beginning of him sort of finding his own way, as it were. And we've talked about it.
And apparently in that session or the next one, he asked the patient something about his body. I don't know if it was about sex or just his body in general, I can't remember. But the guy said, I have absolutely no connection with my body.
And we agreed that actually he's got to start there. And that with that kind of patient, You're starting from the beginning in terms of helping to build a self, a core self, because he hardly has one. He's lived this false self life very obligingly all his life. And at some point, you know, some people manage it and probably die never knowing what they're missing.
But this young kid at some point felt total despair about what was. do have to start and I said start doing there's a lovely paper by Graham Music who's a child therapist I think he's an adult therapist too but he wrote this in the journal child psychotherapy and he called it the neglect of neglect because everybody was writing about trauma and he thought not enough therapists were studying how to treat these neglected children and he linked it with my notion of children who are undrawn as opposed to withdrawn you know that the object hasn't pulled them forward And he said he called it working with children who were undrawn and unenjoyed. And then he describes this little boy growing up in an ordinary household. It's not one of these inner city neglected kids. And he found him so boring.
Teachers never paid any attention. These children can make themselves completely invisible. And he eventually started describing. all the bodily movements the little boy made because he tended to jiggle a lot and it was a way of attending to his um body really and it helped a lot made the child feel you know we can't go i'm talking about the importance of the parents holding or kissing or biting children's feet and stuff baby's feet but you can't do that with a 10 year old patient we can't go biting their feet or sucking on their toes or whatever But we can pay attention to their body very, very closely and show that we are noticing that it's jiggling or that it's now more relaxed or that it's feeling a bit more comfortable in that chair or something.
So that's sort of an answer to the idea of the more neglected element. As I say, the patients are mixed. You don't have just neglected or just traumatized.
You tend to have mixtures. But with the traumatized ones, it's even... trickier, I don't know if it's trickier, but you have to be very careful that they don't experience you as being intrusive or seductive, seductive in the bad sense, if you start talking about their body. But I think you have to find a way of doing it that makes it safe, but that attends to the ordinary body that was neglected by being so intruded upon. You know, you don't want to just I think what happened in the beginning when we were working with these kids, we stayed off the body altogether.
But that doesn't help either, because what about their normal sexuality when it starts to come? Would they know the difference if somebody hadn't helped them to feel? It's OK to feel.
I got interested in this because I was I still do supervise people who work with learning disabled people, adults and children who are sexually abused. And I got interested because sometimes somebody who'd had quite a long treatment there, the man would start to feel attracted to his female therapist. And I'd suddenly register. But we'd all think he was being perverse again, or he was going to rape her.
And then we'd suddenly realize, no, he actually rather loves her, and he's just finding her attractive. So we have to recognize healthy sexuality and the other aspect of bodies when it emerges, the little buds emerge, rather than just seeing the perversion all the time. So that's very easy to say, but harder to do than to say. I don't think we should neglect the body altogether is what I'm saying. Yes, thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I'm also hearing the sort of, from what you were saying in your paper, the importance of helping the patient locate their own sensation, either their own thought or their own feeling. So thank you very much.
A man called Peter Blake, whom you may know, because I think you're next door neighbors, but of course he's in Australia, so he's not your next door neighbor. Anyway, he's a child therapist in Sydney. And in my mind, you're all quite close together over there, but you're not really.
We are. But anyway, he said something to me the other day about Frances Tustin's idea about the sensory preoccupations of autistic people. And I was saying I never liked that concept because there was a period when she linked it with her concept of babies being born like normal autistic kids.
And I had. you know, written to her about that and thought she was wrong. Anyway, she changed her mind. But I have neglected this. So I said, I confess that I neglected it.
And he said she supervised him and she taught him if it was a child who couldn't describe her feelings, to get them to describe the sensory experience. So the child would say the roads were really icy today, but there was some grit. That bit was very icy, that bit was gritty. And she would encourage him to get the child to elaborate so it was slippery that was a slippery slidey feeling that was a rough feeling very primitive attention to detail and I thought that was brilliant yeah right thank you very much okay it looks as if we're going to have to bring the session to a close although I think there's a lot of um lots of ideas and thoughts and stimulation in the room um So I'd like to thank you on behalf of all of us here for being willing to give you time.
I know I'm left with a wonderful feeling of curiosity and you can kind of feel a sort of a buzz of that in the room here as well. I noticed my mind going to, you know, sort of all over the place, really. Lots of connections with my own client experiences and little memories and little daydreams. to me is always a sign of a really excellent presentation. One such wee moment was just thinking of a client who'd recently noticed some pictures in my hallway.
I'd been working with her for seven years and she'd not seen them before. And I realised at the time she was looking up, that things were looking up in general. But in listening to you, I realised perhaps she's also feeling the pull of the future.
Yes. The temporal element. So, yeah, my mind's buzzing with lots of little. Okay. Well, thank you so much, dear people.
It's been a real honor and it's lovely to talk to you in that beautiful building, by the way. We're in a golf club, but yeah. Oh, really?
Yeah. Well, all that wood looks rather Canadian to me, so it's. All right. Actually, I didn't mention that, but Anne is Canadian.
And yeah. Another colonial, yeah. Yes, yes, we have got a gift for you, so we can't hand it over, but I think that'll be winging its way to you. Oh, how lovely.
Yes, yeah. How lovely, how exciting. From all that way.
Perhaps we can offer something. an indigenous way of thinking which might be through a wayata so Beautiful. That's so lovely.
Thank you so very much. I'm really honoured. Well, have a wonderful conference, folks. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
Thank you so much. Bye-bye.