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By Root 581 0

for a conference, in collaboration with a well-known child psychotherapist from Buenos Aires. The conference was to be held in Florence, and for a moment he reflected on how pleasant it would be to be in Florence again, enjoying the always very generous hospitality of the Italian Association for Child Psychotherapy, an association whose corpulent president placed great emphasis on the importance of elaborate conference dinners and a good cultural programme. At the last such conference, when Dr Fairbairn had given his paper on early manifestations of the Oedipus complex, the delegates had been taken to a restaurant on the banks of the Arno where, as the sun set, they had been treated to a chocolate pudding borne in on a trolley, the pudding being in the shape of Vesuvius (the chef was a Neapolitan). The pudding’s very shape had been enough to draw gasps of admiration from those present; which gasps turned to exclamations of surprise when fireworks within the chocolate crater had erupted into incandescent flows of sparks, like bright jets of lava, like tiny exhalations of fiery gold.

85. A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation

Dr Fairbairn was pleased with the amount of work he had got through by the time Irene arrived in his consulting rooms at eleven o’clock.

‘I have had a very satisfactory morning, so far,’ he said, as he ushered her into the room. Then he thought that the words ‘so far’ might suggest that the morning was about to change, which had not been the meaning he had intended to convey. So he quickly added: ‘Not that I’m suggesting the tenor of the day will change because of your arrival. Au contraire.’

Irene waved a hand airily. ‘I did not interpret it in that way at all,’ she said. ‘Have you been seeing patients?’

Dr Fairbairn waited until Irene had sat herself down before he continued. ‘No, not at all. I’m working on a paper, long-distance, with Ettore Esteves Balado,’ he said. ‘He’s an Argentine I met on the circuit, and we found ourselves interested in much the same area. We’re writing on the Lacanian perspective on transference.’ He paused, smiling at Irene. ‘And it’s going very well. We’re practically finished.’

Irene looked at his blue linen jacket. Linen was such a difficult material, with its propensity to crumple. She had a white linen blouse with a matching skirt which she loved to wear, but which crumpled so quickly that after five or ten minutes she looked like, well, Stuart had put it rather tactlessly, like a handkerchief that had been left out in the rain. It was an odd analogy, that, and she wondered what the Lacanian interpretation might be. We did not choose our words simply for their expressive power; our words were the manifestation of the conflicts of our unconscious, indeed they themselves formed the unconscious itself. Lacan had made that quite clear, and Irene was inclined to agree. She did not think that we could find a stable unconscious; our unconscious was really a stream of interactions between words that we used to express our desires and conflicts.

So when Stuart had made those remarks about a handkerchief in the rain, he did not mean that her linen outfit was a handker-chief left out in the rain, or indeed even looked like one. What his words revealed was that he feared disorder (or rain) and that he wanted her, Irene, to be perfect, to be ironed. And that, of course, suggested that he looked to her for stability to control his sense of impermanence and flux, his confusion. No surprises there, she thought: of course he did. Stuart might have many good points, but in Irene’s view, strength – what people called backbone, or even bottom – was not Stuart’s strong suit. Mind you, it was strange that people should use the word ‘bottom’ for strength or courage. What was the Lacanian significance of that?

Her eyes returned to Dr Fairbairn’s blue linen jacket. He had said something, she recalled, about the combination of fibres in the jacket, and that must be the reason it looked so uncrumpled. The question in her mind, though, was: at what point did the insertion of other fibres