eventually.
“Bertie must be able to move on,” said the psychotherapist.
“We all need to move on, even when we’re five.”
Irene looked pained. If Bertie moved on, then where, in the most general sense, would he go? And where would that leave her, his mother? Bertie was
Dr Fairbairn picked up her concern, and sought to reassure her. “Moving on means that you may have to let go a bit,” he said gently. “Letting go is very important.”
This did not help Irene, and her expression made her disquiet clear. Melanie Klein would never have approved of the term moving on, which had a distinctly post-modern ring to it. Nor did she speak of closure, which was another word that in her opinion was overworked and cliched. She had imagined Dr Fairbairn to be above such terms, but here he was using the words as easily as he might talk about the weightier concepts of transference and repression. She decided to sound him out about closure.
“And closure?” she said hesitantly, as one might propose something slightly risque.
“Oh, he certainly needs closure,” said Dr Fairbairn. “He needs closure over that
Irene looked at Dr Fairbairn. This was a most puzzling remark to make, and perhaps he would explain. But he did not.
“First we should think of how he can move on,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Bertie needs a sense of where he’s going. He needs to have a horizon.”
“Well,” said Irene, slightly resentfully. “I can hardly be accused 304
of not offering him a sense of his future. When I take him to saxophone lessons I point out to him how pleased he will be in the future that he worked at the instrument. Later, much later, it will be a useful social accomplishment.”
Dr Fairbairn nodded vaguely. “Saxophone?” he said. “Is an ability to play the saxophone a social accomplishment or is it an anti-social accomplishment? No reason to ask that, of course; just wondering.”
Irene was quick to answer. “Saxophones provide a lot of pleasure for a lot of people,” she said. “Bertie loves his saxophone.”
(She was ignoring, or had forgotten perhaps, that awful scene in the Floatarium where Bertie had shouted, quite unambiguously,
“Oral behaviour,” muttered Dr Fairbairn. “One puts the saxophone mouthpiece
“But you have to do that with a wind instrument,” began Irene.
“And even if you have no oral fixation might you not still want to play the saxophone? Just for the music?”
“One might think that,” said Dr Fairbairn, “if one were being naive. But you and I know, don’t we, that explanations at that level, attractive though they may be, simply obscure the symbolic nature of the conduct in question. Let us never forget that the apparent reason for doing something is almost always not the real reason for doing it.
“Take the building of the Scottish Parliament,” went on Dr Fairbairn, warming to the theme. “People think that the fact that it is taking so long is because of all sorts of problems with designs and plans and so on. But have we stopped to ask ourselves whether the people of Scotland actually
So Mother has asked us to build a parliament and that is exactly what we are doing. But when we finish, we fear that Mother will ask us to go away – or, worse, still, Mother will go away
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herself. Many people don’t really want that. They want Mother still to be there. So they’re doing everything they can to drag out the process of construction.
“And here’s another thing. Why does the parliament building look as if it’s been made out of children’s wooden building blocks?
Isn’t that obvious? It’s because we want to please Mother by doing something juvenile, because we know that Mother herself doesn’t want us to grow up. That’s why it looks so juvenile. We’ll win Mother’s approval by doing something which confirms our child-like dependence.”
Irene listened to all this with growing enthusiasm. What a brilliant analysis of modern Scotland! And he was right, too, about saxophones; of course they were oral things and she was no doubt running a risk of fixing Bertie in the oral stage by encouraging him to play one. But at least she knew now, and the fact that she knew would mean that she could overcome the sub-text of her actions. So she could continue to encourage Bertie to play the saxophone, while at the same time helping him to progress through the oral stage to a more mature identity.
She looked at Dr Fairbairn. “What you say is obviously true,”
she said. “But I wonder: what shall I do to move Bertie on?”
“Give him a clear sense of where he’s going next,” replied Dr Fairbairn. “Take him to the place he’s going to. That is what we all need – to see the place we’re going to.”
Bertie sat in a small waiting room while Irene talked to the director of admissions at the Steiner School. He was
