Bertie nodded. “Ink,” he said again. And then added: “Ink.”
Dr Fairbairn smiled. “You may be wondering, Bertie, why I’m holding a bottle of ink.”
Bertie shook his head. “No,” he said, even more quietly.
“Well,” said Dr Fairbairn. “There’s a very interesting little game we therapists have invented. It’s called the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Would you like to play it, Bertie?”
Bertie felt he had no alternative but to agree, and he did.
This must have been the right answer, as Dr Fairbairn appeared pleased with it.
“Very well,” said the psychotherapist. “I shall open this little bottle of ink . . . so. There we are. And now I shall pour just a little bit of it onto the middle of this piece of paper. So! Look.
Now I shall fold the paper over, in half, like that. There!”
Bertie stared at the piece of folded paper. “Is it my turn?” he asked.
Dr Fairbairn smiled. “Hah! No, there are no turns in this game. You, Bertie, have to look at the ink blot that comes out and tell me what you see! That’s what you do.”
Bertie took the piece of paper and unfolded it with trembling hands. Then he examined the still wet ink blot.
“I see Scotland,” he said quietly. “Look, there it is.”
238
Dr Fairbairn took the piece of paper and stared at it. Then he turned it round.
“Funny,” he said. “I’ll do it again.”
Once more he poured a small amount of ink onto the paper and folded it over. Again, he handed it to Bertie. “Now, we shall see,” he said. “You tell me what you see. And don’t hesitate to tell me, even if it’s something very strange. Don’t hesitate to speak your mind.”
“I won’t,” said Bertie obligingly.
He took the piece of paper and unfolded it.
“I see the Queen,” said Bertie. “Look, there she is, Dr Fairbairn. I see the Queen’s head.”
Dr Fairbairn took the paper from him and peered at it. He seemed put-out.
“I shall do it again,” he said.
More ink was spilled, and the paper was folded. Bertie, now quite confident, although he found this game somewhat tedious, exposed the blot to view.
This time he stared at the blot for some time before he spoke.
Then, handing the paper back to Dr Fairbairn, he said: “That’s Dr Freud, isn’t it? Look, Dr Fairbairn, you’ve made two Dr Freuds!”
Rather to Bertie’s surprise, Dr Fairbairn now put away his bottle of ink and threw the pieces of paper in the wastepaper bin. “Perhaps we shall do that again, Bertie,” he said, “when you are feeling a bit more imaginative. For the moment I think we can leave it at that. I need to have a quick chat with your Mummy before you go. You go off and read
Bertie sat in the waiting room while his mother went in to speak to Dr Fairbairn. Although he knew that he was meant to have an hour of therapy, he never really had more than ten minutes, as his mother would go in and talk to Dr Fairbairn for at least fifty minutes before she came out. What could they be talking about? he wondered. Surely one could not go on about Melanie Klein for fifty minutes twice a week? But that’s what they seemed to be doing.
239
Inside the consulting room, Irene sat in the chair recently vacated by Bertie and listened to Dr Fairbairn.
“I did a bit of Rorschach work with him this morning,” Dr Fairbairn said. “We didn’t get very good results. He came up with very literal interpretations. I saw nothing of the subcon-scious processes. No light on the object relations issue.”
“Oh well,” said Irene. “We must persist. There’s still a lot of aggression there, I’m afraid. He wanted to go bowling the other day. That’s very aggressive.”
“Maybe,” said Dr Fairbairn, noting something down on a pad. “Maybe not.”
“And then there’s some sign of knife fantasies,” went on Irene.
“He keeps asking for a penknife.”
“Worrying, that,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Of course, boys do like that sort of thing, you know.”
Irene looked at him. “Some boys may,” she said. “Some males need knives. Some don’t.”
Dr Fairbairn thought for a while. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking a bit about Bertie, and I’m beginning to have a sense of what’s going on. The dynamics. The splitting process.
The good mother/bad mother schizoid bifurcation.”
Irene leant forward eagerly. “Oh yes?” she said. “And what do you think is the problem?”
Dr Fairbairn rose to his feet. He looked down at the crumpled pieces of paper in his wastepaper basket and, on a sudden impulse, picked one out, uncrumpled it and showed it to Irene.
“What do you see there?” he asked.
