Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor

One of the challenges in psychoanalytic work is to find ways to enliven the space when working with individuals whose thinking is highly constrained and who have little capacity for play. This incapacity often signals a split between valued and devalued aspects of self. In cases such as these, self-protection becomes paramount and may profoundly impede growth, as whatever is not known is perceived as dangerous, rather than being a challenge that invites further development. For the therapist who must create aliveness within the consulting room, we are caught by the very real threat that this aliveness poses to the defensive structures on which the patient's equilibrium rests. Movement thus can be quite precarious. In this volume, Marilyn Charles considers how notions of "play" and "myth", as brought into the literature by Winnicott and Bion, can help to provide an interim space in which impossible realities can be constructed at a safe enough reserve that we can more actively consider them and thereby create possibilities, rather than foreclosing on them.