Nina Coltart - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

This paper was first given as a contribution to the English-speaking Conference of Psychoanalysts in 1982. The Conference was in the form of a symposium, whose overall title was simply Beyond Words. This is an expanded version of my original paper.

After I had agreed to write this paper, my mind went blank for quite a long time. Then I began to realize that a paper for a symposium whose overall title was Beyond Words appropriately had to be generated in that very area, namely, where blankness seemed to be. After a while, the title for the paper announced itself. I was wary of it, since it seemed both eccentric and religious. But it stuck tenaciously. For those of you who do not know it, it is taken from a short poem by W. B. Yeats called The Second Coming (1919). It occurred to me when I reread it closely that it is a poem about breakdown and the possibility of healing, or could be seen as such. It is mysterious, but then so is our subject. It goes like this (my final italics):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

First published in The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition, edited by Gregorio Kohon. London: Free Association Books, 1986.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is not a paper on religion. It does not look to Messianic dogma, nor to Christian symbol to help us out of the anarchic depths of the unconscious. What caught my attention was the idea that there is a distinct metaphor for us in the poem which speaks to the whole of what analysis is about. We can move the metaphor of the poem from the religious to the analytical. Some people have seen this metaphor as pessimistic; you will gather that I have seen it differently.

It is of the essence of our impossible profession that in a very singular way we do not know what we are doing. Do not be distracted by random associations to this idea. I am not undermining our deep, exacting training; nor discounting the ways in which unlike many people who master a subject and then just do it, or teach it we have to keep at ourselves, our literature and our clinical crosstalk with colleagues. All these daily operations are the efficient, skilful and thinkable tools with which we constantly approach the heart of our work, which is a mystery.