In Search of a Vital Self Part 2

The analysis with Winnicott commenced in March 1962, comprising a total of 160 sessions. Even as early as the first few sessions, Winnicott responded to Guntrip’s central concern, moving seamlessly into his pre-Percy personality and the mother of his earliest development – the unrelated mother and the buried child. By 1964 the following areas were analysed: (a) differentiating the underlying sense of feeling unmothered, (b) holding the fear of aggression, (c) exploring the impacts of the early breakdown self (felt as fear of insanity), (d) the need to mother the Percies in the outer world as a way to counter the lack of his own mother, and (e) facing the reality that time is needed to ‘regrow’ a firmer foundation of self to open the ‘tomb’ (the tomb room dream of more than 25 years previous). In various dreams, Guntrip felt a gentle aspect associated with his father emerging out of the tomb together with the murderous Spanish ambassador – now two sides of Guntrip’s active personal self appeared as new possibilities, on the way to the experience of one’s “own properly fulfilled self.”