‘Would you say you were better or worse for your experience with me?’

‘But now you’re back in the consulting room. Of course I’m better. But that’s a clinical term. I’m afraid of being better at the cost of living inside myth and dreams. Psycho-analysis stands or falls on whether it makes better human beings, morally better, not clinically more healthy. What you are really asking me now is: Am I able to live more easily now than I did? Am I less in conflict, less in doubt, less neurotic in short? Well, you know that I am.’

I remember how she sat opposite me, the alert, vigorous old woman, with her efficient blouse and skirt, her white hair dragged back into a hasty knot, frowning at me. I was pleased because of the frown — we were outside, for a moment, the analyst — patient relationship.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘If I were sitting here, describing a dream I’d had last night, the wolf-dream, let’s say, more highly developed, there’d be a certain look on your face. And I know what the look means because I feel it myself — recognition. The pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form. Another bit of chaos rescued and “named”. Do you know how you smile when I “name” something? It’s as if you’d just saved someone from drowning. And I know the feeling. It’s joy. But there’s something terrible in it — because I’ve never known joy, awake, as I do, asleep, during a certain kind of dream — when the wolves come down out of the forest, or when the castle gates open, or when I’m standing before the ruined white temple on the white sands with the blue sea and sky behind it, or when I’m flying like Icarus — during these dreams, no matter what frightening material they incorporate, I could cry with happiness. And I know why — it’s because all the pain, and the killing and the violence is safely held in the story and it can’t hurt me.’

She was silent, looking at me intently.

I said: ‘Are you saying perhaps that I’m not ready to go on further? Well, I think that if I’m capable of being impatient, of wanting it, I must be ready for the next stage?’

‘And what is the next stage?’

‘The next stage is, surely, that I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.’

‘Alone?’ she said, and added drily, ‘You’re a communist, or so you say, but you want to go alone. Isn’t that what you’d call a contradiction?’

And so we laughed, and it might have ended there, but I went on: ‘You talk about individuation. So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognizes one part after another of his earlier life as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story, or stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the experience, or fitted it like a piece of mosaic into a very old pattern, and by the act of setting it into place, is free of the individual pain of it.’