So may we start?

 

Oberon and Puck 

Half a lifetime ago, I was a research fellow in a technical university, employed to investigate the 'human factors' in computer software engineering. It was the early 1990s. Email was just becoming available to university staff. No one I knew owned a mobile phone. But video cameras could be hefted around on your shoulder, or stood on a tripod – they were large, heavy things. Everyone owned a Walkman. My boss had started out as an engineer, but had become fascinated by sociology. His wife, Jacquie, worked in a healthcare setting, and she was using video cameras to film the interactions between mothers and their young babies. The babies had been diagnosed as deaf or hearing impaired. She was using the video camera to film the interactions, then playing back the film at slow speed to show the mother what was happening. In most cases the mother had tried to initiate an interaction with her offspring, but had thought the baby hadn't connected, so she had moved on to try something else, then something else, getting more and more upset and frustrated as she went on, which in turn distressed her child. Watching the slowed down video with Jacquie, she could begin to see that her baby was responding to her, but at a different pace. A different rhythm. In this way, Jacquie and her technical nous had managed to introduce a third dimension into the mother/baby dyad, and something new had come to life: a new relation that started out from the point of listening, with the help of a camera, first of all to the baby.

A few weeks ago, I heard a colleague at an international psychoanalytical congress (on Zoom) give an anecdote from her days as a psychologist on a mother and baby ward. This was before she decided to become a psychoanalyst and she said it was the experience that propelled her onto the path of her formation. She had bumped into a new mother in a corridor one afternoon, a mother who was very concerned because her new baby was not feeding. As these two women paused to exchange a greeting, the mother said: "Early in my pregnancy, during a scan, I heard someone say that the foetus had no stomach." The psychologist turned to the baby and said, "Of course you've got a stomach, Lola." She said it spontaneously, in a loving way, addressing the words directly to the baby. The next day, she heard during handover that the baby had begun to feed. 

The first anecdote emphasises the technology, the second emphasises the words. But each illustrates the know-how of a third party who plays a part in activating a structure of discourse. Neither knew what they were doing at the time, but both were unconsciously mobilising the analyst's discourse. Lacan credited Freud with inventing this discourse. Far more important than the body of knowledge Freud left in books, the analyst's discourse is the little bit of technology, the invisible machine, that has an effect on the real.

A psychoanalyst waits for the subject to speak, then enters the conversation using the language of the analysand. I've begun to notice that one or two people are doing this with horses and that their efforts are getting  results. Yes. They are waiting for the horse to speak, and then they reply using the horse's language. One of these, Sharon Wilsie (who is based in New England) has developed quite an elaborate set of ideas about what she is doing. She has codified the language of horses and is now busy transmitting Horse Speak to anyone who will listen. I'm listening, and I'm having a blast working out how to use it in the newly burgeoning field of equine facilitated psychotherapy (EFP).

The blog will be a record of my journey into this unusual field of practice, but not without Freud and Lacan.  

In the next entry, I shall introduce you to Oberon and Puck (pictured above) and tell you what happened when I started using Horse Speak in a session with Klaus, one of the first people I began to practice with out in the field with the horses.