The Manticore

MYSELF: Alive as he was when I knew him. He seemed to have a personality, you know. Rather puzzled and considering, and I did all the talking. And he usually agreed. Sometimes he was doubtful and said no. But his attention seemed to lend something to whatever I had talked about or decided. Do I make any sense?

DR. VON HALLER: Oh, yes; excellent sense. These figures we have in our deep selves, you know, have a way of being both external and internal. That one we talked of – the Shadow – he was inward, wasn't he? And yet as we talked, it appeared that so many of the things you disliked so strongly about him were also to be found in people you knew. You were particularly vehement about Netty's brother, Maitland Quelch -

MYSELF: Yes, but I should have made it clear that I very rarely met him. I just heard about him from Netty. He was so deserving and he had his way to make in the world single-handed, and he would have been so glad of some of the chances I hardly seemed to notice, and all that sort of thing. Matey's struggle to qualify as a Chartered Accountant pretty much paralleled my own studies for the Bar, but of course in Netty's eyes everything had been made easy for me, whereas he did it the hard way. Meritorious Matey! But when I met him, which was as seldom as decency allowed, I always thought he was a loathsome little squirt -

DR. VON HALLER: I know. We went into that quite extensively. But in the end we agreed, I think, that you simply read into Matey's character things you disliked, and these proved after some more investigation to be things which were not wholly absent from your own character. Isn't that so?

MYSELF: It's difficult for me to be objective about Matey. When I talk about him I feel myself becoming waspish, and I can't help describing him as if he were some sort of Dickensian freak. But is it my fault he has damp hands and a bad breath and shows his gums when he smiles and calls me Ted, which nobody else on God's green earth does, and exudes democratic forgiveness of my wealth and success -

DR. VON HALLER: Yes, yes; we were through all that, and at last you admitted that Matey was your scapegoat – a type of all you disliked and feared might come to the surface in yourself – please, one moment – not in these physical characteristics but in the character of the Deserving Person, ill rewarded and ill understood by a careless world. The Orphan of the Storm: the Battered Baby. You don't have to blush for harbouring something of this in your most secret image of yourself. The important thing is to know what you are doing. That tends to defuse it, you understand. I was not trying during those difficult hours to make you like Matey. I was trying to persuade you to examine a dark corner of yourself.

MYSELF: It was humiliating, but I suppose it must be true.

DR. VON HALLER: The truth will grow as we work. That is what we are looking for. The truth, or some part of it.

MYSELF: But although I admit I projected some of the least admirable things in my own character on Matey – you notice how I am picking up words like "projected" from you – I have a hunch that there is something fishy about him. He's too good to be true.

DR. VON HALLER: I am not surprised. Unless one is very naive, one does not project one's own evil on people who are especially good. As I have said, if psychiatry worked by rules, every policeman would be a psychiatrist. But let us get back to Felix.

MYSELF: Does his appearance now mean some sort of reversion to childhood?

DR. VON HALLER: Only to an emotion you felt in childhood, and which does not seem to have been very common with you since. Felix was a friend. He was a loving friend, but because of your own disposition, he was very much a thinking, considering friend. Now just as the Shadow makes his appearance in this sort of personal investigation, so does a figure we call the Friend. And because you have worked well and diligently for the last few weeks, when the going cannot have been very pleasant, I am glad to be able to give you good news. The appearance of the Friend in your inner life and in your dreams is a favourable sign. It means that your analysis is going well.