However, my heart sank at the thought of translating all this into clinical language so we could us it for the hurt-child-within-the adult. When I returned home I dicovered that John Bowlby had already done this job in his book "A Secure Base". I was so pleased that I wrote congratulating him on providing us with just the service we needed. John Bowlby then invited me to come and see him at the Tavistock Centre. I made notes afterwards for distribution to our students at ISA (Institute for Self-analysis) - Here is
what I wrote:

A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN BOWLBY
I walked int the main entrance of the Tavistock Insitutute thinking of the previous times I had been there. The last lectures of Wilfred Bion came to mind where he free-associated to questions, leaving me puzzled by his resonse to my question. I had explained about the creative orgasmic cycle we derived from Reich and how it seemed to be the shadow of a destructive cycle - his his 'basic assumption group'. Bon spoke of the young chld in analysis who apparently takes no notice of the analyst's interpretations. He went up
to the board and started to draw. Another question came from the audience and he free-associated on another tack. I never had the chance to ask him what he meant. He died shortly afterwards.

I was now going to meet someone of at least equal stature in this field, John Bowlby. Would he be more accessible? The woman on reception was reading something and not aware I was standing there. She looked up with a start. "I have an appointment with John Bowlby." She phoned. "He will meet you at the
lift on the 4th floor." Sure enough, as I came out of the lift there was a kindly, sprightly person, greying and remnding me a little of Bion. I was carefully escorted down a corridor and settled in a chair. At first Bowlby seemed to want to get to know something about me and the Institute for Self
Analysis. I described my unorthodox background and history and the pre-history of the Institute. Why is it called the Institute for Self-Analysis? he enquired. I talked about Karen Horney's work on Self-Analysis in 1941 and suggested that all good therapy was an assisted self-analysis anyway, which he did not challenge. In relation to ALice Miller he said that he was in Zurich 8 years ago and hoped to meet her but
she was not around. I asked why Alice had such flak from the psychoanlytic scene whereas he seemed tolerated if not accepted. He explained that life had been difficult and that he had felt isolated in the 1950,s and 1960,s though he had tried to keep on good personal relations with people. Though Anna Freud attacked his theories she still remained a friend. This was not true of the Klein circle. Mrs Klein, apparently, could not tolerate the idea that maybe parents could be resposible in some way for their children's problems.

He said that he originally took up work on infants separated from their parents and in care because there was no question that parents could be responsible for this situation (because it was due to war, illness of parent or child, birth of a sibling etc.) I said that it was a worry that radical work can be marginalised and
isolated and that at 54 years of age and the oldest member of the Institute, I was concerned about support. Bowlby looked at me with amusement and pride.

"I'm 81" he said "and I can count my close supporters on one hand, or maybe two". He added that in the last 10 years many people in the psychoanalytic scene were questioning fundamentals and listening to others. It is change, albeit slow change.

I asked, in so many words, whether there was a Bowlby 'school'. Some people he said, acceot 20%, 30%, 50% or 90% of my ideas, implying that the influence of attachment theory is spreading to all sorts of people. I said how, that very morning, there was an example on the District Nurse course I had been teaching with Kate White. A student had decribed how an elderly man, suffering from cancer, was always on the point of crying. This was anxiously prevented by his wife. The student spent an hour and a half with the man where he cried freely. Subsequently he made a considerable recovery, being able to dress and go out into the world. The student's understanding of the need for this to happen came from insights about bereavement she had learned on the course.

We moved on to consider the question of how his attachment theories applied to the area of child abuse. I had brought a draft paper for the Open University's new child abuse pack, where I had listed eleven factors showing how the mourning process in both bereavement and abusae was similar. I moved over and craouched by his chair and we went through the factors line by line. Bowby agreed that we had applied his theory correctly to abuse. At some point I asked him whether he had made this link in earier years. He smiled. He said at the time sexual buse was rarely referred to by anyone.

I also pointed out that his description of the therapist as a 'companion' was very similar to Alice Millers 'advocate'. I suggested that Chapter 20 in Vol.2 reads like Alice Miller's radical critique of parents,
psychiatrists and therapists attitudes in blaming children - what he called the'falsification of the Family context". "This must have been long before Alice's work" I said. "Yes, around 1970."The diagram which described "Natures Mourning Cycle" i.e. mourning was accomanied by the Creative Cycle derived from Reich and Bion, "I'm not persuaded he said". I had so many other things talk about that I did not think it worthwhile expanding on the cycle. However, on the trauma, as apart from the creative side, he did
suggest that we might study work on other traumas like victims of Vietnam and tragedies like the Zeebrugge Ferry disaster and Colin Murray Parkes work on the loss of limbs. In passing, it is worth noting that, like many other researchers and analysts who have studied pathology there is a lack of work on creativity. But Bowlby has given us so much we can hardly complain.

I had read in Bowlby's recent paperback the importance he assigned to the point when the person stops trying to change the past, and accepts that it is history and unchangeable. Only in personal discussion and clarification did I realise that he means the complete mourning process cannot take place
until the idealised, good desired parent is accepted as not existing and therefore dead and mournable (to coin an ugly word!). At the time of writing, only 10days ago this insight has proved invaluable in face-to-face work.

I will give one example. This person has worked through enormous traumas of abuse, mourned them, and started a creative new path in her life. But every few months, something returns from her unconscious and we work on it. The last time, since the interview with Bowlby, produced a new insight. She had mourned the awful events of her life. But, together, we constructed that the (fantasy) good parent who would 'save'her (and a factor in simple survival) had not been given up and could not therefore be mourned. At this point in time, it seems that mourning the loss of this figure, who in actality never existed, is crucial. And it is a real death. This good figure is dead, lost, irrecoverable. What seems to be happening, is that she can leave the past make changes where they are possible - in the present and future.

In contrast, there are areas that Bowlby's background does not cover and our 'alternative' tradition does. An example I brought up is the use of the language of the body and the derived visual unconscious language, which gives access to the earliest years of life or even before. Bowlby said he had a prejudice against considering the first year of liffe because of all the unlikely theories associated with Klein that were currency during his early work. We had some unclear discussion where he was saying, why did it matter what the date is, and I was saying "You may have to recover early abuse before you can mourn it" I gave a practical example of using body sensations to recover early experience. In the time available we did not seem to clarify beyond this point.

One thing we did agree was the unforunate notons of Freud that has been taken up very much in 'humanistic' circles. This is the notion that there is something inherently therapeutic about emtional discharge, per se. We agreed that if you do not know who is at the other end' of the emotional discharge, you cannot mourn and it is not therapeutic at all. In other words, if you do not know who the discharge is really aimed at, you are more likely to get into an endless repetition rather than mourning. We also agreed that we had experienced people going on for decades in orthodox psychoanalysis or Kleinian equivalents here real traumas where not dealt with, recognised or mourned.

There were some interesting odds and ends too. I mentioned Matte Blanco's work the 'unconscious as infinite sets' and expressed the thought that there was 'gold' in his links with mathematics and logic. He replied that he and Matte were the youngest members of an early training group in 1939. He also said that he could not make anything of Lacan and when I suggested that there was 'gold' here also, he said he preferred to use findings that had some real practical value for his work. I said Lacan was an eccentric Zen Master.

We spoke about early feminists, opposition to his work and how this had changed. I told him that one of our feminist members suggested that a future paper-back should substitute 'she\her' for 'he/him', He smiled a little wistfully. "I don't think I'll be writing any more paperbacks"

We had now gone on for about an hour and a half and body language indicated it was time to part. I said, "Its good to get our use of your theory confirmed from the 'horse's mouth' if you will pardon the pun. He smiled. On my way out I figured that he did seem as a person to embody his theory that attachment mattered. He is accessible and open. Later I remembered that I had forgotten to ask whether sexual relating could be considered as a sub-division of attachment - an exciting attachment. but there is only so
much you can exchange in a short time. I never had a personal discussion with Bion. I am sure that whilst 'Zen' wisdom might have been forthcoming, there would not have been the kind of exchange I had experienced today.

I walked home, being only 20 minutes away, feeling reflective and a bit exhausted. I had filled up the space energetically with a lot of questions.

It had been very worthwhile.

JOHN BOWLBY AS A SUPERVISOR
I needed a supervisor for myself but there was a difficulty. However wise and tolerant someone in the analytic scene might be they would not share my fundamental thesis derived from early Freud/Ferenczi/Fliess/Alice Miller. The obvious person who could fulfil this and a lot more was John Bowlby but I doubted whether he would want to do so. Encouraged by Kate White I wrote and to my delight received a letter back proposing dates. For about the next two years I went either once in two weeks, or weekly, except for John's regular holidays, often in Skye.

The sessions with John were, without exception the most stimulating, lively, creative hours that I have experienced with anyone at any time. I got used to going up to the 4th floor at the Tavistock, tap on the door, and then a brief chat about new and personal things. There was a liveliness about him, a twinkle in the eye and laughter. Sometimes he sould scrunch up his eyes and lower his head looking like we was concentrating intensely; then he would look up and tell me what he had worked out. What is hard to put into words is that the experience was so profound and yet so simple. He could draw upon a rich experience and apply it to a field he had never been involved with. I used to think each week about what I needed to talk to JB about. We are very different by temperament. I like to talk about ideas or people I am working with in a free-associative way and I rarely make notes.

John was interested in detail and would make notes of age gap betwween siblings, parents, grandparents, year of birth, the culture at the time, for example 1930's or War etc. I am now much more interested in these details myself.

First he would listen patiently to all I had to say. Then he might ask a question and then speculate about what theory you could have about the person, what hypothesis could you make? What astonished me was how radical he could be. For example, he approved of the practice of an Advocate encouraging a person to talk to a hallucinated father in the here-and-now. (He preferred the term "illusion displaced in time" rather than hallucinations.) He had no trouble at all in our use of letters, drawings, or physical contact for holding very regressed clients. Also surprising was his encyclopaedic memory for facts, books, references or speople on widest range of topics, including other sciences like ethology, biology etc. When we were discussing working with the Multiple Personality he proposed a book written in 1910 which was one of the first attempts to understand the phenomennon. We did talk about whether everyone is in some sense a multiple personality, and John said,"Well, two personalities is multiple".

This time was a formative period in the development of our young Institute. After a few sessions I realised that our directdion was really supported by JB. He said once "We think on the same lines" This was very important for our confidence in facing the outside world in general and the therapeutic
scene in particular. Sadly, John died before we could tell him that ISA ha been voted as a member of the UKSCP Analytic Psychotherapy section.

A particularly important question is language and culture. I knew from experience that the kind of language and terminology we use would have profound effects upon practice. John has been a seminal influence. He prefers terms that are descriptive and do not imply any particular theory..
You can then form alternative hypotheses and see which works out best. A number of examples can be found in the "Dictionary" article in this issue of the journal. The most important are the use of "import\export of emotions" instead of "transference", the "recovery of childhood experiences" instead of regression, "attachment feelings" instead of dependency states, Parental Voices instead of Introjected parents or superego (We used the notion of "Predators" that had been intnernalised; John said "You really have to nail who it is - Mother, Father or whoever")

In Journal 3, John Bowlby expands on his"pathway" theory which we also have found useful. He said that in the early days he was always having to fight for the importance of early experiencce. Now this battle has been largely won, he then had to remind us of the importance of decisions and changes throughout life, including young adulthood and old age. He also had lots of ideas we have taken up in regard to practical aspects of setting up programmes, teaching methods and orgnisational detail (I only discovered in an obituary that he had originally reoganised the Institute for Psychoanalysis)

In essence John's approach was always experimental on the lines of "why don't you try to translate all this new stuff on child abuse into attachment terms and then apply knowledge from other fields" One hypothesis which he held and which our subsequent clinical work has confirmed a number of times, is that abaondonment is CENTRAL even in chld abuse. Often the physical, sexual or emotional abuse is followed by abandonment which is felt to be utterly unbearable. Where the father is a perpetrator it often the case that the mother is too anxious and deprived to give good- enough mothering to the abused child. In therapy, a primary abondonment is sometimes re-experienced and felt to be an even more dreadfulthan the later abuse.

Our first experiment with couple therapy was based upon John's advice and encouragement. He proposed that the couple and their Advocates met as frequently as the couple desired and this proved to be very effective.

Colleagues and students would sometimes ask me to enqire about someone Bowlby knew personally. There was curiosity about Winnicott. John said that Winnicott was an artist and could be read for inspiration. They never disagreed about practical mattters connected with children and their
caregivers. But Winnicott could hold incompatible notions in his head without, apparently, worrying about it. I also asked about Suttie and why his important book never really gained the influence it deserved. John said that it was a lot to do with Suttie's early death because personal interaction, in the form of lectures and dicussions, has a lot to do with the dissemination of knowledge.

Another topic that might be worth recording is when I reported that many people found our combination of Alice Miller, Karen Horney and John Bowlby eccentric; "What we have in common" he said, "is the support for the innocent child or infant". We were once discussing sexuality, which John preferred to see a a different behavioural system from attachment. I wondered whether we could apply ethological findings to sexuality as he had applied it to attachment. We were considering sexual choice of preferred partners when John said "If I had to guess when most people make this choice, I would say at about 3 years of age"

One piece of advice has proved very important. John advised us not to bother with controversy by attacking other people's theories but to concentrate on producing a realy good theory and practice of our own, on the grounds that this way, though slow, would produce the best results in the end. Perhaps the most amusing was his comment on how our practice should be as unmystified as possilbe so lots of people could become Advocates; he looked at me with a wry and mischievous smile and said "Ordinary blokes like you and me have to be able to do this work"

TOWARDS THE END

In April 1990 John announced at the end of a supervision session that he was to have an operation. As I could not say anything at the time, I wrote the following:

Dear John, It was a shock to learn that you were to have an operation. Kate, who is a nurse, says the same kind of thing you said yousrelf - that is, it is a routine operation and should be alright. But as you know very well, emotions don't take much account of rationality. This experience makes me
realise the extent of my attachment to you as a person and how grateful I am that you are radical enough to supervie me even though I come from what the Establishment would see as a fringe organisation. I do hope the operation goes well and hope that the recovery goes smoothly and that you return to your active life. When I left I wanted to give you a hug but only had the courage to shake your hand. Please consider this letter to be a hug by post. Best wishes from Adult John, and love from his inner child.

In fact he recovered from the operation to the extent that he could attend the publication celebration of his new biography of Darwin though he was in a wheel chair. When Kate and I went to say hello, John said he wanted to get back to our work as soon as possible.

In what turned out to be our last supervision session, John appeared to be really well and healthy. I think we both had the unspoken assumption that there was at least a few years work ahead of us. My assumpution that there was lots of time to check out many things on my mind was not the case.

Anyway I did check out about our current clinical use of the "Little Caretaker". He approved whole- heartedly. On September the 3rd Dorothy Southern, John's secretary, phoned me at home to say that John had died from a stroke the previous day and would be buried in Skye. I wrote the following
obituary which was published in the Guardian.

"Dear Sir, I was shocked and saddened today to learn of the death of John Bowlby. I know there will be many obituaries about this innovator and about he kindly and supportive person that he was. Many people in older age rest upon their laurels and cease to be creative. Not so with John Bowlby. I would like to put on record how he supported with his wisdom, myself and members of our Institute in a field which he did not have personal experience - the abused child within the adult. He was keen that we apply his attachment theory to this work and even when in a wheel chair, recovering from an operation, he apologised for not being able to work on it the next week. Our debt to him is enormous. Like many other people, I will miss him both as a person and as a creative thinker."

Since John's death we seem to meet more and more people who are working with attachment theory in therapy or research. The conference in his honour in London attracted 700 people from all round the world, and from a wide variety of professions; ethologists, social workers and many others.

JOURNEY TO SKYE

DRIVING THROUGH SNOW AND BLIZZARDS, BLOCKED ROADS, FLOODS AND PERILS, THEN ON TO SKYE WHERE THE GULF STREAM WARMS THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS, TAWNY BROWN BRACKEN AND MAJESTIC SCENERY OF THE ISLAND. AT LAST WE HAVE ARRIVED. WIND ROUND THE SMALLEST ONE TRACK "A" ROAD WE HAVE EVER SEEN. ON THE HORIZON THERE ARE CURTAINS OF SHOWERS, CURLEW AND KESTRELS SWOOPING. WE SPOT A RUINED CHURCH ON THE CLIFF TOP. IT IS A MEDIEVAL RUINED CHURCH AND BURIAL PLACE. WE SEARCH THE GRAVEYARD BUT FIND NO GRAVESTONE. DISCOVER A PLOT WITH FLOWERS AND A TREE. WE HAVE ARRIVED AT JOHN BOWLBY'S GRASS COVERED GRAVE.

WITHIN ME, BOTH LITTLE JOHN AND MY GROWN UP SELF REALISE AND ACCEPT THAT JOHN BOWLBY IS DEAD BUT THAT HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON IN HIS WORK AND IDEAS,AND IN OUR WORK, AND IN THE PEOPLE WHO KNEW HIM. STUMBLED BACK TO THE CAR NOT WANTING TO BE THERE ANYMORE. MISSION COMPLETE. READY TO MOVE ON IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.

Bowlby would want us to develope our work and coninue the unique tradition he initiated. I thought of the old socialist Joe Hill, whose saying was 'dont mourn, organise' a more fitting epitaph for John Bowlby would be in my opinion:

DO MOURN, THEN ORGANISE!