The title for this piece is from T.S.Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, which I’m currently reading. Or experiencing might be a better word since I’m not reading it in the sense that I might read a novel where there’s a plot to follow, characters to know and some kind of outcome. With his Four Quartets, Eliot takes us into a sense universe. We encounter them affectively as much as cerebrally. Almost like a dream state where we know something is happening but are at a loss to interpret the dream. Or we can only interpret it afterwards. This is how I always find myself with the Four Quartets. A phrase will catch my attention and I’ll want to think about it. Roll it around my tongue until I think I’ve found all the flavour there is to find.

I haven’t read Eliot since I was at college when, for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon, one of my lecturers would sonorously read the Four Quartets to us in a broad Scottish accent. (Since this was all I remember him doing, I’m not sure how much I learned about the poems. But phrases have stayed with me for forty years, so something made an impact.)

Eliot’s poetry stays with me. He seems to understand mysticism very well. And the language of psychotherapy is very like the language of the mystics. There is the idea of “God beyond God”, of the “Unknown Known”, of “Negative capability”. Ideas which travel between at least two worlds: psychotherapy and religion. Both of which are attempts, it seems to me, at soul making. Of trying to find words for those parts of ourselves that look beyond ourselves. (This, it seems to me, is what we might mean when we speak of God. We mean, I think, that which both anchors us to the Here and Now and also allows to dream of the Other.)

In the same poem, Eliot talks of the “still point of the turning world”. Another good description of the work of psychotherapy .We give our patients time to encounter this still point. To find a place where they can rest and Be. I remember times in my own analysis when I was lying on the couch quietly. Not really thinking. Just Being. Fortunately I had an analyst who was able to allow me this reverie space. She did not need to be constantly poking me. She let me be by myself in the presence of another. (Meditation is a similar process, I find. Being by myself in the presence of Another.)

Another image for this state of mind is that of a mother feeding her baby. The baby may be actively feeding and being nourished by the mother. Or it may be simply be at rest, with the nipple in its mouth. Being in communion with the breast whilst the breast is in communion with the infant. And as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott comments, we don’t ask who owns the breast. Baby and Breast are one. They are together at that still point of the turning world.

If this were an analytic session and not a blog, I’d be saying something like “And here we finish for today’. Instead I’ll leave where I began, with the line from Burnt Norton “And the end and the beginning were always there.”