ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I tried to show how at first people, then thoughts, can be felt to wait in the background, as it were, of our minds. In this chapter I shall try to show something about the conditions under which thoughts can wait their turn to be thought about – or attended to – not in the background but in the foreground, just beyond the horizon of our attention, and how this can enable even multiple tracks of thinking. I want to describe some interesting parallels between three children’s manner of thinking, conversing and walking. The concept of internal phantasies concerning the self’s relation to internal objects offers a means of understanding this. Two of the children had difficulty – and met obstructions – with the natural turn-taking involved in conversational dialogues and inner sequential thinking. It turned out that they also had a problem with the dynamic flow involved in the swinging, alternating movements required for ordinary walking. I gradually learned that, unlike babies Alice and Angela, described in Chapter 2, their internal objects were definitely not felt to be waiting patiently in reserve. These observations were based on psychoanalytic clinical noting of the children’s transferences to me, my often bewildered or frustrated countertransferences to them, and the way these relationships seemed similar to the way their feet and legs interacted – or rather failed to interact – smoothly with the ground.
