It was evening. Anna had been restless and I lay on the bed covers beside her and stroked her hair. Daisy sat quietly in a corner.

Anna seemed to be talking half to herself and half to me and I was only half listening. Her hand touched the front of my trousers. Randomly? ‘We don’t want the horse.’

A sexual reference? Or perhaps she was she talking of her friend Lynn’s daughter, who has a horse. She was saying more words, but I could not hear them clearly. She said something about ‘the beaker’, which made no sense to me. ‘We always talk about him, don’t we?’

Then … ‘I think, we didn’t have a horse, did we? That would have been something.’

A car started up in the street outside.

‘What on earth is up there?’

‘They’re very nice, animals.’

I would like to be able to listen better to such talk.

I never did a clinical training, one which included Infant Observation, where students observe a mother and baby, but it has always seemed to me a powerful aspect of that training, where the observation involves really being aware of what you are seeing and hearing and feeling, and also being aware of what you make of what you see. A friend at our party said afterwards how ‘one knows she is there but as elusive to catch as a fistful of mist.’ Trained as a psychotherapist herself, she went on:
‘I think I mentioned to you once about how her state reminds me of Infant Observation, and I was hit quite strongly with the same feelings yesterday. She is alive with her good object, and like babies, I guess is filled with passionate feelings of all kinds, but no words to describe or interpret them. Also like a newborn, I feel, is that explanatory words are no use, she needs her feelings to
be met and understood instantly.’

This psycho-analytic language – ‘ good object’ – has me thinking again about what Anna sees, when it seems that she has to rely on her internal world to understand what is going on outside of her. I am confident that there is nothing much wrong with her eyes, with the functioning of the retina. But the brain does not now compute well what she sees.

I know from school text books that the images from the retina are upside down, and the brain simply turns them round, like a computer image, and we know how quickly the brain adjusts left and right, when we drive in a different country. And I understand how the brain recognises images , and is programmed to do that very well when it matters, for example in recognising very slight differences in facial expression. I also know to be wary of the computer analogy.

So now Anna has difficulty in recognising faces, and I notice that she usually waits until she hears the voice and recognises people like that. Though she cannot always work out the direction from which the voice is coming, so even that is difficult for her. It is not just that she has difficulty with faces. She may not recognise a table. (And tables don’t speak.)

There is a step from our kitchen to the garden room. It is about an inch high, and a foot deep,and is painted white. You could not imagine a less worrying step. But it has become for Anna the biggest obstacle in the house. We are going to experiment with another ramp, but in the meantime, I am trying to think what is the problem.

Yesterday Anna stood at that step with Lynn for twenty minutes. She put one foot on it, felt around (it is quite smooth), and withdrew the foot.

I lifted her and put her down gently to stand on the garden room floor, level with the white step. Lynn put on a cd of French chansons and I held Anna and danced a few steps. ‘Is that Tim?’ she said.
You could have thought she was totally blind.

There must be research and such like that would help to explain this. I wonder if it is written in a language I could understand.

I took a book from our shelves - our books are psycho-analytic, as Anna was a psychotherapist. Freud’s Footnotes, by Daniel Leader, has a chapter The Internal World. He reminds me that I could start with Plato (the psychic cave) and Locke. Before Freud and Klein, philosophers of mind explored concepts of internalisation – for example the eye as camera obscura – we still talk of ‘the mind’s eye’. I observe that Anna sees internal images, but cannot make sense of them.

One of the first tests the psychologist gave her years ago, was a simple jigsaw of an elephant. She did not recognise it. Inside, I was screaming, IT’S AN ELEPHANT, can’t you see it’s an elephant, a child of two would see that. Actually it did not look like a real elephant, not in size or shape or colour or texture, and the office we were in was not the context in which you would expect to see an elephant. It looked like a jigsaw. But she could not recognise the meaning it was meant to display.

And now she cannot see the meaning in ordinary objects around the house. The white step makes no more sense to her now than that elephant. But in her head?

‘They’re very nice, animals.’