โ Scribed by James Astor
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The conversation took place on 29 December 1988, at Simsbury. I went down to visit Don after Christmas. We had a meal together and most of the conversation took place at the table in his kitchen where he conducted some of his supervisions, particularly the evening ones. The atmosphere of the interview was friendly: I had known Don for some time and he was happy to talk to me about his work. He spoke, as he often did, with his eyes closed when giving a long answer -only looking at me when I asked a question. Reading his replies again, I can hear his evocative and fluent delivery and see his fist, holding the thin, white cigarette he smoked throughout the interview; he sipped wine as he talked. I did not challenge the evasions. Later, I typed up the recording, and he made some corrections, as he knew this was going to be published.
My last meeting with Don was when he was in the nursing home in north Oxford, shortly before he died. I asked him about his fear of death, and what he thought his legacy would be. He spoke of the death, by drowning, of his son in childhood and how this was an irrecoverable-from event. He thought his best book was The Psycho-Analytical Process. I asked him about The Apprehension of Beauty and The Claustrum, and he acknowledged them after a long, long silence, when I thought he had gone to sleep. I left feeling profoundly sad that this extraordinary, gifted and complicated man, who had inspired so many people, should have alienated as many, and increasingly isolated himself in his last years.
The interview
The route is very direct. As a medical student, I had done medicine in order to become a psychoanalyst. During medical school I did an elective in Bellevue Hospital, on Loretta Bender's ward where the original work with schizophrenic 74
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