I’ve been thinking a lot about Louis MacNiece’s poem “Prayer before Birth”. I’ve quoted it several times to my patients. It’s a habit of mine, to quote bits of poetry when it seems appropriate. Usually when something a patient says evokes an image or feeling in me which finds more tangible expression in a line of poetry. (I really should read more poetry. My fund of quotations feels too limited!)

To return from quoting poetry, to writing about it, let me come to MacNiece’s poem. It is an unborn child’s prayer to the world it is about to enter, asking for care and protection from numerous dangers. As with anything of this sort, it can be read in so many ways. I want to suggest two ways of reading it. One, the child’s prayer to be protected from its own destructive possibilities. The other to be protected from the destructive potential of the outside world. These are familiar themes to all who are therapists or who have been in therapy. We learn that the rages we encounter in other people are the same rages we encounter in ourselves. (As well as the capacity for loving, caring and nurturing.)

Thus MacNiece’s unborn child prays for protection from various threats. “The blood sucking bat or the rat or the club footed ghoul…” Or the strong drugs with which the human race may dope it. Or the “…sins that in me the world shall commit.” This litany is enough but the infant has not reached the end. It prays to be filled with strength against “… those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton…” The wise infant in us recognises that it, too, has the capacity to be anti-life. To make others into a cog in a machine. To turn others – and itself – into “a thing with one face.”

Much of my work as a therapist is to enable my patients to explore their inner world. The comment I hear so often is “I hadn’t seen it like that.” Or, “You’re right. I do do that, don’t I?” (At which point I smile a modest and knowing smile!) Two stories come to mind where I pointed out to a patient some aspect of their inner world of which they were unaware. One was a young woman who had come to England for a year. Her aim was to explore Europe. Most weekends she and her boyfriend were visiting one or another European city. She came to see me because she was depressed and couldn’t understand why. She was “living the dream”. Only the dream was being spoiled by a permanent black cloud. We spent some time thinking and talking. I encouraged her to share her dreams, as I often do. We began to look at her associations to these dreams and discovered whole unexplored psychic continents, which amazed her. “I thought I was ok, sorted. I knew what I wanted and where I was going. Now I’m not so sure.” I pointed out the irony of travelling from Australia to explore Europe whilst being so unaware of her own hidden cities!

Another patient comes to mind who had a childhood laden with bloodsucking bats, and club footed ghouls – amongst other horrors. She had a violent father who regularly beat her and her sister for the slightest deviation of his rules. A mother who had a number of lovers whilst her husband was at work and who called my patient a deluded liar when she challenged her mother about these men. Eventually she left home and had a number of unsatisfactory relationships before “settling down” and having two children with a husband who was married to his work. Her own troubled upbringing was reflected in her relations with her daughter. Once the girl reached adolescence, the tensions between them increased. And the more my patient tried to manage her daughter’s behaviour, the more my patient became the feared “blood sucking bat”. She hated her daughter for turning her into the very thing she most feared and hated in her self. The blood sucking bat and the club footed ghoul.

After several years of sometimes disturbing and challenging therapy my patient left by mutual agreement. I saw her for a follow up meeting. She looked very well and was thriving in a new job. The therapy had helped her find, in MacNiece’s words “Water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.”

Not all my work makes such a difference. I can think of two or three people for whom therapy has been so transformative. And these have come to birth after a long and hard labour. For others the work has been less intense, less demanding. But just as life giving. Their unborn prayers have been heard. And they have known this and been able to build on that knowledge. Finding “grass to talk to me, sky to sing to me…”