A few words on Neville's Poland

By Bartosz Puk, Kraków. 

Polish Psychoanalytical Society

Neville first came to Poland in 2005. This was as part of his annual trip from Australia, via Israel to Denmark and Portugal. Poland found itself on his map between Israel and Denmark. Later, he visited Krakow, Gdańsk several times and in 2016, finally, at the Polish Psychoanalytical Society Annual conference in Warsaw.

At the beginning of 2005, and maybe was it at the end of 2004, my friends and I took up the organization of the Polish Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Society Conference. It was then that the idea arose to invite a guest from the far antipodes. It seemed absurd and I did not realize then how close the ties between Polish psychoanalysis and Australia can be. However, I wrote an e-mail that in those days we are organizing conferences in Krakow and we would like to invite Neville. His personal and direct way of thinking was introduced to us by Jan Malewski who knew him from Tavistock and his book The Makinig of a Psychotherapist was extremely easy to use and read for us. With great surprise, I opened my mailbox in the morning and there it was - a letter from Neville that it happened so that he would be in Europe at that time and he would be happy to come to Poland. It was during his "tour" in which he traveled almost every year from Australia to the USA, Israel and further to Denmark. Poland found itself on the Neville map between Israel and Denmark.

He started his lecture in Krakow, "How the Super-ego is formed from Narcissism." (Conf PTPP, October 2005), not in the way it is usually the case on many psychoanalytic papers, with a quotation from Freud but with his personal experience.

“I arrived five minutes late for a session. My patient was waiting. She looked angry:
A therapist is supposed to arrive on time, she said.
She could have said,
I am upset that you have arrived late
Or,
You obviously don’t care about me
Or,
I hate you.
But she chose to say: A therapist is supposed to arrive on time.(...)"

Neville repeatedly cited his clinical experiences in situations that we could all be involved in in some way. In their history, but also in our own clinical experiences. At the first meeting in 2005, a friend therapist told him that reading his books she felt as if she was a small girl and finally simply understood psychoanalytical writing. He replied that he had once decided to write in a manner so that for a young small boy would understand. And he added that this little boy had therefore met this little girl. Perhaps it was the voice of a little boy born in Portugal before World War II.

His acquaintance with Wilfred Bion and Eric Brenman was the driving force behind his thinking, in which he reached beyond the realms of psychoanalysis, and at the same time gave analytical therapists the courage to reach for freedom. The most important thing for him were not so much the drives or the fate and relations of internal objects as the search for the object itself. He was full of ontological endeavors, and the analysis was an emotional and mutual journey. He saw narcissistic shutdown as a turning away from of life-giver and stopping these efforts. He loved life and thinking. (And good wine, and if someone knows Portuguese vineyards, then the they ate acquainted with the Symingtons.) In his passions, he always tried to go deeper. It was sometimes very difficult for some of his interlocutors because he engaged them to the gut, where he looked for a thinker for new thoughts. As part of his life adventures, he reached the antipodes and stayed there. On the Skype card, there was the following quote from his favorite Marion Milner. "It will be a sore fight letting go and letting the sea in." He died in Sydney in late 2019.