CASE NOTES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 12

CASE NOTES

MY FATHER’S SON, by Richard Lumford; Cape. English price, 10/6: RICHARD LUMFORD’S father was a psychopath. Richard Lumford’s mother was psychotic. Not unnaturally, Richard Lumford was fairly neurotic himself. He had, as a friend told him, "got his centre wrong," and this book is his own account of his dim, unreal life, and his search for someone or something on which he could centre himself. He had enough money to allow him idleness, and thus he was able to concentrate exclusively on himself and his symptoms." They were typical enough. He had: "virtually no interest in marriage or ordinary adult life." He joined the R.A.F., and found there a temporary haven, because he was able to sink his inadequate individuality in the mass. He. found comradeship, but comradeship in the R.A.F. rested largely on danger and apprehension of death; "Thus the two feelings reacted upon and stimulated one another; fear of dying made me love the more, and the more I loved the. more I was afraid to die.’ He _ resolved this conflict by going down with tuberculosis, often a physical manifestation of a strong unconscious fear of life. But ‘that was only a temporary solution: "My central problem was inescapablethe problem of how to find love and the sensuous world, of how to relate myself to direct and lyrical experience; and I was starved of sensation . . . so desperate in the agony of my detachment I could have embraced a stone." He tried psycho-analysis and it helped him considerably, enabling him to sort out and classify his conflicts like pinned butterflies in a glass drawer, but it is (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) obvious from his writing that he is still only a shadow man, some way removed from reality. He has written a cold, morbidly fascinating book. He knows all the intellectual answers, all the physical and material answers, he can describe accurately his emptiness in any given situation, While he remains content to seék for a real physical or material centre on which to fasten his love, every day will -be for him just another page in his case book. If he would for a moment lift his nose out of his case notes, he might see that there is a reality beyond the material, and it is only in this réality that he can become whole.

G. leF.

Y.