– Introduction –

reckoned with, and when we meet it, Poirot’s little grey cells aren’t adequate to deal with it on their own. Whether what we confront in the haunted chamber is the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, the Jungian ‘shadow’ self, the embodiment of some buried childhood trauma or simply a personification of the terrible fact of death (for M. R. James, the ‘King of Terrors’), to come to terms with what the ghost represents we must expand our mental horizons. If we are to achieve fully integrated minds, we can’t go on being left-brain supremacists, insisting on the primacy of analytic language, scientific logic and objective truth: we must accept that the right hemisphere of the brain, with its resources of fantasy, poetic symbolism and subjective insight, has something vitally important to tell us too. That has certainly been my experience. Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century of serious therapeutic work, I’m struck by how often, in trying to explain my own terrifying mental states to psychiatrists or psychotherapists, I’ve resorted to images or turns of phrase in some of my own favourite ghost stories. Shakespeare famously spoke of how, ‘as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown’, the poet ‘turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ The poet, mark you, not the clinician or the neuroscientist: and when, with his or her help, our shadows acquire that shape and that name they somehow become less frightening, more manageable, or at least liveable with.

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