I am glad that I was not the only one terrified by this extraordinary occurrence. Nat was clearly embarrassed at what he had done. Most of all, he was shocked at the very depths of seething emotion that lay beneath his usually unflappable lethargic facade.

I made some tea. We talked for a while and generally recuperated from the earlier excesses. As I drove Nat home, we both heard the church clock strike. We were greatly taken aback as, simultaneously and nonchalantly, we both glanced up at the moonlit tower. Slowly, we took in the fact that we’d been immersed in the regression session for the best part of three hours; it was eleven o’clock. I did not fear for Nat’s safety on this occasion, for he was evidently too tired to do anything but sleep, soundly.

THU FEB 14

I saw Nat this morning. I attempted to gauge his depression, which is frequently at its height during this period of the day, as is common amongst sufferers of this illness. He was very morose, despite a good night’s slumber. Indubitably, the primal therapy puts him in contact with the very core of his “sick” being. He said he had gained an insight. Life seemed less flat: it had “grown an extra dimension” after yesterday’s struggles. I questioned him on this extra dimension and it seemed not wholly malignant. Still, I am wary of raising false hopes, for no sooner does Nat advance than he has a relapse.

Has not he noted, I wondered, throughout his life a steady development: from foetus to baby to child to youth to adult?

“To death”, he added. Like all too many adolescents, he denies this pattern. He will not or cannot acknowledge his point blank refusal to grow up.

Surely it cannot be as simplistic as his comment suggests: namely, that adulthood is linked inexorably with death and must therefore be avoided.

SUN FEB 17

Nat went to see his friend Simeon in London yesterday. Simeon’s continued browbeating of my patient resulted in a rather ugly incident. Nat, unable any longer to cope with his companion’s verbal assault, involuntarily reverted to the foetal position. Thankfully he was able to pull out of it before unleashing any monstrous screams. Simeon had deliberately manipulated the scenario in order to provoke Nat’s anger. This wasn’t necessary, I told Nat.

From what Nat says, Simeon seems an interesting character, if somewhat misguided. His life is almost as bereft of emotional attachments as Nat’s, but at least he gets out into the “real world” each day, even if it is—as he calls it—a “loonie-bin”. Apparently, he got his information about primal therapy from a rather dubious second-hand source, and it centred on the work of Panov and the other Parisian experimental psychologists. Semidigested scraps of information can be so dangerous. The only positive thing to come out of the affair was that Nat had successfully made the train journey to South London and, even more remarkably, returned intact after the bout of impromptu regression. Very encouraging.