ABSTRACT
Written in 1830 by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the mythical creature the Kraken describes rests in a timeless slumber on the ocean bed. It is only with the apocalyptic fires that he rises, and in 104a fury, reaches the surface and expires. I hope to use this metaphor to describe an example of a brief psychoanalytic consultation model for survivors of external, adult trauma, originally developed by Caroline Garland in the Trauma Unit at the Tavistock Clinic.
I close my eyes and I am in the olive grove. I can smell the dry, almost salty air and hear the breath of the wind through the branches of the trees. The birdsong is just beginning its morning chorus. There is a particular moment in growing olives that when broken apart they will bleed with a kind of milky oil, that smells intensely of heat and olives and the rich earth. There are over forty trees in the grove and in the clear, morning light they are gently swaying. There are twenty of us in that company, all young Lebanese men like me, waiting with our machine guns and our hearts pounding. Within two hours, all of the olive trees are gone and only three of us remain. This is what I see over and over again—no, not see but live again each time I sleep or at moments when a smell reminds me of the olives or the sunlight has a similar quality or I smell salt and it is the smell of blood in my nostrils.
