ABSTRACT
The difficulties with both bathwater and babies have something in common; we forget our bathwater, and we do not exactly have to "remember" our babies; we may know them intimately, in almost every aspect of their being, but it would be hard to define them or describe their properties, or even really to explain what it is about them that makes them special to us. Nevertheless, the phrase swam into my mind, a while ago, as carrying an appropriate message for one looking back over a life, more than half of which has been spent being a psychoanalyst. Even before I began to think it out, I was aware that a lot of "stuff" had accumulated, starting long ago; and yet I certainly have not felt that I have been lumbering through life increasingly heavy-laden, as surely I would have if it had all stayed on board; some of it would even have disproportionately magnified the burden by fighting for space against deeply incompatible other things. Without having really conceived of it in this way before, I realized I must have junked a lot of it as I went along, sometimes as a result of quite complicated, long-drawn-out, and occasionally difficult thinking. Those onomatopoeic words, flotsam and jetsam, have always appealed to me, though I could not imagine how I might 156ever use them. I used not to be able to remember how they differed, or how you told them apart. I am still not sure about telling them apart if you actually find them, but flotsam is goods resulting from a shipwreck and found floating in the sea, and jetsam is goods thrown overboard, or jettisoned. Just to complicate matters, Chambers Dictionary adds that jetsam also "according to some, is goods from a wreck that remain under water" (my italics, because I suddenly saw that the unconscious is the store for some of those). I do not, on looking, see many experiences in my life that were akin to shipwrecks, so this leads me to think that, although some may have remained under water, most of my abandonings—the result, I like to believe, of thought and choice—were jetsam. I have voluntarily jettisoned things, as one does the bathwater. No doubt many of the properties still inherent in the baby are flotsam, however.
