In the next series of slides we see a figure wearing a dress, high up on a building called Ivory Tower. The Ivory Tower is a play on the idea within psychiatry that psychotherapists live in something of an Ivory Tower, removed from the acute disturbed situations often encountered with patients in in-patient settings or Community Mental Health Teams.  

This whimsical spin on suicide and self harm has a serious point to make. In self harm and suicide anger that was perhaps directed towards another is directed towards the self. Quite often in self harm and suicide it is not just the self that is subject to attack but a relationship that has been internalised with somebody else that also evokes the attack. The mother’s body is subject to attack in this case as well as Mr Jones’ body.

The idea of Mr Jones who feels he may have been painfully separated from his mother wearing her dress is a joke which plays on the idea of identification as a defence against loss. By ‘appropriating’ his mother’s identity he need not face the fact that he has lost her. This idea was embodied in the Hitchcock film Psycho where the Norman Bates’ character whose mother had died wears her dress and plays the part of and becomes his own dead mother.