I was speaking the other day with someone about their experience of being asked to reflect. It became apparent that, as is often the case, someone who was being asked to reflect on their life was in fact being asked to reflect back to another person something that that person wanted to see.

I remember, in my own experience, being told by a teacher to reflect on something I had done and realising as I attempted to do so that no amount of my reflecting was going to change the fact that I didn’t like what he was about or that what I had done seemed necessary. I had turned a cross-country run into a protest at being told to run (which I actually enjoyed doing), and that this made a certain teacher very cross indeed.

Unfortunately that teacher wasn’t able to understand there was very little personal, towards him, in my refusal, but that what he was experiencing was a reflection of my life growing up with a certain kind of a father. My being able to refuse was to survive. Context was hardly an issue. What appeared to be an unfair command certainly was.

Fortunately another teacher, one of two men to whom I think I may owe my life, saw what was happening, took me to one side, asked if I was all right and drove me home from the school.

On reflection these kinds of minor miracle happen more frequently than one might imagine. At the time I was astonished.

On reflection I see how a certain kind of reflection, of the form that kind teacher offered to me (and genuine kindness is often a sign of emotional and intellectual depth) might dream up a very old relationship between mirrors and miracles. The words are related in their pre-European roots relating to astonishment and happiness.

Reflecting, reflective practice, like loving, is always narcissistic. Whether or not that reflection is able to offer happiness to more than oneself is what clinicians find themselves reflecting on when they begin considering categories such as ‘pathalogical’. And here I feel as if I am entering a hall of mirrors.