Hal at the Inner Infant meeting (pp. 806–807)
‘since you’ve selected Jim as the member of the group you need something from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and hold you and love you, since your parents aren’t ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.’
Context
The scene stages the ghost-father as pure structure, and gives him the name. Kevin Bain, regressed to his Inner Infant, is made to choose a man to come hold him in place of the parents who "aren't ever coming," and the man he points his throttled bear at is named Jim — a mild, blank, silent older man who, asked eleven progressively louder times to rise and love him, "just sits there," and never comes. It plays like a cruel little liturgy of the whole book's paternal absence: the child crying out by name to a Jim who will not answer, the needs-meeter who stays motionless while the grief crescendos. Hal, three feet away and praying not to be recognized, is watching a stranger act out the exact charge the ghost-father lays on the living — call the father, name him, and get silence — with his own family's founding first name attached, by accident, to the man who won't come.