I tried to eat my salty crisps as quietly as I could from my seat in the sun drenched stands at Queen's Club London. I was failing VERY badly. The ear curdling crunch in my mouth was strangely at odds with the lack of noise emanating from the seven thousand seater Andy Murray centre court on finals day.

Every attempted slow motion chew seemed to echo around the stadium. Were people looking at me?  Could they hear what I could hear? Were they trying to call security, or change seats?  Damn it, I was hungry and stuck in my seat, I vowed to keep going.  Victory belongs to the most tenacious!

37-year-old Tatjana Maria and her 23-year-old powerhouse opponent Amanda Anisimova seemed to slide silently on the court. The crowd was hushed as if we were in a huge outdoor library examining a rare manuscript.  Had they run out of Pimm's, or jugs to transport it in? The carefully tended grass acted like a shock absorber.

When Maria hit the ball it was so subtle, so controlled, so silent. So deadly.

Maria was thankfully not cured of her slice addiction! In the modern world there is so much pressure to conform. Are therapists supposed to make you normal, to help you fit in? Or are they in service of you playing your own game?

Maria had lost her last nine matches in a row. She played a game that looked like it came from the 70s. Was she joking? Jung talked about individuation, becoming who you really are. Well maybe he was talking about Maria. An outlier, a misfit in the modern game. A woman who truly dances to her own tunes and her own creativity. She enjoys hitting the ball. Her love for the game radiates.

She was a crafty ninja. Even her four-year-old and 11-year-old daughters, both court side, could not be heard. (Maria told the audience that they would often fall asleep during a match. She wondered if it was the sound of the tennis balls. The soporific bounce.)

Her father was a professional handball player. Maria was playing with her hands unlike any other player in the world today. An intergenerational gift? Like families of musicians or mathematicians....her's was a family of great hands. What did your parents give you? The most bedazzling thumb, fingers and wrist! And Maria was leveraging that gift for all it was worth. The racquet was incidental. A painted-on afterthought. Was this an avant-garde dance theatre performance....No it was a big money finals day!

Slice. Hack. Slice. Chop. SLICEIER, SPICIER. CHOP CHOP.  Maria, 37, was the Queen of Queen's. Maria was an analyst on court. She could read her opponent. She was indestructible. Anisimova would hit the ball hard. Trained in modern tennis her game was all power, top spin, athleticism. BOOM. But Maria was finely tuned into her and able to catch every missile. She would return it with interest.  Maria the spin doctor.

Freud talked about repetition compulsion. That is tennis! It's when we recreate a traumatic experience in the hope that this time we will figure it out. But it doesn't usually work out. We just repeat the same pattern and get re-traumatised. On centre court we could see that Anisimova kept trying to undo the trauma of hitting the ball in the net. Yet, she was powerless and did it again, and again!

Anisimova could not read the spin. She would just try and hit back hard. She could not control the ball, at least at first. But in the second set the younger and less experienced Anisimova slowed down, and she began to tune into Maria's play. This reminded me of a consulting room when there is good work going on. The therapist can catch what the patient says, and things flow back and forth. Things become more intricate, and new patterns of play evolve. A new development takes place. You no longer hit the ball in the net quite as much.

Freud said we need to figure out how to love and work. Winnicott added that we have to do this playfully, creatively. I recall attending a lecture by the analyst Donald Kalsched where he admitted he spent hours watching sport on TV, looking for a sublime moment. The beauty of such a moment can be transformative for the psyche. Such intense beauty sits alongside the tragic nature of human existence.

There was a golden grass field created by these two players. There was intoxication in the air without Pimm's. They were archetypal opposites. Slice versus power. Old versus young. They shared a love for the game, for creativity, and the spirit of tennis.  Eloquent and generous in their play and mutual respect for each other.

The analyst Bion used the term O to refer to ultimate reality. On this finals day, were we experiencing an insight to the deeper nature of things by watching a ball go back and forth over a net? According to psychotherapist Symington, O refers to the Greek word Ontos. Some people think it comes from Zen Buddhism. The analyst Akhtar thinks it comes from the Sanskrit Om, because Bion spent his first eight years in India.

I have a new theory. I just wonder, perhaps it comes from Bion playing with an O shaped tennis ball in his consulting room. Squeezing it, bouncing it.  Throwing it against the wall. And occasionally, spinning it!