A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  By far the best writing assignment I used in my class was one I lifted from Joe Brainard, the visual artist and writer, whose book I Remember is, for me anyway, a classic. It inspired Georges Perec’s Je me souviens, as well as hordes of writing teachers who have discovered its remarkable properties as a vehicle of memory. Here are some excerpts from the book, which I gave to the students:

  I remember many first days of school. And that empty feeling.

  I remember the clock from three to three-thirty.

  I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad a policeman would put you in jail.

  I remember rubbing my hand under a restaurant table top and feeling all the gum.

  I remember that life was just as serious then as it is now.

  I remember not looking at crippled people.21

  In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, which I wrote while I was still working at the hospital, I described the effect of the words “I remember.” “My hand moves to write, a procedural bodily memory of unconscious knowing, which evokes a vague feeling or sense of some past image or event emerging into consciousness. Then the episodic memory is present and can be articulated with startling suddenness.”22 Writing “I remember” over and over again fuels a machinery of remembering. The processes that generate the memory are hidden, but it is interesting to ask in this context, “Who is writing?” Arguably, the “I remember” exercise partakes of what used to be called automatism, a subject of great interest to physicians and psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pierre Janet and Alfred Binet in France, William James, Boris Sidis, and Frederic Myers in America, and Edmund Gurney in England all did experimental work on the phenomenon, which was variously interpreted as indicating a plural self, a subliminal self, or a dissociation that reflected a retraction of consciousness. One of Janet’s patients, who had wandered off during a dissociative fugue and remembered nothing of it, recalled it in detail while writing under hypnosis. The resemblance to anarchic or alien hand syndrome in neurological patients is surely provocative. A fourteen-year-old patient I mentioned in The Shaking Woman, written up in the journal Brain, who could remember nothing for more than a few seconds, was nevertheless able to recall his entire day when he wrote it down. Actually, that is misstated. His hand seemed to be able to remember and record. He could not read what he had written. His mother could.

  The act of writing is a motor habit. It partakes of an ordinary form of automatism. What appears on paper during this exercise is therefore often surprising because it feels unwilled, prompted by tracing the letters of the words “I remember.” One man in my class remembered sitting in a sink near a large cabbage, a sink that was one of a long row of sinks in a vast barracks-like room. His mother was giving him a bath. He explained that the memory must have been from his time as a child on a collective farm in China. He was the patient whose parents were arrested when he was six. He never saw them again. Whether the memory recorded during the exercise is one that has hardened over time and therefore has been subjected to significant editing or whether it is one that emerges seemingly from nowhere as a startling illumination from long ago, not recalled for many years, and therefore still fresh in its sensual details, the sense of ownership represented by the first-person pronoun as it looks back at you from the page cannot be overestimated. This form of ownership is nothing less than the alienation of the self in language, a form of reflective self-consciousness that invites interpretation.

  “I remember,” one of my students wrote, “when I was a child.”

  I remember when I had no problems or maybe I did, but I got through them.

  I remember having fun being lonely.

  I remember feeling okay.

  I remember what I did and wished I didn’t do.

  I remember the loss of me.

  Memory is the ground of all conscious first-person narratives, even fictional ones. There are many reasons to believe that conscious memory and imagination are a single mental faculty. Here the writer created a brief, evocative series of sentences that recorded an earlier self, the change that took place in her, and the mourning for the person she believed she had once been. The sentences are abstract. They conceal every detail of what happened to her and whatever it was that made her feel guilty, and yet the final effect is poignant. A number of patients wept when they read their “I remembers.” I and the other students did our best to comfort the person who had broken down. Open grief was admissible. It occurred regularly. Crying had a legitimate place in my hospital classroom.

  Now a story: One day in the winter of 2006, a young man came to my class. He wrote an “I remember” exercise. Here is an excerpt:

  I remember the ancient tree in the playground between buildings 111 and 112. There were four levels—level one, level two, level three, and level four. We kids would sit in the branches at our assigned levels—Kyle at level four, Kirk at level three, Vern at level two. I was at level one. I was chubby and did not climb well. There we sat.

  I remember the swimming pool and its own system of little kid hierarchy. A white tag meant you were a novice swimmer, red meant advanced, and a blue tag meant lifesaving skills. I swelled with pride on receiving my white tag. I still have it somewhere . . .

  I remember Billy. He was a bully. His mother committed suicide.

  I remember exploring Castle William with Kyle. It is a famous historic structure overlooking New York Harbor. It was mostly full of trash and debris. We howled when we found that somebody had used a broken toilet and left something for posterity . . .

  I remember playing T-ball on the Dodgers. The team’s star first baseman, handsome and athletic at six years old, was named Mike Lavache. He might as well have been Robert Redford. We won the final game in spite of his absence.23

  I loved his return to childhood, and I explicated my admiration for his piece in class. Afterward, I spoke to the student in the hallway and asked him if he had ever thought of becoming a writer. He looked a little surprised. We chatted a bit about books. He was released, and I didn’t see him again. Then in 2011, after I had stopped my work at the hospital, I received a package in the mail, opened it, and found a book inside: Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers by Jared Dillian. I opened the volume and read the dedication the writer had scrawled on the title page: “To Siri—Thank you for saving my life and helping me to become a writer. Jared.” Jared Dillian’s memoir of his life as a trader on Wall Street, his bipolar disorder, psychotic break, and subsequent hospitalization includes a chapter called “I Remember.” He recorded the writing exercise in the book and, as I read it, although I had forgotten his name, I instantly remembered him. I had no idea he had been a trader at the doomed firm.

  Here is his description of the class in his book: “I found myself seated at a rectangular table with a few of my esteemed colleagues. A complicated woman sat at the other end.”24 (I am deeply grateful for that perspicacious description of me.)

  He writes about the twenty minutes of composing, about our talk after class, and then that same night he remembers his earlier writing ambitions, his decision to make money first and write later, but the class had jogged him into another place: “That writing exercise—my brain hadn’t felt so alive in years. I wanted more.

  “That night, I was having trouble sleeping for the first time since being admitted. I was thinking about what Siri had said to me. A real writer was telling me that I could be a writer.

  “For the first time, I wanted to get out.”

  At the very end of the chapter, he is sitting on the subway with his wife going home. He writes, “I was capable of wonderful, creative things. I was capable of being a huge pain in the ass. And I was living in a universe that finally made sense.

  “I was me.”25

  I am pleased to say that Jared Dillian is doing well. He is writing and living in a universe that still makes sense. His is a particular and unusual case, but this may be what writing is—the flowering of a perso
nal imaginative vision. And that imaginative vision of moving elsewhere, of seeing the self in other terms, can be part of a cure. Jared Dillian is a talented writer, and yet it is wrong to separate his gifts from his illness—the lilt and force of his prose are of him and partake of a manic energy that keeps the reader reading. I do not wish the wrenching agonies of manic depression or the delusions and cruel voices of psychosis on anyone. All remedies are welcome, but we must be careful about thinking of mental illness as divorced from the self, as an alien power that descends on a brain and throws it off balance or floods it with unwanted neurochemicals, as if there is no relation between a life lived and neurobiology. I had no idea I would be instrumental to the new path he found for himself, but it turned out I was: I said the right words at the right time. My respect for his work was genuine. He knew it and he felt it. That moment may be compared to the lift of a good transference in psychotherapy or a physician’s kindly given placebo, which then created a shift in him—one that had both unconscious and conscious qualities.

  The full complexity of Jared’s case must be acknowledged. His psychiatrist, whom he tellingly calls S+12 in the book, helped to quiet his psychosis with lithium. During his time in the hospital he also rediscovered how alive writing could make him feel. Both pharmacology and writing are implicated in his cure. Both involve active physiological processes and, in both cases, their therapeutic effects are not fully understood. Writing, however, engages self-reflective conscious awareness in a way that taking lithium, for example, does not. As Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan argued in “Aesthetic Ambiguity,” different psychic levels are engaged in creativity, both the surprises that come with “functional regression” and the rigors of evaluation and “control.” “When regression goes too far, the symbols become private, perhaps unintelligible even to the reflective self; when, at the other extreme, control is preponderant, the result is described as cold, mechanical, and uninspired.”26 In other words, the range of written expression is huge: from evocative, affect-charged word salad that flirts with or becomes incomprehensible to the dead controlled languages of many academic, scientific, and some schizophrenic texts.

  Science is about control, control of vocabulary and method, so the same results can be replicated again and again. Its models are often frozen, even when researchers attempt to describe dynamic processes. But absolute control is impossible. There are always leaks. Subjectivity cannot be eliminated from the story of doing science, which does not discredit the scientific method and all the discoveries that have been made in its wake. But along with formal science papers that record their data and their findings, there should and must be a parallel medical literature, one in which a particular case and its vicissitudes is fully written, either by the patient or her doctor, preferably by both. An embodied psychiatry acknowledges that the ill person is not a collection of “presenting” symptoms to be counted and treated. Rather, a patient is a person whose symptoms are embedded in an ever-changing history of his or her self, a self that is not an isolate, but one actively created through vital exchanges with others. It must include a diversity of texts, fMRI studies, to be sure, but it will also have to turn to, or rather turn back to, the fluid “literary” qualities of the case study Freud worried about, to the journal entry, to word salad, and to the personal narratives of memory, which may not bear the “serious stamp of science” but are nevertheless invaluable, both as vehicles of insight into mental illness and as avenues to its cure.

  Inside the Room

  * * *

  I FIRST read Sigmund Freud when I was sixteen. Did I understand what I was reading? Probably not, but I was fascinated, and by the time I read The Interpretation of Dreams a few years later, my lifelong curiosity about psychoanalytic theory had begun. I thought of becoming an analyst for a while, have immersed myself in the problems of neuropsychoanalysis, the brain-mind conundrum, and wrote a novel with an analyst hero, The Sorrows of an American, but I was fifty-three years old before I found my own analyst. I landed in her office because I had a symptom, “the shakes.” The symptom became a book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. The shaking has returned as a theme in our sessions, but it has not been central to what I now think of as an internal revolution wrought in therapy.

  For six years I have been in psychoanalytically based psychotherapy twice a week, and I have been changed by it. How this has happened remains mysterious. I could tell you a story now, one different from the story I arrived with on that first day, but the dynamics of how one story supplanted another, how talk, often repetitious, circling, speculative, even nonsensical, has achieved this shift in me, I couldn’t explain to you with any precision.

  I know this: I feel freer. I feel freer in my life and in my art, and those two are finally inseparable.

  Here is a point. I am deeply familiar with psychoanalytic theory, but I wonder if my knowing it has made any difference in my own therapy, in untying knots and opening doors.

  It is good my analyst knows theory. It has surely guided her treatment of me, but her particular beliefs, the intricacies of her positions on this or that, are entirely unknown to me.

  In his preface to The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote, “In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples . . .” Psychoanalysis and the novel are founded on a wisdom built from the particular.

  Every philosophical system, every model of the mind-brain-self-body, of consciousness and unconsciousness, is incomplete. There is always something that escapes it—a thing that exists without explanation, a monster that cannot be brought into the system.

  But then, ideas are never any good unless they are felt and lived. Otherwise, they are just “dry letters,” as Dickens wrote. A good deal of theory is desiccated and corpse-like. In her novel L’Invitée, Simone de Beauvoir’s character Françoise says, “But to me, an idea is not a question of theory, one experiences it; if it remains theoretical it has no value.”

  Anna Freud called intellectualization a defense.

  Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.

  Psychoanalytic theory comes alive inside the room. It has to live between analyst and patient.

  The room is always the same. Every time I go, it looks the same. Were I to arrive at a session and find that the room had been remodeled or substantially altered, I’m sure I would feel alarmed. And yet, for a long time I didn’t look very closely at anything in it. After about three years, I did. Why? I felt free to do so. A change. But it is the repetition of the room’s sameness that counts—the sense that the room doesn’t change. My analyst looks the same. Her voice is the same. She is there when she says she will be there. When I have to wait an extra couple of seconds before she buzzes me into the waiting room, I used to worry, not a lot, but a little. Now that is over. I recognize the sound of her steps when she leaves her office to walk toward me where I sit in the chair until she comes to get me. She has a light step, neither slow nor hurried. Mostly, however, she belongs to the room. She and the room go together, a ritual return to the same space with the same person inside it. If I couldn’t depend on their sameness, I might not be able to change. I can only change because the room and my analyst are fixed.

  The time in the room is not the time outside the room. Behind me is a large clock with numbers that tells the time for the session, but it is a clock-time that is not quite clock-time because the world slows down in the room. Sometimes I know in my body when it is almost over—sometimes I don’t.

  This is the constant reality: two people in a room who speak to each other. One speaks more than the other, and through that dialogue there is internal motion in the patient. The analyst may be moved, too, must be moved, but it is the change in the patient that counts. The dialectical shiftings between me and you, the storytelling, the associative leaps, the descriptions of dreams, and the intens
e listening that occur in the analytic space are Freud’s greatest legacy, his greatest invention, a codification of a particular kind of dialogue. Bertha Pappenheim’s “talking cure” goes on in myriad forms, and what is interesting is that there is no ultimate or final technique. What happens in the room is guided by theory, but the world forged between patient and analyst is also an intuitive, unconsciously driven, rhythmic, emotional, and often ambiguous undertaking.

  This is why doing analysis is something like making art.

  Somehow, repeated sessions of talk between two people can unearth what was once unknown and bring it into the light of the known. It is a kind of remembering, certainly, but a remembering with feeling or a remembering about feeling. The memories that appear do not have to be accurate or literally true in any documentary sense. Our conscious autobiographical memories are notoriously unreliable. Freud called this instability Nachträglichkeit. Memories are not fixed but mutable. The present alters the past. Imagination and fantasy play an important role in remembering. Memories are creative and active, not passive. In his Outlines of Psychology (1897), Wilhelm Wundt writes, “It is obvious that practically no sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between images of imagination and those of memory . . . All our memories are therefore made of ‘fancy and truth’ [Wahrheit und Dichtung]. Memory-images change under the influence of our feelings and volition to images of imagination, and we generally deceive ourselves with their resemblance to real experiences.”

  Are there any memories from a life without emotion? Feeling undergirds all memories, whether they are accurate or not. There is accumulating neurobiological evidence that the same systems of the brain are at work in both remembering and imagining, in not only recollecting the self but projecting it into the future. And yet, memories are often fictions. We do not mean to make them up. We are not lying, but their truth is not a documentary truth.