At the end of that year, another white-knuckle ride of postponed supervisions and tardy, scribbled essays, I managed to scrape a final upper second. My family were delighted; my director of studies was relieved. So was I, writing in my diary that my result ‘vindicates my time here, whether I enjoyed it or not’.
That entry was written on 16 June 1991, when I had just received the result. I managed to remain in a positive mood for a couple of pages or so, but later on in the same, long entry, when I asked the question, ‘So how do I feel, now that my two-way stretch is coming to an end?’ the answer was:
The sight of the slightness of my person-in-the-world, and even to myself, has been frightening. I am not impressive. I am a woman of little grace, almost no achievements, no distinction, a sexual cripple, an awkward social actor. I am clinging most humiliatingly to childhood, refusing to grow up, resenting the very young. I have felt at times this year, less confident in myself, less proud of myself, more frightened of the future, more depressed and despairing than I have ever felt. I have a slight, uneventful, dull outer life, and sometimes it has seemed as if my soul has all but seeped away from me. I am a social cipher, an underwritten character, and an awkward, inadequate one at that.
When I had written my first entry ten months earlier, I had explained that the diary was to be my only extra-curricular activity for the final year. Its purpose was to be that of self-analysis, focusing on the question of whether, after my recent failures, I should really consider myself to be a writer or not, or whether I should give up my childhood dream and settle for life as an ordinary person – like a civil servant or lawyer or something – instead. (The possibility that one might be both a writer and something else never seems to have occurred to me.) Reading it today, some entries are as embarrassing as I would expect them to be; some, where I berate myself for not working or for picking my skin or pining over some man, are just sad, but in others I can see the first sardonic glimmerings of grown-up self-awareness.
Sure I’ve accounted for my social inadequacies, lack of patience and sulkiness as signs of a great artistic temperament, and felt nicely superior to those mediocre, non-creative multitudes.
Sure I’ve put up with years of depression, lethargy and self-hatred on the understanding that great art must arise from such noble sufferings.
BUT I HAVE HARDLY WRITTEN ANYTHING!
The entry for 13 February 1991 interests me for what it shows about my behaviour towards other people, men particularly. Jane and I had been discussing a mutual friend, a first-year student at her college.
I said to Jane that I couldn’t believe X liked me. She said he did but that sometimes I annoyed him. Why? I asked warily. I whinge and I look too much for confirmation, fish too much. This was all the more horrible to hear because I had suspected it. I must watch myself around him, and take care not to do these things. He makes me feel uncomfortable because he just smiles and nods and goes along (or pretends to) with whatever unreasonable behaviour one throws at him. I suppose I fish so much with him because I’m trying to goad an honest adverse reaction from him. Friends let you know, in a nice way, when you’re being annoying.
It had to stop, the whingeing and fishing. My neediness, my moods and my dramas had exasperated my friends, sometimes to the point where they could be my friends no longer. I didn’t want to lose any more friends. I didn’t want to keep putting men off either. From that first ‘FUCK OFF!’ I had understood that there was something really wrong with me inside, that men could see it, and that I would have to get it fixed.
I had already begun to seek help. In my first year, I saw a university counsellor, who told me that I could choose either to be a victim or to empower myself. In my second year, I saw another counsellor who told me that I had an almost beatific face and suggested that I join the art therapy group. That same year, I went to my doctor who said to try vigorous exercise and hot baths and if that didn’t work, to take a year out. My new best friend, who had been seeing the same counsellors, transferred to LSE and began analytic psychotherapy, which sounded like a far more interesting option than the exercise and baths. I found out that there were funds available for psychotherapy for undergraduates and asked my pastoral tutor if I might access them. A biologist by trade, he thought that psychotherapy would be both unnecessary and unhelpful. Instead he had me visit him every two weeks for a sympathetic chat and a discussion of my eating habits, which he clearly believed were the core of the problem. I didn’t agree, but he was all I had, so I kept going back to his office for our appointments, where I stared at graphs of fungal growth patterns on his computer screen, and thought about all the miraculous and exciting therapy I was going to have once I got out of there.
9. Soviet Jews who had applied for visas to emigrate to Israel, which had been refused. They then remained in limbo, disgraced and discriminated against, but unable to leave. Jews from the West helped as much as they could, sometimes by paying visits in person. Mum, Dad and I had made one such visit together in 1987.
10. Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky, Mind Over Mood (The Guilford Press, London, 1995, p. 206)
11. Roz Shafran, Zaftar Cooper, Christopher G. Fairbairn, ‘Clinical Perfectionism: a Cognitive-Behavioural Analysis’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, July 2002; 40(7): 773–91
12. I’ve made my target word count for the day now, but then so could any idiot. I know lots of other people who write twice as much just in a morning.
13. That’s what they call tutors in Cambridge. An honours examination is a ‘tripos’. Students live in numbered rooms not on corridors but on ‘staircases’. In June they attend ‘May Balls’. It’s not just any old place, you know.
Confession
28. I have the impression that I will never be able to explain things clearly, especially when talking about important matters that involve me.
The Padua Inventory
———
Where the epistemophilic instinct is a preponderating feature in the constitution of an obsessional patient, brooding becomes the principal symptom of the neurosis. The thought process itself becomes sexualised, for the sexual pleasure which is normally attached to the content of thought becomes shifted on to the act of thinking itself, and the gratification derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual gratification.
Sigmund Freud, from Notes upon a Case of
Obsessional Neurosis
For sufferers of what we currently call obsessive-compulsive disorder, the ascent of Freudianism was something of a disaster. This is not because Freud was unable to identify the condition or describe the symptoms: ‘Obsessional neurosis [as he called it] is shown in the patient’s being occupied with thoughts in which he is in fact not interested, in his being aware of impulses in himself which appear very strange to him and in his being led to actions the performance of which give him no enjoyment, but which it is quite impossible for him to omit.’14 Writing several years earlier, Father Victor Raymond showed that Catholic priests recognized them pretty well too: ‘Obsession may be described as an idea that recurs automatically or mechanically and involuntarily, and forces itself irresistibly on the consciousness, in spite of all efforts to banish it. Further, this idea causes pain and provokes various impulses.’15
The priest and the analyst differed in their views of what caused the problem, and in how it should be treated. Following the French alienist Pierre Janet, Raymond saw vulnerability to obsessive thoughts as one characteristic of ‘psychaesthenia’, a deficiency in psychic (that is, mental) energy which also manifested itself in ‘enervating’ ruminations, feelings of doubt, awkwardness, a sense of inferiority and a tendency to leave tasks uncompleted. Heredity played ‘an important part in the genesis of this evil’, although ‘mistakes in the rearing of children’ were also to blame for its development. And as far as treatment was concerned:
What means, then, are to be employed to remedy the mental weakness of the patients? They are firm guidance and
a corresponding obedience – subjects on which we speak more at length elsewhere. Obedience will be gained in proportion as the director can inspire the patient with confidence. This certainly is no easy matter, especially with those whose malady takes the form of doubts. ‘What proof have I that I ought to obey you?’ one patient used to ask. ‘May I not be making a mistake in placing all trust in you?’ The director must bring much patience, compassion, and kindness to his task, and impress upon his charge that he has everything to gain by following blindly the advice given to him. It will be well to explain to him that by carrying out this advice he will be enabled to throw off those painful ideas which embitter and cramp both the social and moral side of his life. Then, again, the director must make it clear that he accepts all responsibility for the consequence of the patient’s acts, anxieties, and thoughts.
Alongside obedience to the spiritual director, Raymond prescribes full participation in the sacraments of confession and communion. These are particularly important for those patients who suffer from ‘scruples’, a kind of religious perfectionism in which the patient becomes so preoccupied with the minutiae of dogma and practice that they end up in a state of spiritual paralysis. They are never quite sure that they have confessed correctly, never fully satisfied, as they return to their pews, that there are not still parts of the heavenly host adhering to their teeth. In Raymond’s account, only a renewed trust in a loving God and his representatives, the priests, can get them out of this quagmire.
Janet regarded psychaesthenia as a form of degeneracy. Freud disagrees, pointing out that obsessional symptoms ‘occur too in distinguished people of particularly high capacity, capacities important for the world at large’ [ibid, p. 260]. Like its sister neurosis, hysteria, obsessional neurosis comes about as the result of the repression into unconsciousness of mental contents which cause the individual so much anxiety that he (in psychoanalysis, your quintessential obsessive is male) is unable to acknowledge them in his conscious thought. To explain very roughly and very briefly, these inadmissible contents relate to the patient’s sexual and aggressive impulses as they were first experienced in early childhood, and to the parents’ reactions to them, as these were perceived by the infant. If the growing child is unable to integrate these impulses into his developing conscious self – his ego – he will only be able to express his ‘forbidden’ thoughts in symbolic guise: as intrusive, senseless obsessions.
According to Freud, the obsessive patient is not alone in having these primitive, sexualized thoughts – we all have them, along with the drives which give rise to them. An individual who has developed a good, strong ego will be able to cope both with the thoughts and with the anxiety which accompanies them. However, if ego development is compromised too much at any point, or becomes ‘fixed’ in one of the more primitive stages of development, then that individual will be left highly vulnerable to mental illness. In Freud’s model of psychosexual development, the growing individual must pass through four such stages: oral, anal, phallic and finally, genital, which he envisaged as the ‘mature’ stage. Obsessive symptoms indicate a fixation at the anal stage.
Alongside this developmental model, Freud also came up with a structural model of the psyche, consisting of the familiar triad of the id, from which all impulses arise, the ego, and the superego, which functions as an honorary board to the ego’s executive – the judging, valuing part of the self. Viewed from this perspective, the analysis of the obsessive psyche would, typically, reveal a more-than-averagely frenzied id, a weak, frightened ego, and a rather over-zealous, or ‘sadistic’ superego, which draws its violent power directly from the id. It may not be degeneracy, but it’s not much prettier.
Despite this ugly picture, Freud offered real hope that obsessional neurosis might be cured if the patient could be helped to bring the repressed contents to consciousness and to integrate them into a newly strengthened ego. If, in other words, they were analysed.
It was a neat idea. In practice, however, the better-heeled obsessives of the western world would go on to spend the greater part of the twentieth century sitting in chairs or lying on couches and paying people to listen to them while they ruminated – and ruminated again, and then ruminated a bit more just to be on the safe side. As the century progressed, and ‘obsessional neurosis’ became ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’, psychoanalysts had less and less to say about the condition. We had a ‘crazy illness’ [Freud, ibid.], resistant to treatment, and with a poor prognosis.
The September after I graduated, I wrote in my diary: ‘This isn’t what I was expecting. Not at all.’ I can no longer remember what it was that I had expected. What I had was my old room at my parents’ house, and a new job as an assistant in a private library in the West End. It was a one-year post, offered on the understanding that I would go on to study for a postgraduate qualification in librarianship. As such it met my most urgent need, which was to demonstrate to my sadistic superego that I had a respectable plan. She was a psychic agency of suburban, Jewish, middle-class values, and in her view, getting a job to support oneself was not sufficient: one had to have a profession. Time was pressing, she said; I needed to find a career ladder and get on it, or everybody would think I was a failure. My ego muttered something about wanting to write. The superego snorted contemptuously, like a great-aunt taking tea on Rosh Hashanah: So who’s stopping you? I’m not stopping you. If you were going to do it, you’d do it, and anyway, what would you live on? Where would you live? Some nasty little bedsit in a cheap area full of axe-wielding rapist drug addicts? The ego looked at her feet, and said she supposed so. The id called them a pair of mealy-mouthed, bourgeois shitheads, threw some crockery, and stomped off to her bedroom to masturbate.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t cut out for a career in librarianship: I loved books, but I couldn’t deal with people and it killed me to have to hand the people the books. Most of my working day was spent behind the returns and issue desks, penned in and on display, with no escape either from my co-workers, who were penned in with me and my moods like so many inky-fingered battery chickens, or from the members, who kept coming up and expecting me to issue books, or take returns, or answer questions – it was just so unreasonable. My few happy moments were spent in the stacks, shelving or searching for requests out among the books, by myself. I soon learned that if I wanted to write during my lunch break, or cry at any time, I could always flee to some dusty corner or other and be guaranteed a few moments’ privacy. The Ecclesiastical History section was particularly good for this.
The job had one major perk, which was a ten-book borrowing allowance for staff. The shelves were groaning with out-of-print riches. I found, for example, the second and third volumes of Noel Streatfeild’s memoirs, which she had written for an adult readership. I also found a book I’d read about in Women’s Review during my more-feminist-than-thou phase: A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner. The book came out of a diary she had begun to keep at the age of twenty-six, with the intention of working out what was truly important to her, so that she could live a better, happier, fuller sort of life. I could easily recognize something of myself in her earlier entries, with their lamentations and ‘exhortations’, their shoulds and their should-nots. She was trying, like me, to think her way logically and rationally through the problem of how to live; was trying, through ‘will and strain’, to change what she didn’t like about herself. I was reading her book as part of my own self-improvement programme, which also included therapy, a correspondence course in creative writing, twenty minutes a day on my father’s exercise bike, fifty sit-ups in the morning and fifty at night.
The book is her account of a psychological experiment, a ‘seven years’ study of living’, as Milner puts in her preface.16 She published it in 1934, under the pseudonym Joanna Field. Her reason for publishing, she said, was that ‘although what I found is probably peculiar to my own temperament and circumstances, I think the method by which I found it may be useful to others’.
Early on in the process, by employing a kind of written free association, she discovered where her thoughts really went when left to themselves. The content of what she found astonished her, so different was it from her conscious beliefs about who she was. She was also fascinated to discover that this very act of paying attention to what had until then been ‘blind thinking’ enlarged and strengthened her sense of self, giving a sounder basis for her opinions and preferences than the received ideas she had been depending upon. This was the first time I had come across the notion that it was no use trying to be what you ought to be when you could not accept what you were. I knew what she was talking about: your mother tells you your old headmaster has died, and while you’re searching for something appropriate to say, your face starts grinning by itself.
Milner went on to train as a psychoanalyst. I wanted to be like her.
The idea that I might one day be a celebrated analyst meant that I could accept the need for therapy and save face: it wasn’t remedial, it was career development.
7 April 1992
Dear Dr —
re: Joanne Limburg
As I understand you know from Joanne, she came to this centre this past October, seeking help for a number of emotional difficulties. Since that time, I have been seeing her regularly in order to help her sort out her therapeutic needs. She is now starting once weekly psychotherapy with Dr —, a colleague at this centre.
My mother had pointed me in the direction of the centre. It provided a walk-in service for young people in north-west London, and at twenty-one, I still just about qualified as one of those (officially speaking, even a middle-class adolescence is supposed to end promptly at twenty-two). The therapist who helped me sort out my needs told me that I should inform my GP, a man who had helped care for me since I was in utero, that I was seeking treatment through the centre. So I went to see him in his surgery and informed him, sadly but calmly, that I was depressed and seeking therapy. As usual, I didn’t cry. I never cried in front of doctors and tutors and therapists – only at my mother and to my friends and alone in Ecclesiastical History. Perhaps that was why, like the tutors and doctors in Cambridge, he was less than convinced.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 10