You young girls, he said, you talk yourselves into it, you sit around saying, ‘I’m so depressed’, having these deep discussions about your feelings, when you should be going out and enjoying yourself. It comes from thinking too much. Look at you there, hiding behind your glasses – you’re a very attractive girl – do you have boyfriends? No. You should go out and get one, have some fun. You are very attractive, very desirable. You are young, for heaven’s sake! Any time you need someone to talk to, I’m here. In the meantime, off you go.
My mother asked me how it had gone. I explained that our idiot doctor thought the best cure for my depression would be for me to go out dancing all night, half naked, with a can of Diet Coke shoved down my bikini bottoms. ‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘He was wonderful with you when you were small.’
Once a week, from October onwards, I would take the Tube after work and head north-west up the Bakerloo line to discuss my difficulties and needs with a Mrs A. There is no reference to these sessions in my diary until late December, but I am quite sure that I mentioned my skin in the first session, because I always did; I think I also said something to the effect that my first Cambridge counsellor had said that I was very insightful, but that I felt I could think my way no further by myself.
My secret hope was that she and the centre could deliver a treatment that would make me as close as possible to the person I thought I ought to be, that I was both entitled and obliged to be, and that it would do it within – say – a year? Then I could get on with life, because I would at last be fit to have one. As I put it in my diary in November: ‘I have to get out of here, but I must be reasonably sure of where I’m going to.’ So I was just a little horrified to be told that, because of the unusual complexity of my emotional difficulties, my therapeutic need, as calculated by the centre, was to go into full analysis, five days a week, for at least three years.
But – what were these complex difficulties?
Developmental problems. I shouldn’t view it merely as a negative decision. The recommendation had been made partly because they thought that I had the capability to make the most of an analysis.
But how would I pay?
I would see a trainee at the London Institute – they had a sliding scale.
But five days a week?
If it was important enough, I would make the time.
But three years?
We were coming to the end of the session. Perhaps I should go away and think about the proposal and she would discuss my misgivings with her colleagues.
The following week, she and her centre made a revised offer: I could see an analyst for psychoanalytic psychotherapy one day a week for three years, on the understanding that this was not my treatment per se, but rather a preparation for the proper treatment to which I felt unable to commit at this point in my life. It was better than their initial proposal; it was much better than nothing. I accepted it. The following April Mrs A and the centre would hand me over to the carefully hand-picked Dr B.
My last few sessions with Mrs A were uncomfortable and fractious. I didn’t want to leave. There wasn’t much she could do. Come April I would be twenty-two, and no longer eligible for treatment at the centre itself.
I understood that.
. . . and, in any case, obviously she was going to be leaving soon.
Obviously? Why?
She was going to have a baby.
And then I saw it for the first time, the huge bump I’d spent weeks and months failing to notice. Once again, I was shocked at myself. I’d read about ‘negative hallucinations’, and, as I understood them, only a really really sick person would have one of those – someone halfway to psychotic. Mrs A didn’t say anything like this, but I thought it all the same, and assumed she thought so too. No doubt I disgusted her.
My final appointment card is pasted into my diary. It shows that on Thursday 2 April at 12 p.m., one day before my twenty-second birthday, Mrs A introduced me to Dr B. Below it I’ve written: ‘Goodbye Mrs A. Goodbye 21.’
My parents took me out to dinner on my birthday. I wore the high-heeled black suede boots they’d bought me, black leggings, a long, low-necked green satin blouse, and a generous smearing of orange concealer on my décolletage. We were a little late for our booking because after I’d finished applying the concealer, I sat on my parents’ bed for half an hour weeping bitterly because I was past it.
All the same, that month I managed to make not just one but three new starts: I began therapy with Dr B; I left the library to get some voluntary work experience because I had seen the light and the light had shown me that it was in the PR departments of charities and not in librarianship that my salvation lay; I bought, as a birthday present to myself, a correspondence course in creative writing with the Open College of the Arts. At this point the diary entries in my A4 notebook begin to peter out and are replaced by writing exercises. The course manual discouraged the kind of angsty, introspective and – I have to say it – pretentious stuff I’d been coming out with. What it did encourage me to do was to throw my attention out into the world, in a way that reminded me of some of Milner’s thought experiments from A Life of One’s Own. The first assignment required me to send in four poems: one about an object, one about the view out of my window, one about an animal, and one about a dream. For the view poem, I took advantage of one of my bouts of insomnia and stood by the window with my notebook and pen, the net curtain hanging over my back, as I tried to get it all down. I can still recall the excitement of it, of trying to keep track of all the changes in the brightening landscape. I remember the satisfaction of realizing that the narrative of the dawn’s breaking would give me a shape for the poem; I remember the pleasure I took in knocking the poem into shape, and how thrilled I was to get a positive response from my tutor, and be told what it was I had managed to do: ‘You have caught the breaking of dawn with exact precision . . . Each verse works as a metaphor for the daily unfolding of life.’
I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed poetry. A few months after I did those first exercises, I asked my cousin Lisa, who knew about these matters, where I might find a good poetry class, and she pointed me towards Michael Donaghy’s workshops at City University. I had no sense of how high-powered these were, which was just as well. I crapped myself every week as it was.
I got a couple of decent poems out of that first term. One of them even made it into my first book:
Skin
She wakes up peeled, absorbing
stale breath. Without her skin,
she will dissolve in the rain,
so she closes all the windows
and locks the doors. Now
nothing can seep in, nothing
out. The day unravels.
She flickers from room to room
like a series of photographs,
appearing unfocused in doorways
and halfway down the stairs,
with no idea of how she got there.
She cannot collect herself,
not remembering what she keeps
inside, or what to leave out.
It’s amazing what the third person will allow you to do. Another, rather less successful poem was written as an exercise: it was supposed to be a dramatic monologue in the voice of a minor character who had witnessed some great historic, mythical or fictional event. I chose the story of Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones.
The Return of the Dry Bones
You won’t find him talkative,
but then you must be used to that,
with all your cases. For us,
it’s been strange. I did feel it coming:
the day before, I saw chalky
prefigurations in the sky, and then
the wind came up and blew first
the dust, in circles, and then
the papery-skinned men home.
We had to believe it,
but he seems not wholly returned to himself,
a thin, unconvincing copy.
He never speaks, but looks at us
in turn, in disbelief, as if
he wonders what we’ve done
to the family he left behind.
He’s moved the furniture back,
but his old life is blown away –
he spends all day just sitting,
flexing his alien limbs, and
tapping his fingers to worn-out vinyl;
Mum can’t face him, my own children hide from him . . .
You know, for years after, every night,
I waited, not accepting that he was
gone. Now I know.
My father had suffered a stroke. I often caught sight of him as I walked past the doors to the lounge, flexing the fingers of his ‘alien’ left hand. Although I felt very sorry for him, I was no more afraid than I had been when my mother had had cancer – less afraid, if anything: it was only a slight stroke, after all, a warning sign which he was lucky to have had. It hadn’t done too much permanent damage, we thought. And he was going to give up smoking for good now, he said.
Dr B’s consulting room was in a basement flat in Camden Town. I entered first into a murky corridor with a portrait of Sigmund Freud on the wall, where Dr B would meet me and show me into her consulting room. She would sit down in the chair in the corner furthest from the door while I, the patient, would take my place in a chair in the corner facing hers. Stretched out along the wall on her right-hand side was the couch, reminding me of the proper, deeper treatment I was expected to have one day. From the first session, I felt as if I were being handled at arm’s length, with tongs.
These have not been a good few days . . . since Wednesday when I first saw Dr B, in a dark basement, where her silence drew me out, and she cut me dead after 50 therapeutic minutes. [Diary, 4/5/92]
When I said to Dr B, some time later, that I knew nothing about her, not even her theoretical orientation, she remarked drily that the portrait was probably quite a big clue. Apart from that, I knew what I could see and hear, which was that she was female, in her forties’s probably, and American. I also understood from the centre that she was a senior member of the profession, a training analyst, and that the centre thought us a good match; I didn’t know why, but wondered if it might be something to do with her PhD.
Dr B worked through the transference. What the word ‘transference’ means, precisely, or what it can be said to mean, will vary, depending upon whom you ask. Here’s what the standard reference work on psychoanalytic terminology says it means:
Transference: For psycho-analysis, a process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation.
In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.
As a rule what psycho-analysts mean by the unqualified use of the term ‘transference’ is transference during treatment.
Classically, the transference is acknowledged to be the terrain on which all the basic problems of a given analysis play themselves out: the establishment, modalities, interpretation and resolution of the transference are in fact what define the cure.17
In order to facilitate the transference, and therefore the treatment, Freud stressed that the analyst should make herself, as far as possible, into a blank screen onto which the patient could ‘project’ her unconscious fantasies; the blanker the screen, the surer the analyst could be that the material projected onto it came out of the patient’s early experiences and was not a product of her relationship with the individual who was treating her. An analyst should not refer to her own experience in the course of the treatment, or to her own feelings.18 If a patient asks her anything about herself, then she should not give an answer, but rather examine what it means for the patient to be asking that question in those words in that tone of voice accompanied by that body language at that particular moment. The only admissible evidence is that which occurs between the analyst and the patient within the consulting room in the course of a fifty-minute session. Within these strict parameters, anything is admissible.
I can find precious little in my notebooks about the three years I spent with Dr B. What I remember, mostly, are those moments when we seemed to be getting on particularly badly, along with the dreams I had about us. An early awkward moment just about made it into the diary. I wrote that I had arrived full of irritability, complaining about the heat and my period. She asked me what it was that I hated. I thought about my answer carefully: SQUIDGINESS, I said. Slugs.
So I hated those things where nature had let herself go, where boundaries weren’t firm and sure?
Yes.
It seemed that there was some squidginess still in my mind about the arrangements. She wanted to reassure me that there was no hurry with the psychoanalysis.
Thank you.
Also, as my brother kept coming up, was I still feeling pushed away by Mrs A and her baby?
I supposed so.
Later on in the session I was enlarging on one of my favourite themes, my attitude to my body.
I said at one point that I was not only cruel to my own body, but that I had hypercritical thoughts about other women’s although I never voiced them, in compensation for my supposed super-unkindness.
‘So I can breath a sigh of relief, then!’ she said.
From that moment on, I never entirely trusted her. But I couldn’t quite admit this to myself, let alone to her. I just kept turning up and saying only what I thought would be safe for her to hear. One day I spent at least a minute watching in fascinated horror as a huge, hairy spider crept across the floor, between her legs and then under her chair. She didn’t ask why I was staring at her feet like that and I didn’t tell her.
About nine years later, a practising psychoanalyst called A. H. Esman published a review of the analytic literature on obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he found to be severely wanting.19 One problem he identified originated from the earliest days of the discipline, with Freud’s assumption that ‘obsessional neurosis’ (OCD) must develop out of ‘obsessional character’. This was not so unusual at the time – Janet worked under a similar assumption – but mainstream psychiatry and psychology had since revised their views according to the evidence; psychoanalysis hadn’t. Even so, the psychoanalytic literature on the nature and treatment of ‘the obsessive patient’ is extremely interesting: I found a couple of papers by John Schimel, called ‘Dialogic Analysis of the Obsessional’ and ‘The Power Theme in the Obsessional’, which reminded me so much of my own therapy, and my behaviour during it, that I almost squirmed in my seat as I read them. These papers describe a person not unlike the clinical perfectionist who shows up for behavioural therapy, a person for whom being in the wrong is a moral and emotional catastrophe. The psychoanalytic obsessive will do anything to avoid saying, doing or thinking anything not entirely correct, and will do just as much to avoid any possibility of their being corrected.
The obsessional lives in a world of painstaking efforts to be exactly right. He cannot tolerate being wrong and, for him, there must be a right in every matter and nuance . . . His wife is rather tall, well on the tall side, perhaps 5 feet 6 inches or closer to 5 feet 7 inches, not quite as tall as her sister, but tall compared to the average, although not outstandingly so . . . etc.20
*
While I was working at the library, I tried contact lenses. The optician put them in for the first time and asked me how they felt. How did she mean how did they feel? In terms of what? She smiled slightly. ‘How does it feel,’ she tried, ‘in terms of adjectives?’
What analytic therapy requires from the patient is that she freely associates within the session – that is, that she makes available to the analyst anything and everything which comes into her head during the session which she is able to verbalize, without attempting to edit it before it comes out of her mouth. For someone, like me, who was incapable o
f giving a straight answer to an optician, who could ‘not tolerate being wrong’, this was never going to be possible. According to Schimel, unless the analyst can keep from getting drawn in, such a patient will be unable to stop herself from turning every session into a fifty-minute power struggle. As the patient’s unconscious purpose is to fend off the acquisition of painful self-knowledge at any cost, the treatment is unlikely to go anywhere very fast. A dream I recorded towards the beginning of the treatment suggests that, in some part of my mind, I knew perfectly well what I was doing: ‘I was pacing vigorously when I went to see Dr B. I paced the space between my chair and hers, until she suggested that I stop.’
That winter, I saw the light again. PR didn’t suit me after all, not even in a charitable setting; it was less about writing, which I could do, than it was about making friends and influencing people, which – well, you know by now. I would go back to university, and this time I would do my best never to come out again. I applied for three MAs: one in applied philosophy at Hull, one in applied ethics at Aberdeen, and a third, in psychoanalytic studies, at Kent. I got three offers, and accepted the Kent option, which had two immediate advantages over the others: I could commute to my therapist from Canterbury for our weekly session, and spend the rest of the week gathering theoretical materiél to help me in the battle. I’m trying to remember how conscious I was of the second advantage, but I can’t seem to untangle what I knew then from what I know now thoroughly enough for me to say.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 11