Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  I couldn’t let go of the washing-up. I bearded my landlady in her clean kitchen and said that I was upset. It couldn’t just have been me – anyway, she’d made too much of it, sometimes cigars were just cigars and washing-up was just washing-up, and besides someone had broken my stereo. She blew up: no one but me had broken my stereo, no one but me had left their dirty dishes all over the place; washing-up was not just washing-up – it was my aggression and my shit, and if I didn’t realize that it was just me, then that was because I’d split it. ‘I hate to say it, but you strike me as someone who’s never grown up, and I’m not your mother and neither is anyone else here.’

  Scott came into the kitchen with a mug and stood there for a moment, looking from her angry face to my stricken one, and back again. I said, ‘OK,’ in a very quiet voice, and left.

  I’ve always tied my hair back at night. For the last few years, I’ve used the same cheap hairbands from Superdrug. They come in black or white, and have a small metal ring at the point where the circle closes. I keep some on my bedside table, some in my handbag, a couple on my dressing table, and a few on the floor under the bed. Sometimes I need to rummage through my handbag in the street. On my street, in the streets round about, outside the local shops, and all over town, I see these ponytail rings lying around. Every time I see one, I wonder if I was the person who dropped it, and spoiled the town for everybody. I’m sure that lots of other women use them and that in all probability the other women dropped some too, but then, who knows what I’m capable of? I certainly don’t.

  The money ran out after two terms. I moved back in with my parents, and did the London–Canterbury commute in reverse to attend the last few lectures, and discuss my dissertation topic. I had taken a course on Jung and his followers in the spring term. Jung’s writings held the kind of appeal for me that Narnia and traditional English hymns had had in primary school: I loved the colour, the myths and the drama. I was especially taken with Jung’s model of the alchemical transformation as a metaphor for the creative process. At the same time, I was reading more of Milner’s writings on creativity, which she saw as essential not only to art, but also to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and to the living of life in general. This is not unusual for a psychoanalyst – one psychoanalytic dictionary defines creativity as ‘the capacity to arrive at novel but valid solutions to problems’22 – but Milner is notable both for the sheer number of pages she devotes to the subject, and to the high valuation she places on creativity as a personal quality. I began to look for secondary literature on Milner. Among other things, I found a paper in one of the Jungian journals called ‘Metaphors of the Therapeutic Encounter’, which reminded me of a comment of Milner’s about how she and a patient had been ‘confronting each other in the crucible of the analytic room’, and which confirmed a tentative decision I’d made.

  My supervisor was staggered: ‘Milner and alchemy?’ Alchemy was a Jungian idea, and Milner was a member of the British Independent Object-Relations School. Not only would it be difficult to square the two bodies of theory – however much Jungians like Milner, and they do – but I would need a second supervisor for the Jungian bits, as this was outside her area. Might it not be more straightforward, she suggested, in the limited time available, to stay within the confines of the British tradition of psychoanalysis, and discuss Milner’s work in relation to earlier writings on creativity and symbol formation? I took her advice. I returned the book of alchemical imagery I’d borrowed from the university library, and wrote a dissertation comparing Milner’s views to those of her predecessors Ernest Jones and Melanie Klein. The result was workmanlike, but dull. Its title was ‘The Free Play of Boundaries’. The irony was unintentional.

  The best bits of my dissertation are those where I stop trying to be the good, thorough little student and just stick in a great big, juicy Milner quote, like this one:

  It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it – the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides.23

  The toleration of doubt – is that the opposite of OCD?

  14. Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis Part III’, 1916–17 (Standard Edition, Volume 16, p. 258)

  15. Revd Fr V. Raymond, O.P., trans. Dom Aloysius Smith, C.R.I., Spiritual Director and Physician: The Spiritual Treatment of Sufferers from Nerves and Scruples (R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd, London, 1914)

  16. Joanna Field (Marion Milner), A Life of One’s Own (Virago Press, London, 1986)

  17. J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1988). I did try to explain it myself in an earlier draft, but tied myself up in such knots that I thought it better to leave this one to the experts. Psychoanalysis does that to you.

  18. Unless these are understood to be part of the ‘counter-transference’, i.e. the analyst’s unconscious response to the patient’s transference; this is allowed to count as analytic material because, as far as the counter-transference is concerned, the patient started it.

  19. A.H. Esman, ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Current Views’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry (2001, 21: 145–56)

  20. John L. Schimel, ‘Dialogic Analysis of the Obsessional’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis (1974, 10: 87–100)

  21. Many psychodynamic psychotherapists would never see a patient for free on principle, even if they were in a position to give their time for nothing, on the grounds that a patient who pays less than she can afford is less likely to commit herself fully to the therapy.

  22. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972)

  23. Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (Tavistock Publications, Inc., London and New York, 1987)

  Sin

  32. When I start thinking of certain things, I become obsessed with them.

  The Padua Inventory

  ———

  The snow was deep and beautiful. When we got to the Newsstand we were cold. Sorrel ordered a cafelatte and I had a hot chocolate. We sat at a small table by the window and opened our notebooks. No one else was there but Sorrel and me and the woman behind the counter.

  ‘Okay, let’s write about sex for fifteen minutes,’ I said boldly.

  Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

  There are depressive ruminations, and then there are obsessive, or anxious ones. Depressive ruminations are typically past-orientated (‘If only I hadn’t gone to that party and opened my big mouth – then I’d never have made such an idiot of myself’) while obsessive ruminations tend to be projections into the future (‘What if I go to that party, feel nervous, drink too much, open my big mouth and make an idiot of myself’?) Speaking from personal experience, I find this an unsatisfactory distinction, as it doesn’t quite capture the flavour of my own most brain-consuming ruminations. I’ve tried to parse these, to figure out exactly which tense I’m ruminating in when I’m ruminating at my worst, but they didn’t seem to fit in with any tense I could name, so I had a look online.

  It turns out that I’ve been ruminating in the past unreal conditional tense, imagining counterfactual histories, those scenarios that didn’t happen, but could have done. Depressive ruminations are in the past unreal conditional tense too, but these can usually be expressed as ‘upward’ counterfactual statements, such as: ‘If I had worked harder at school, I would have done so much better for myself.’ The kind of ruminations I’m talking about, on the other hand, are most accurately expressed as ‘downward’ counterfactual statements, for example: ‘If my parents had not been prepared to support me for so long, things would have been so much worse.’ My limited reading would suggest t
hat thoughts of this form are supposed to make you feel better, grateful for your blessings and appreciative of your achievements and better qualities.

  I haven’t found too much so far about the downward counterfactual thoughts that leave you fearful and guilty, so if you don’t mind, I’ll fill in some of the gaps myself. Here are some examples of the nastier downward counterfactual:

  This is the first spike I can remember acquiring. I was thirteen, on a summer holiday in Devon. It was a beautiful blue and green, fuchsia-scented day, and we were taking a walk around the cliff tops of whichever cove or bay we were staying in. I was out in front, and approached a gate with a stile. I was about to step over it and ever so absent-mindedly carry on walking when I realized with a jolt that the grass ran out suddenly just a few feet away on the other side, and ended in a sheer drop. It only took me a split second to notice this, and pull back again, but then it wouldn’t have taken much longer, I reasoned, to keep walking and dreaming until I fell over the cliff edge, and ended up dashed to pieces on the jagged rocks, after which the pieces would slide bloodily down the rocks and into the churning sea. It only showed how easily these things could happen if you were so stupid as to relax your vigilance for a nanosecond. Once this alternative and fatal scenario had started playing in my head, it repeated and repeated and repeated, like a 1970s public information film on continuous loop. It wasn’t on my mind every waking second, but from then onwards, a dozen associations might lead to it, and then a hundred could, and then a thousand more.

  Here’s another of my top ten downward counterfactuals. Between my second and third years at Cambridge, I went on a cycling holiday round Ireland with two friends. It didn’t go well: I found cycling on the roads terrifying, hated roughing it in youth hostels, kept squabbling with one of the other holiday cyclists, got so sunburned and midge-bitten that within two days I had forearms like bright pink novelty candles and suffered all the way through from terrible constipation because I could never relax enough on an unfamiliar toilet. Somehow, though, I kept going west with the others, moving from Dun Laoghaire to Waterford, then to Cahir and Cashel, on to Cork, Tralee and at last to Dingle, as far west as we could go.

  I’m guessing, though I don’t remember, that we spent a night in a hostel in Dingle. What I do remember is that when we set off again the next morning, I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself: we were going to have to push our bicycles for five miles up the Connor Pass, we hadn’t slept well, we had been quarrelling incessantly and my constipation was all I could think about – my stomach was full of concrete and would never clear and neither would my head.

  We were pushing our bicycles up one of the main streets in Dingle. It was quite a slope, my bicycle – which was a totally unsuitable, thick-framed, small-wheeled town shopper – felt as heavy as a juggernaut, my eyelids wanted to close, my lower abdomen was aching, my head was down, I was filled with sorrow and pity and all of it for myself.

  Suddenly the bike juddered; my front wheel had hit something. It was the bottom of a ladder. I looked up and there was a red, furious face at the top of it, shouting something I couldn’t understand. I muttered sorry and walked on in tears, shocked and thoroughly ashamed of myself.

  That was all that happened. But if I had hit the ladder harder and knocked the man off, then he would have fallen backwards, probably into the road, perhaps to his death – or he might have broken his back at the very least, and never been able to work or walk again. The whole town would converge on me, shouting. I would be taken into police custody and charged with . . . reckless walking with a bicycle? I would become a hated figure in Ireland, the emblem of the selfish English student tourist bringing back bitter memories of colonial oppression by her cavalier maiming of a good, hard-working Irishman. They would all push for the maximum penalty. At the very least, I would never be allowed back into Ireland again.

  I have never been back. Anything connected with Ireland has been a spike ever since.

  And here’s one of slightly more recent vintage. I finished my MA, which I passed without distinction or even merit, worked as a clerical assistant at a trade association in the West End for four miserable months, and then moved up to Edinburgh to live the life of a writer. While I was there, I lost my virginity to, and had a brief affair with, a married man. Supposedly, I was his wife’s friend as well, but my behaviour suggested otherwise. Anyway, we slept together a handful of times, they moved away and she hadn’t found out. I lost touch with both of them. That was all that happened.

  But what if she had burst in and discovered us? Perhaps she would have gone for me physically – I knew she had a violent temper; at any rate she had told me that she had. She might have grabbed a knife and slit my face so that I would always be ugly and no one would ever find me attractive again. I would never have got married if that had happened.

  Or perhaps she would have thrown me, butt naked, out of whichever flat she’d found us in and slammed the door. A naked woman in a public place, I would then have been set upon by some hideous characters newly escaped from an Irvine Welsh novel, who would have opportunistically raped, beaten me and left me for dead. At the very least, the neighbours would have heard the fracas and called the police. Once the police had been called, whether I was slit up, naked, or both, the situation would become public. It would reach the papers. The headline would have been something like: ‘ANGRY WIFE THROW’S [SIC] HUSBAND’S MISTRESS OUT NAKED’ or ‘JEALOUS WIFE KNIFES LOVE RIVAL’ or maybe there’d just be a picture of me, slit up and/or naked, captioned: ‘THE WAGES OF SIN’ or ‘MAN-SNATCHING “FRIEND” GETS HERS’.

  My whole extended family would have to leave the country. Naturally, they would choose to leave me behind.

  Now I come to think of it, there is an added imperative element to the past unreal conditional tense in this last scenario: this is what should have happened. A crime unpunished or inadequately repented of is an incomplete act, an uncorrected error, an unpicked spot.

  I’d kept all other writing in abeyance while I was concentrating on my MA, but I took a break from my dissertation that summer to go on a residential poetry course in the West Country. At my first meeting with the two poet-tutors, I said that what I had come for was help to break my ‘writer’s block’. They set me an exercise: write a poem, in three stanzas of four tetrameters, about a day in the park. So I did.

  Ice-Cream

  The gleaming whorls of animal fat

  are slithering down cones and arms,

  but she prefers to contemplate

  the river’s mouthwash blue, fresh

  as an iced drink thrown in the face.

  She shudders off the licking sun,

  keeping her body a Winter stone

  in rivers of chocolate, light, and sweat

  for it only takes one button-hole

  to leak one drop, and the park and day

  will melt into puddles of hot fudge sauce,

  slapping round naked, embarrassed knees.

  When I read this out to the tutors and the other students on the last evening, they agreed that one of the things that made my poetry so striking was its honesty. They had known me for all of five days.

  But I’d had enough of life as a Winter stone. I was fed up with trying to appease my Great-Aunt Superego. Nothing had worked: the library had been a purgatory, the PR had only revealed further weaknesses, and I was obviously not destined for scholarly greatness. I’d had therapy, but I didn’t feel much better for it. I was nearly twenty-five, and all my attempts to be a normal person had failed, so perhaps it was time to come out as a writer. My mother had told me repeatedly during my adolescence that writers were people who found that they couldn’t do anything else. It seemed I really was one of those weirdos. Writing professionally had the added advantage that people expect writers – poets especially – to be all neurotic and peculiar; in fact, if you appear something like normal, they are disappointed and a bit suspicious.

  Counterfactually, I could have simply staye
d where I was, worked to earn money, continued attending the workshops at City which I had returned to, and got on with the business of writing. Instead, I decided to escape from my entire life and leave London. I got a place on the MA in creative writing at St Andrews. It was as far away as I could get but it was still a professional qualification, which would placate the great-aunt if she found me and came to visit. The problem with the plan was a practical one: I had only just worked myself out of debt, and there was no funding available for the course, or any guarantee of earning as a result of it.

  At one of my cousin’s parties, I met a couple of writers from Edinburgh who were into Zen Buddhism and transgressive fiction. I told them about my plans, and Mr Zen said, ‘If you want to move to Scotland and write, why don’t you just move to Scotland and write?’ adding, ‘How many more books do you have to read before you start writing?’ If I ever found the nerve, they said, I could make use of their spare room.

  In April, my three-year term of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (preparatory to entering full analysis) came to an end. I told the therapist that I was moving to Scotland to write: she wasn’t dumping me – it was the other way round. So watch my dust.

  Now that writing was to be my work, rather than an escape from it, I tried to write every day. This is part of the journal entry I wrote on my way up to Edinburgh:

  . . . that was one hell of a morning. Mum and Dad were set to deliver me to King’s Cross. Then Dad lost control of the car round about 11. He first reversed suddenly, ripping a very old flowering bush off its trunk and smashing one of the lights at the front of a parked car, then shot forward, mercifully through the narrow aperture (never noticed before – points on the Tyne do actually dance, jump up and down) between a cherry tree and another parked car, leaving a skid mark across the pavement before knocking the edge off our neighbour’s hedge and slamming into the back of his car which was parked in a driveway, forcing it, crunch, through the wooden double garage doors.