The same, perhaps not surprisingly, might be said of kept women themselves. Most of the ones Salamon writes about were quite happy to talk about sex, although, like the men they have it with, it doesn’t always feature much in their lives: ‘With the sheik I probably have sex a couple of times a year – that’s not much is it?’ Nor do they make a pretence of loving the man who keeps them – some do love him and some don’t. One woman who makes a habit of being kept, as many of them do, refers to all her keepers as ‘Willie’: Willie I, Willie II, Willie III, Willie IV – like the kings (or keepers) of England. Similarly, they aren’t on the whole disturbed by the thought that their lovers are married to someone else. In fact, it sometimes seems that one of the pleasures of being kept is that it enables you to be more wife than a girlfriend and less wife than a wife. ‘I think it’s a fine game and no small work of art,’ one of them boasted: not only did she ‘travel extensively and enjoy the company of world-renowned classical musicians’ but her fellow, while making all this possible, also ‘mows the grass and takes out the garbage’. One might be forgiven for thinking – though it isn’t the impression Salamon wishes to give – that these women live in a perfect world. The chief evidence that they don’t is their extreme reluctance to talk about their means of support. The reason no doubt, as Salamon surmises, is their fear that they might be mistaken for common or garden prostitutes: a fear made all the more intense by the fact that what largely drives them into taking money in the first place is their greed for social success: ‘I have arrived – so to speak!’ said the woman who enjoyed the company of classical musicians.
The social success that they want is of course the kind that only money (or, in some cases, power) can bring, and one of the most striking things about them is the distinction they make between the money that supports them and can’t be spoken of and the money that is casually spent on them and is spoken about all the time. Some kinds of kept women – Salamon calls them ‘professional opportunists’ – spend their lives cooking up situations in which their lovers will find themselves in a shop handing out cash in preposterous quantities. She cites the case of a woman who ‘manipulated her lover into a top boutique in Switzerland, selected several outfits and feigned astonishment when the bill came to slightly over £11,000’. Another on her first date always suggests a rendezvous at Harrods. ‘If he fails to buy her something from the vast assortment featured there he is definitely not attracted enough to be worth her while.’ The point of these expensive acquisitions goes beyond their mere expense. The more a man spends on you, and the more ‘tasteful’ the things he buys, the greater the status he confers. ‘She contrasted her own situation with that of her friend who was kept by an Arab man. She commented that while her friend had dozens of pairs of shoes, none of them was handmade and while her friend’s lover had bought her a house in a fashionable London mews, it was not really a very nice mews house.’ Many of Salamon’s opportunists are upper-middle-class women with degrees, confident that what they are getting in return for their favours is simply what they deserve to have.
Not all kept women are equally cynical. Even in Salamon’s book there are women who fall in love with men who just happen to be rich. Nor are they all equally interested in money. ‘If he hadn’t been so good at his job I wouldn’t have looked at him twice,’ Salamon was told by a ‘senior executive’ in a cosmetics firm who was being kept by the managing director: ‘I’m very ambitious myself and I need that mental stimulation in a relationship.’ Women who are kept by their bosses – ‘career women’ in Salamon’s categorisation – may be glad of the opportunity to talk about work to their lovers in the way husbands talk about work to their wives. What must be even nicer, however, is the encouragement they get – ‘my lover is my true friend because he wants me to make the most of myself’ – and, nicer still, the chance to make it to the top smoothly and ahead of everyone else. Colleagues may not like it but that’s their bad luck and easily attributed to jealousy or incompetence. ‘Although they have achieved high positions through dubious means, the members of the Career Woman category appear aggressively sure of their own abilities,’ Salamon reports with admiration and dismay. The anxieties of deviance might have seemed more impressive if we had heard from women who’d been kept and dumped.
The impression one gets from reading Salamon’s book is that the unusual element in these women’s lives is merely the unusual degree to which they allow ambition (or self-interest) a free rein. Women, as feminists often tell us, are the victims of their own wish to please. No one would say that of the women Salamon writes about, though one might, if one were tender-hearted, say it of the men who keep them. ‘What is past is past,’ she was told by an American who’d been kept by four different men. ‘During the relationship I usually enjoy myself and grow as a person. And from there one just goes on.’ Maybe, as the women themselves argue, they’re not that different from everyone else – ‘I think I am quite normal in saying that I love to be spoiled with attention and gifts’ – but know what they want and worry less than students of deviance think they should about how they get it.
Book reviewed:
Kept Women: Mistresses in the Eighties by Edna Salamon
Fortress Freud
Psychoanalysts have a difficult relationship with the rest of the world – or, as they sometimes call it, ‘the goyim’. Janet Malcolm’s two very striking books of reportage, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives, make this clear. Freud’s wife, according to her grandson, ‘divided the world into those who knew of grandfather and those who did not’. The latter, he said, ‘did not play any role in her life’. In that sense every analyst is Freud’s wife and lives in a world entirely taken up with psychoanalytic concerns. Sometimes it seems that they hardly know what may happen in real life and fear it accordingly. On the night of the New York blackout in 1965 someone I know was with his analyst. As the lights went out the analyst – not the patient – jumped out of his chair and shouted: ‘They’re coming to get me.’ Psychoanalysts have had good reasons for considering themselves beleaguered, but for the past twenty years at least, the world, being less interested in them, has been less interested than they imagine in finding them out. ‘No decent analyst would let his picture appear in the Times,’ one New York analyst snapped at another, as if he had caught him sneaking his image into the temple of Baal. Malcolm speaks of the ‘chilly castle of psychoanalysis’ and admires its austerities. One might less admiringly think of it as Fortress Freud and question whether it too needs to be so insistently defended.
The idea that psychoanalysis is something to be guarded from the world was of course Freud’s: ‘we have been obliged to recognise and express as our conviction,’ he said in 1933, ‘that no one has a right to join in a discussion of psychoanalysis who has not had particular experiences which can only be obtained by being analysed oneself ’; and Malcolm, who is unusual in being nice as well as astute, wants us to know that he regretted this – ‘you can believe me,’ she quotes him as saying, ‘when I tell you that we do not enjoy giving an impression of being members of a secret society.’ Though she concedes that he went too far in speaking of a ‘right’ to talk about psychoanalysis, she also believes that he had no alternative: ‘From the resistance that even card-carrying Freudians put up against the Freudian unconscious, the resistance of the non or anti-Freudians may be deduced.’ But the idea of ‘resistance’ is an old Freudian wheeze for dismissing other people’s opinions; and one doesn’t have to cite the shortcomings of the rest of the world in order to account for Freud’s attempt to declare psychoanalysis a total exclusion zone.
Despite what is said by loyal members of the taskforce, Freud was never entirely on his own, though it’s true that in the years of ‘splendid isolation’, as he called them, the years of his friendship with Fliess, no one shared the confidence he had in himself. By 1902, however, a psychoanalytic society met every Wednesday around a table in his waiting room; and if to start with it had o
nly four members, its discussions were still considered sufficiently interesting to be reported each week in the Sunday edition of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. At the end of his life, when he made those remarks about giving an impression of belonging to a secret society and not enjoying it, his ideas were ‘detonating’ (Malcolm’s word) throughout the intellectual world. He was passionately determined to make his mark as a scientist, and it could be that the most effective way of persuading the world that he’d seen further than any of his rivals, especially those among them, like Adler and Jung, who had been obliged to pack their bags and leave the Freudian house, was by surrounding his secrets with secrecy. ‘I am nothing by temperament but a conquistador,’ he said in a letter to Fliess, and he fought hard to make his sovereignty over the unconscious secure. In the world at large Freud’s revelations were assimilated in all sorts of ways. Psychoanalysis, however, was a family matter.
The situation has scarcely changed even now. Take, for example, Freud’s own reputation. Present-day analysts, so Malcolm asserts, are unruffled by what is now routinely, though not always persuasively, said about Freud: that he persecuted his colleagues, that he took unfair advantage of them, that he faked his evidence, that he fucked his sister-in-law. ‘Most Freudian analysts,’ she writes, ‘can take or leave Freud himself,’ and reading that sentence, one may briefly wonder what can have happened to make them all so reckless, but her real meaning, to judge by the analysts whom she herself cites, is that they can take or leave what is said about Freud by anyone who isn’t an analyst. Within the profession security is almost as tight today as it was when Freud was in charge, and it is still the case, Malcolm reports, that ‘outsiders wishing to join in the discussion of psychoanalysis are in effect told to go away and maybe come back after they’ve been analysed.’ No analyst would say in public that he had doubts about Freud.
The first of Malcolm’s two books is an account of the contemporary psychoanalytic profession largely based on the experience of one middle-aged New York analyst whom she calls ‘Aaron Green’. He is an edgy, discontented man, committed to Freud’s legacy in its most classical form and at the same time acutely aware of the profession’s shortcomings. He discusses, for example, the period when he was in training at the New York Institute of Psychoanalysis:
‘I had several friends who were asked to resign.’
‘After a long time in training?’
‘Yes, sometimes after many years.’
‘What does it mean when someone is dropped?’
‘I don’t know. These things are shrouded in mystery.’
Far from having been abandoned, the ways of the secret society have been institutionalised. Authority relies on silence and mystification to get its effects and no one knows on what grounds candidates for membership have been blackballed: they simply vanish into the daylight. Malcolm, whose own feelings about psycho analysis aren’t at all easy to gauge, talks about ‘the narrow, inward-turning path of psychoanalytic therapy’ and represents the training institutes and analytic societies as ‘decrepit mansions with drawn shades’ planted along ‘hidden, almost secret byways … marked with inscrutable road signs’. What she seems to have in mind is something drawn by Charles Addams, homes for ghouls rather than the headquarters of what is commonly assumed to be a form of therapy.
Once an analyst has completed his training he begins to hope that he will, in time, become a training analyst himself; or, as Green puts it, be admitted into the inner sanctum of psycho analysis, his own analyst’s bedroom. ‘Not everyone,’ he says, ‘feels like that – some people drop out of the institute world and go their own way – but the majority, like me, for whatever infantilely motivated reason, hope that they will get into that bedroom: that they will become training analysts.’ Once they are in the bedroom that’s where they want to stay. Analysts, it seems, spend most of their time in each other’s company – at meetings, over supper, in matrimony; they worry to an unusual degree about each other’s good opinion and, as they say themselves, find little to talk about with people ‘on the outside’; the members of a given institute speak the same way, even dress the same way. ‘Aaron’s attitude towards the NYU Institute is … affectionate’: for the Columbia analysts ‘he has nothing but bitterness and scorn.’
‘But the schism was years ago,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with them now?’
Aaron frowned, and said in a low, dark voice: ‘They’re sharp dressers.’
In the early 1960s I used to see a middle-aged analyst who found it impossible to accept that the reason some of her patients wore miniskirts was that most of their friends wore them too: it must, she insisted, have some deeper significance.
There are many analysts – Green is one – who would agree that analysts spend more time closeted with each other than is good for them; and the question of what psychoanalysis can and cannot sensibly account for is more unstable, or ambiguous, than most patients realise when they are lying on the couch wondering why their analyst hasn’t spoken for the past three-quarters of an hour. For example, Malcolm says of Freud that ‘it has become a kind of cliché that he was “no Menschenkenner”’ (i.e. no judge of people). To those who are not au fait with the subtle, self-protecting, teasing ways in which psycho analysis both tries and refuses to connect with the external world this may seem surprising. ‘Throughout his life’, Malcolm continues, Freud ‘was beset by the affliction of over estimation’, but since the overestimations she cites – which are the ones that are usually cited in this context – are his overestimations of Breuer, Fliess and Jung (‘the most prominent of those who came within the orbit of Freud’s propensity for idealisation followed by disillusionment’), one might suspect that the cliché, however well founded, is also a convenient way of making it seem that there was nothing in Freud’s behaviour that could decently be thought reprehensible.
Psychoanalytic theory offers no grounds for expecting analysts to be wiser than anyone else: its view of human nature and its capacity for change, let alone improvement, is far too gloomy for that. According to Green, ‘such small edge as analysts have they exercise in only one situation in life – namely, the analytic situation.’ Malcolm is more eloquent. ‘The greatest analyst in the world,’ she says with seeming admiration, ‘can live his own life only like an ordinary blind and driven human being,’ but the unjustified sinner, the really ordinary human being, may think there is something tricky about a science that claims so much and so little for itself and its adherents. Her remark, intended perhaps to release psychoanalysts from the uncomfortable burden of other people’s expectations, at the same time makes it plain that analysis should not be seen in the way it is conventionally seen – as a means of assisting people to get their lives in order. What it provides is, appropriately, both more modest and more magisterial: an initiation into its own way of thinking.
On the other hand, if it’s the case that the greatest analyst in the world can’t get any more grip than the rest of us, why have Freudians laboured so hard to keep up the image of Great Father Freud? And why have so many people, most of them loosely or formerly connected with psychoanalysis, felt it necessary to work away at the destruction of that image? It has often been said, and not only by its detractors, that there is too much of the family romance in psycho analysis (consider the number of analysts who, as Green points out, boast that their analyst was analysed by X who was analysed by Freud or Abraham or Ferenczi – though I’ve not yet come across any who’ve boasted about being analysed by my relative Max Eitingon): maybe a history in which filial passions have played such a critical part can itself be taken as evidence in favour of Freudian theory.
The current black sheep and family snitch is Jeffrey Masson, the principal subject of Malcolm’s second book. Masson made his first appearance in the international psychoanalytic community in the early 1970s and the community was dazzled. ‘He wasn’t,’ writes Malcolm, who has an eye for these things, ‘like the other analytical candidates one sees at congresses – quiet and
serious and somewhat cowed-looking young psychiatrists who stand about together like shy, plain girls at dances … Masson was dancing with some of the most attractive and desirable partners at the ball.’ He was a student of Sanskrit at Harvard when he first had recourse to psychoanalysis (‘my main symptom was total promiscuity’). From Harvard he went to Canada to teach Sanskrit at the University of Toronto and on the day term began realised he would have to give it up. (‘I couldn’t sit there with four students, all eccentric, and read this little script. I just couldn’t.’) So he decided to embark on a training analysis at the local institute in preparation for a second career. As with everything else in his life, he was first enraptured, then bored – though to begin with, he was bored only with psychoanalysis in Toronto: ‘when I get to the real heart of things,’ he told himself, ‘it will all be different.’ In 1974, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Denver, he gave a paper on Schreber and Freud: ‘Canada,’ a New York analyst said, ‘has sent us a national treasure.’
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 14