They’ve got me all wrong. I’m not sharing my saint with anyone; I’m keeping her all to myself. She will be the roommate of my submarine nights, her name is Teresa of Avila.
Should conspicuous tokens of faith be allowed in schools, yes or no? Yet another committee that can’t manage without a psychologist, this time to discuss France’s constitutional secularism. Representatives of every brand of sensibility, profession, gender, and politics had been convened to guide a lawmaker through the issues. Unsurprisingly, we were at odds: some, like me, felt that religion is a private matter and public space shouldn’t be an arena for the contest of beliefs; others took our rigorous stance for an assault on the very right to believe, a disgraceful mark of intolerance. A young woman in a head scarf suddenly raised her voice above the noise: an IT engineer, pretty, clever, and adamant. She explained to us very forcefully that she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this “union,” which she wished to publicize in order to definitively “fix it” in herself and in the eyes of others. Her desperate need to be fixed, defined, seen, was immediately obvious to the rest of us, especially the psychologists. Furthermore, should we deny her this “identity,” she was quite prepared to sacrifice herself—like those female suicide bombers on the other side of the world, and soon, perhaps, in our own suburbs. We had been warned. Hot-faced, voice spiking shrilly but full of eloquent resolve, she informed us that her veil was also a protective barrier, shielding her body from the lust of men, and visible proof “that I’m devoted to my work, that I’m a serious person, and that I don’t have the slightest interest in sex.”
“‘Neither whores nor submissives*’!” cried the woman on my left, incensed, and I clapped. [*Ni putes ni soumises: women’s rights movement founded by French Muslim women in 2002.—Trans.]
“She wears her veil like Saint Teresa wore a habit, she’ll get over it in a few hundred years,” snickered the man on my right.
“But that’s completely different!” Reproving stares pierced me from every side. Trapped, I said meekly: “Well, I think it is, anyway.” It was no time to be splitting hairs.
The spontaneity of my outburst surprised me. As if Teresa had just installed herself inside me, suddenly, by default, as the software manuals call it: from now on, automatically, as soon as your mental programs are booted up, before you’ve thought to modify this ineluctable presence by recustomizing your habits or traditions of thought, there something or someone is. In my case, there was Teresa, finally turning me away from a pointless, pretentious debate whose speakers were simply regurgitating the usual arguments and counterarguments as heard on TV. Should have expected it.
I fell into a kind of stupor, sucked into the abyss that separates the IT jihadi—protected from everything and then some by a scarf that strangles her worse than a convict’s neck iron—from the Golden Age visionary attempting to reconcile the faith of her desires with her loquacious reason. Was it really such an abyss? Sure. Not sure. Let’s see.
Teresa, as I read her, was able, by entering into ecstasy and writing down her raptures, not only to feel suffering and joy in both body and soul, but also to heal herself—almost—of her most salient symptoms: anorexia, fatigue, insomnia, fainting fits (desmayos), epilepsy (gota coral and mal de corazón), paralysis, strange bleedings, and terrible migraines. What is more, she succeeded in imposing her policies on the Church by reforming the Carmelite order. She founded seventeen monasteries in twenty years: Avila, Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladolid, Toledo, Pastrana, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Beas, Seville, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Palencia, Soria, Granada, and Burgos. In addition she wrote prolifically (her Collected Works run to nine volumes in the Spanish critical edition by Fr. Silverio de Santa Teresa); showed herself to be a most skillful metapsychologist, well before Freud, obviously; and emerged as a canny “businesswoman” within a Church that hadn’t asked for it. Unrepentantly carnal, she was moved by an insatiable desire for men and women, and naturally for the God-man Jesus Christ, never troubling to conceal her passions, even though she had taken vows, gone into seclusion, and hidden herself in a prickly woolen robe. Teresa used on the contrary to stoke her ecstasies to the limit, the better to savor their delights—sadomasochistic, of course—while analyzing them. And she bequeathed to us a masterpiece of self-observation and baroque rhetoric, not so much a Castle of the Soul, as it may be too hastily translated, but rather a kaleidoscope of “dwelling places,” moradas in Spanish: a “psychic apparatus” composed of multiple facets, plural transitions, in which the writer’s identity slips its moorings, is lost, is freed…with apologies to the head-scarfed engineer. Enough to make my colleagues, were they to go out of their way to visit this unlikely “castle,” turn green with envy.
Ever since she surfaced in the vagrancy of my submarine nights and imposed herself “by default” upon my discourse, Teresa hasn’t left me alone for a moment. This can be irritating, especially during the psychotherapy sessions with my analysands. For they are, male and female, one and all, sick with love, like Teresa, like Marguerite Duras, like the IT engineer, and plenty more. Like me, except that I have spent so many years analyzing myself and others that I lost the capacity for passion and it’s no longer that simple. Teresa wasn’t fooled either, in a way; at any rate she was far less gullible than some of my patients of either sex who revel in lovesickness and close their ears to my interpretations, no doubt because they love me too much.
But Teresa had no qualms about delving to the “root” of her “sins,” of her “boiling desires,” those “galloping horses” as she called them, nor about attacking the incompetence of her confessors, who did not understand her.
The whole trouble lay in not getting at the root of the occasions and with my confessors who were of little help. For had they told me of the danger I was in and that I had the obligation to avoid those friendships, without a doubt I believe that I would have remedied the matter.…
All these signs of fear of God came to me during prayer; and the greatest sign was that they were enveloped in love, for punishment did not enter my mind. This carefulness of conscience with respect to mortal sins lasted all during my illness. Oh, God help me, how I desired my health so as to serve Him more, and this health was the cause of all my harm.8
I take it that Teresa was implicating certain “friendships” and more precisely “prayer,” the practice of mental prayer for fusion with God: both of these presumably lay behind her “sins” and her indispositions. But I also see her as decomposing the internal shifts of her way of believing in God. If she, Teresa, loves God so much, it’s because she fears Him—punishment being the solidary inverse of love. Can love be a ruthless demand that punishes one to the point of illness? “These signs of fear of God…were enveloped in love.” Teresa points to the central knot of her malaise, a pernicious knot that the lovely engineer, fixed to her identity along with so many lovesick analysands, will take years to unpick. The earthly “punishment,” her symptoms but also her penances, derive from a mixture of love and fear, sex and terror. This weave that constitutes desire itself—desire for the Creator, as well as for His creatures—had hitherto eluded her, insightful though she was. In the sentence I am now reading, Teresa expresses herself like an analyst, or at least that is how I translate her. I feared, she says, that loving would be either meaningless or forbidden, and hence always culpable; and I contented myself with mobilizing all of my “conscience” (my moral sense, my superego). I remained “careful of conscience” so as to combat those unworthy desires, those sins. My very illnesses were punishments that I inflicted on myself out of fear of the Beloved, fear of not measuring up to Love. But by the time of writing these lines, she concludes, I’ve gone beyond that point: I have understood that such a conscientious longing for “health” in order to “serve,” were it even to serve God, can only cause me “harm.”
The future saint has just discovered what the superego enjoins: “Delight in suffering!” What to do? With
out relinquishing that feminine stance—“A female I was and, for better or worse [pour en souffrir et pour en jouir], a female I find myself to be,” as Colette put it9—the Carmelite nun transforms it into a different position, for which she finds plenty of justifications in Scripture: as a garden lets itself be watered, so Teresa lets herself be loved, abandoning herself to the mingled waters of pleasure, sublimation, and a kind of self-analysis that she discovers as she writes. With no resistance or dread—no tyrannical superego, as my colleagues of the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society would interpret it.
Offered up, passive, defenseless, Teresa embraced the rite of prayer as preached by the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna10 in his Third Spiritual Alphabet, and passed down to her by her paternal uncle, Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda: silent rather than spoken prayer, submersion of the self in an infinite longing for the other, the absolute Other, the divine, as penetrating as a Spouse. This amorous state, heightened by the nun’s very account of it, engulfs its author and infects the reader with an imaginary pleasure so potent it makes itself felt and is embodied in each of the senses (mouth, skin, ears, eyes, guts). Teresa is a well, a Persian wheel, an underground stream, a downpour, the beloved Being impregnates her with His grace.
Delirium? Inebriation? That may well be, she doesn’t care, she prefers that to the love-fear that hounded her before. How dismal it is, that anxiety in which melancholics love to wallow! Their black bile can be left to the Lutherans, because La Madre wants no part of it, ever again! Unknown to herself Teresa is preparing a miracle, and she succeeds where Judge Schreber will fail. This celebrated jurist believed himself to be persecuted by a God who cared little for the living, the instigator of a plot to turn him into a woman who would redeem the human race. Fit to haunt the body and soul of any self-respecting psychology student! You know the case I mean? That’s right. Even outside psychology circles, it’s well known that the “Schreber Case” prompted the first psychoanalytic investigation into psychosis.11 Teresa’s God, by contrast, has managed to split off from the vengeful Creator God of judgment and damnation, and His rays, notwithstanding their omnipotence, are wholly beneficial: He cannot do other than love and be loved, even when He is not responding. Over a few decades of monastic experience Teresa rewrote, after her fashion, the thousand-year-old story of God the Father, which Jesus had already done much to transfigure; but now the Spaniard will die of bliss in Him without dying. In her visions, through her pen, the tyrannical Beloved, the stern Father, Père-sévère, softens into a Father so tender as to become an ideal alter ego, kind and rewarding, who draws the ego out of itself: ek-static. Does He put her to the test? Teresa knows that He adores her, because He speaks to her, assures her of His unfailing presence by her side. What’s more, He is in her, He is her as she is Him. God, God-man, his body marked by five wounds, who suffered and rose again, whom Teresa embraces as he hangs on the Cross. An angel’s body, too, equipped with a long dart that can penetrate you, inflame you, then slake your thirst with water and sometimes, indeed, with mother’s milk:
Let us come now to speak of the third water by which this garden is irrigated, that is, the water flowing from a river or spring. By this means the garden is irrigated with much less labor, although some labor is required to direct the flow of the water. The Lord so desires to help the gardener here that He Himself becomes practically the gardener and the one who does everything.
This prayer is a sleep of the faculties; the faculties neither fail entirely to function nor understand how they function. The consolation, the sweetness, and the delight are incomparably greater than that experienced in the previous prayer. The water of grace rises up to the throat of this soul since such a soul can no longer move forward; nor does it know how; nor can it move backward. It would desire to enjoy this greatest glory [to revel in it: querría gozar de esta grandísima gloria]. It is like a person who is already holding the candle and for whom little is left before dying the death that is desired: such a one rejoices in that agony with the greatest delight describable. This experience doesn’t seem to me anything else than an almost complete death to all earthly things and an enjoyment of God [estar gozando de Dios].
I don’t know any other terms for describing it or how to explain it. Nor does the soul then know what to do because it doesn’t know whether to speak or to be silent, whether to laugh or to weep. This prayer is a glorious foolishness, a heavenly madness [Es un glorioso desatino, una celestial locura] where the true wisdom is learned; and it is for the soul a most delightful way of enjoying.
Often I had been as though bewildered and inebriated in this love, and never was I able to understand its nature.…
The soul would desire to cry out praises, and it is beside itself—a delightful disquiet. Now the flowers are blossoming; they are beginning to spread their fragrance. The soul would desire here that everyone could see and understand and understand its glory.…
It would want to be all tongues so as to praise the Lord.…
While I write this I am not freed from such holy, heavenly madness.…
Since [this soul] desires to live no longer in itself but in You, it seems that its life is unnatural.
…There is no reason sufficient to prevent me from this excess when the Lord carries me out of myself—nor since this morning when I received Communion do I think it is I who am speaking. It seems that what I see is a dream, and I would desire to see no other persons than those who are sick with this sickness I now have. I beg your Reverence that we may all be mad for love of Him who for love of us was called mad.12
My parents are dead, my partner left me, I don’t have children: I don’t have anyone. Nature is beautiful; the world situation is beyond help; life makes me laugh, because I never could do tears. My colleagues at the MPH (for the uninitiated, the Medical-Psychological House, my official base where I practice as a psychologist) think well of me: “Everything works out for Sylvia Leclercq, what a dynamo!” Not particularly discerning, as assessments go, but I’ll settle for it. What the ladies mean by that (and I say “ladies,” because in such an institution, the staff is invariably 99 percent female) is that they don’t resent me, that I do my job well enough. I socialize with them just as often as it takes to maintain my image, for I don’t look for truth in human contacts, apart from those undefinable relations that attach me to our inpatients and my own cases. Whether or not they can be called “bonds,” these are my greatest weakness, at any rate.
Paul is a “compensated autistic,” according to his medical records. He seldom speaks, his gaze wanders, and what sound like sentences from him are often no more than TV advertising slogans or snatches of a fable by La Fontaine. Paul’s memory and ear are faultless. He is an excellent piano player and spends much time listening to cassettes. He’s a teenager going on thirty, tall and lanky, slightly stooped, prone to losing his balance and passing out. Paul also likes hugging girls, who willingly reciprocate, having fallen for those feline eyes, which never rest on anyone. Yesterday, out of the blue, he came and flung his skinny arms round me and rocked me hard. “I don’t want you to die.” I must have looked pretty stupid, because for once he stared me straight in the eye. He went on repeating the same thing all day long. Was it in response to another sentence running through his head that he wasn’t telling me, along the lines of “You should die, I want you to die”? That evening, he decreed: “All things considered, I need you for my life. Understand?” I left the building under his catlike gaze, cheered by that “all things considered.” I hadn’t understood that Paul had understood everything, after all.
Élise is a tougher nut to crack. She is fifteen and incontinent, which people find quite trying. She has to be changed, dressed, the works. But she can’t stand nurses or nurses’ aides. “Not touch!” she shrieks in anguish. Furious outburst, dose of tranquilizers, and it starts all over again. Nobody wants to look after her. “Mrs. Leclercq, I know it’s not your responsibility, really I do, but as Élise seems to get along with you so well…” Dr. To
utbon, our director, can always be trusted to light upon the cheapest solution. “Don’t worry, I’ll see to her.” Because the life of the psyche lodges in unexpected places, there’s no reason a therapist shouldn’t change Élise’s diapers. I soap her, I scent her, I’ve found out she likes lavender. She draws fields of lavender for me, and I bring back fragrant blue armfuls of the stuff from my garden at Île de Ré.
“Quit acting like one of those old-school analysts: lavatory/lavender, is that it?”
Marianne Baruch, the MPH psychiatrist, my only friend in here or anywhere, sticks to prescribing slews of pills. She loathes all that Freudian–Lacanian mumbo jumbo, which it amuses her to attribute to me. Parapeted behind thick glasses, encased in faded jeans like a fifty-something teen, she’s a gruff character whose affection, on its rare outings, is mostly for me. But I was talking about Élise. Any exchanges between the young girl and myself serve only to help us arrive at the things that begin (with all due respect to Dr. Baruch) in the sphere of sensation. Lavender is odorous and tactile, it dampens and lubricates, it caresses. It does these things, not me. I improvise: I bring flowers, I play, she plays, savors, sniffs. And one thing leading to the next, Élise brings out some pieces of her ragged story. Her mother hasn’t been to see her for five years. She remarried and left Paris, she’s probably got other worries now. Only her father still takes my Élise out for the odd weekend. He is a sad, shriveled little man, impossible to seduce, no matter how much supermarket cologne or lavender essence his daughter pours over herself.
Nothing had predisposed me to do this job. I drifted for years between the couch and the library, but I was not cut out to teach, still less to teach literature. My salvation was Marguerite Duras: I never completed my thesis on her, because the more I thought about her the more depressed I got, but I did turn it into a slim volume, Duras, or the White Apocalypse, published by Zone.
Teresa, My Love Page 2