Dear Readers,
Next week I am moving to the long-waited rehab facility, and after that I will be returning home.
Until now, I have been shielded from the costs of disability because of our wonderful and vital NHS. This will change when I get home due to the considerable costs of remodelling the house, and my need for round the clock care.
I ask, therefore, that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Lets keep this show on the road.
Below is an essay I dictated to Carlo earlier this week - a blog on analysis.
Since I’ve become disabled, many of my dreams are quite violent and unpleasant, and most of them are set in my childhood home in Bromley, which is decayed, if not falling down, or a kind of bombsite. There are characters in wheelchairs, but never me, though I assume that these ghostly figures are parts of me, distributed throughout the dream.
I’ve been interested in dreams since my uncle, one of my father’s many brothers - who was a child psychologist, and ran a school for autistic children in Somerset - first began to talk to me about psychoanalysis. He told me I wanted to kill my father and sleep with mother. This was a shocking, if not reductive view of the Oedipus complex. I became fascinated from this moment in Freud and his work. At King’s College London, where I read philosophy, there was a course given by Richard Wollheim on Freud and psychoanalysis, with a particular interest in the work of Melanie Klein, who I thought he knew, or had been analysed by. Wollheim wrote an excellent book for the Fontana Modern Masters series on Freud, which I studied. Then I read all of Wittgenstein’s writing on Freud, which is strange and inaccurate but illuminating. I believe his sister was analysed by Freud and I guess their families, both living in Vienna, knew one another. After leaving King’s, my reading of psychoanalysis continued, and I read most of the masters; Winnicott, Klein, Lacan and so on, up to and including younger and more modern interpreters, like Adam Phillips and Darian Leader. There is much in this tradition that I found fulfilling and fascinating, particularly the case studies from an earlier period. As far as I can tell, analysts no longer write case studies, for all kinds of reasons, mainly to do with privacy and psychoanalytic accuracy, but I found them as beguiling as good short stories. We know that Freud, when he was writing his own important case studies, worried that they were more like short stories than they were scientific work. It is obvious there is really nothing scientific about them. You could take the same patient and have them analysed by five different therapists, and each analyst would come up with a different view of the analysand. This cannot be how science works.
I began my analysis in the early nineties, when I was in my late thirties, with a Freudian analyst who was not much older than me, though inevitably, in the transference, I considered him to be far more knowledgeable, intelligent and omniscient then I could ever be. But he was very good at his job.
I had a lot to talk about and found that I looked forward to the sessions, which were twice a week. I took to lying down on the couch with enthusiasm. I didn’t want to look at him; I wanted to dream and think. There was a lot of silence, which I was not intimidated by. I had no desire to babble. I found the interregnums to be a very practical and useful tool, as Freud has suggested it might be. In the silence, a lot is happening; you are not paralysed but thinking; a number of ideas and images will emerge in the period, which will be sorted through until you find something that must be exposed to the light.
Some people worry that therapy will somehow halt the creative process; they suggest that when talking through your issues, you will somehow evacuate them, and will therefore have nothing to write about. That was never a worry for me, it never happened. I found at the end of each session I wanted to write a diary entry, that I would go through the dream interpretations provided in the analysis. This I found fertile for my work because the analyst – if we were having a good session - would say things that I could never have conceived myself. He would make connections which would surprise me, and which would prove generative.
This isn’t to say that the sessions were all play. During those years, I went through some painful experiences when I was at a loss and depressed. But the analysis kept everything moving. When it works, it doesn’t allow you to linger in any particular state of mind. It moves things along, despite the darkness. There is no doubt, however, that psychoanalysis is both a quick and a slow cure. Sometimes during a session you might come to realise some idiotic repetition that you’ve been living in for most of your life. Something like this could become clear to you, and in that moment you would never wish to make the same mistake again. And while it might be a banal thing, it may have taken you years to come to this recognition. On the other hand, there are other understandings and changes which may take years for you to recognise, things that you cannot possibly bring yourself to do or say, even though to others they may seem simple. Which is why, as I say, psychoanalysis can work both slowly and suddenly.
Freud was an orthodox analyst, but he didn’t like an analysis to go on for too long. The idea that a therapist would see the same patient for thirty years or so would probably have seemed absurd to him. He saw patients for two years or so, and then he’d encourage them to leave. But he also socialised and went on holiday with them, gave them money, and he particularly liked wealthy Americans. Lacanians have a particular bias, against Americans and what they like to think of as American forms of therapy; but this is a prejudice and an absurd one at that. They like to claim that American therapy stylised patients into becoming part of the smooth capitalist system, rather than making them into awkward individuals. But this is mostly untrue, and American post-war psychoanalysis is profound and fecund, and still worth reading. Psychoanalysis has always claimed that is does not have a political bias, and it is interesting that its greatest practitioners, Freud, Jung, Klein, Lacan, were all conservatives. But there are many liberal and left psychoanalysts as well; there is a long tradition of critical and anti-capitalist bias in psychoanalysis, which can work as a critique of capitalist convention, which subjects are supposedly acculturated to, but which they can resist.
Psychoanalysis is not a cure-all. It doesn’t suit everyone, and it might be difficult to find an analyst that suits you. I didn’t shop around for my analyst; he was recommended by a friend, I just went to see him, he was starting out and had a space. The moment I left my first session, I thought, this is for me; I want to do this, and I did it, and I’ve never regretted the amount of time and money it has cost me. It is certainly expensive. The French psychoanalyst Lacan certainly wanted it to be expensive. He believed the more you paid, the more it hurt it, the more you’d get out of it. There had to be a cost. He didn’t want you lying on the couch for months talking crap and being evasive. If he thought you were doing that he’d cut short the session and invite you to leave. This method really hurried things along, but he was, despite these strange habits, a brilliant listener. In contrast, my analyst is a Freudian, and I wouldn’t want to visit a Lacanian, but I have many Lacanian friends. I like knowing how long my session will be, and that this is my apportioned time slot. This means that I can lie down and say what I like, or say nothing if I want. In one session, I remember, I spent the whole session describing a long dream I had had, and when I got to the end, with about thirty seconds to go, I asked my analyst what he thought it meant. “That is the story of your life,” he said.
I know my analyst has many writers on his books, since he is a considerable writer himself. And I know that his patients continue to see him for many years. These particular analyst/patient relationships has lasted longer than many marriages, or other relationships. So this is an odd experiment. You could say that he and I are experimenting together. What happens if you extend an analysis over thirty years? What kind of analysis is this? And what is going on between analyst and patient?
Probably my analyst knows me better than anyone else knows me. I’ve spent more time with him than I ever did with my parents, a thought that always makes me laugh, because we are still talking about them. I wouldn’t say that my analyst and friends; I don’t want to be his friend, and I never ask him about himself or his opinions on football or politics. Sometimes we do discuss literary topics and we have had long talks about Kafka, Dostoevsky and Proust, for instance. Sometimes these discussions are illuminating, and other times I know he knows that I am avoiding some important issue by chattering on about The Trial or Metamorphosis. There are some topics, and very boring ones, where we have got stuck, sometimes for months on end, and I have felt dead at the end of the sessions, as if I have been trying to bury him under my depression. He once said to me, “I am very tenacious. I will never give up.” I found this uplifting, despite the darkness of this particular period. But is does move on, though it might take a long time, perhaps a year or so.
Psychoanalyst is not just a talking cure, or even a listening one. When you get out of that room you have to act; you have to be different, you have to change your life. You have to have new relationships; you have to speak differently, you have to change your clothes, you have to leave people and make dramatic decisions. It is what happens outside the room that matters. You have to take it seriously and take risks, since everything you’re already doing is always already a risk.
Psychoanalysis is a bit like this blog. Carlo came into my room about an hour ago and asked me to write a one for this week. I had no ideas at all, I thought nothing would come. Then he read me a question sent in by someone on Twitter with regard to dreaming. I thought, “I could talk about.” And I began to speak this blog exactly as it is written here, and it began to flow. I couldn’t stop. One thing led to another, which is called free association, and off it went.
Carlo thinks that this blog is long enough as it is, and I should pretty much wrap it up here, otherwise this it will end up the length of a small book. But I would like to add that psychoanalysis has been and still is - with its ideas about sexuality, gender and all the rest - still at the centre of our culture, just as it has been for the last hundred years. Turn on the radio, and you will hear politicians and commentators talking about gender, the mystery of it, and how one become gendered and what it means to be a male or a woman. Psychoanalysis and Freud is always worth talking about, but I will wrap this up, Carlo’s hands are getting tired, but I hope to return to it at a later date.
Your loving writer, Hanif.
xx
Hanif, you are brilliant! This piece is marvelous. And as usual, you made me laugh at unexpected moments. i hope your new facility will bring about the needed changes. Carlo thank you for doing this with you dad for all us to be in communication. My best wishes to you Hanif in the new place, and my thanks to Carlo.
Ruth E Sanchez
Hanif: I did an analysis with a noted Melanie Klein psychiatrist and it healed my deepest wound. We never worked on the subject matter but somehow his reparenting worked wonders. It was a surprise that suddenly that wound had disappeared. However, I found that analysis has its limits and it was not until years of Buddhism and now Advaita transformed me totally.