ON BEING DREAMED

Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, A Eunuch’s Dream, 1874

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.