Category Archives: Reviews

Writing Psychoanalysis in the Twentyfirst Century – Book Reviews

23 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Reviews, the psychoanalytic process

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Paul Williams, The Fifth Principle, London, Karnac, 2010; Scum, London, Karnac, 2013.

What happens within the mind of a child not only rejected by both parents but also the object of their abuse and denigration? How does a child muster the necessary resources to survive, to hold a part of themselves intact enough to question the world his parents have created for him – or her? A clinician working with someone who has had such a desperate struggle with parents past, whose derision has become the voice of truth; the voice that says how could you even think or believe you are worthy/can do/ will do/ will create/will live….? must listen to – and feel – such battering.  This is part of that child’s normal, even as it seems unintelligible, even as we seek for that elusive sliver of sanity, or moments of anger that harbour hope – so quickly wiped out in a veneer where nonchalant cynicism rules. How easy it is for clinicians, and others, to become engulfed with this, paralysed, entangled with the other, capitulating to the seductions of a false self, the performer whose smiles cover darkness… where, truth be known, dying, actually dying,  promises something better than this liminal inferno… Apparently.

Paul William’s The Fifth Principle  and Scum  are the first two books of a trilogy, an account of such a struggle. The books  take as their subject aspects of the author’s life, Williams explains in his preface to The Fifth Principle. The first covers the years between birth and the age of eight years of age. The second addresses adolescence. The third will be about adulthood. Williams, the author, is also a psychoanalyst, a former editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and now, the back cover of The Fifth Principle tells me, dividing his professional time between private practice and the National Health in the UK. How he reconciles his subject  – drawn from himself – with his current position – adult, clinician and, no doubt, survivor, is a significant undercurrent.

It is misleading to consider the book ‘autobiography’ Williams says. The author, ‘and the individual written about, are not the same person… It is a piece of literature that furnishes an account of the methods of the mind in its efforts to prevail in oppressive circumstances. The author has undertaken, on behalf of the subject, to provide a faithful, intelligible rendering of unintelligible events’.

Of whom do we write when we write autobiography – or history? One’s self narrative evolves over time, even as one might fashion a particular story or myth about one’s formation from pivotal remembered moments. Even so, as Elisabeth, another member of the blog world writes in a reflection on self narrative, and indeed about Williams’s works, our inner lives are far more complex – ineffable. Memory, such as it is, is but one source in the re-membering of one’s self – a moment by moment process of reading and re-reading the past as it is woven into one’s self representation.

Is the psychoanalytic situation a place where we tell ourselves our story in the presence of another? Or is ‘psychoanalysis’ a joint construction, the creation of a third position born of the respective subjectivities of the patient/self and analyst? Or, perhaps, as well as, is the psychoanalytic situation a place where myth, the story told about oneself from childhood onwards, the story learned at the parental knee, is broken down into something rather more essential where, as Winnicott shows, the self’s origins,  patterned from the earliest maternal-infant relationship onwards, are revealed afresh?

Right from the start Williams takes the reader into experiencing:

How do you know which of your memories is the first? Mine seem to fluctuate, so I am never quite sure which, if any, is the earliest. Sometimes I can recall looking up at clouds, transfixed and alarmed by the vast, random movements. At other times, I remember feeling cold and still. I think I am lying in a pram, staring at what must be the sun, at dusk, slipping out of a darkening sky. “Just wait. If you wait, you will be carried into the gold”, a comforting voice says.      At other times, I can feel detached, drifting silently in space with no awareness of my body, and with a mind that seems to have seized, perhaps out of fear, although I don’t feel this. I am numb.  “There is nothing to do, nowhere to go”, is the refrain. I can’t say if this memory was an event, whether it came later, or who, if anyone, said it or anything like it.(TFP:11)

Williams the writer is the adult voice explaining to the child that once was – he was- …the mother/analyst mediating, detoxifying, transforming internal experiencing…

The discovery and knowledge of your terror – that all you have striven for may lead to abandonment and death- can, surprisingly, bring consolation and relief. Your fear is that all you hold dear can, if ignored even for a moment, draw you into annihilation. Ignorance of the lasting influence of this fear is by far the greatest obstacle to freedom.Once unmasked as a fantasy of disaster designed to remind us of, not free us from, the past, contemplation of the disaster becomes possible.(TFP:14)

The experiencing of the child ‘subject’ is given words, then meaning. We see that the Boy Williams has a refuge, ‘The Woods’ where he feels safe and secure. It is a memory, maybe, of something good and holding, where he recaptures some sense of his infant experience -Winnicott’s maternal-infant reverie, perhaps. At home though the child is caught in the crossfire between mother and father. Of his Father he writes..

...anything I said, especially if it contained enthusiasm, was the meaningless boast of a puffed up exhibitionist, a conceited mummy’s boy full of hot air…I took this judgement to heart, but did not properly understand until much later in adulthood when it occurred to me that this was precisely his view of my mother’s behaviour…. His accusation of falseness towards things I said had a confusing undermining effect on the way I came to view myself and on the way I thought about thinking. I believed that whatever idea came into my mind it was defacto, bogus -without meaning.(TFP:22).

Williams is unflinching, describing his father’s ‘reasonableness’, his undermining of his wife, Williams’s mother and his attacks on his son. There were his mother’s rages, her ‘nuclear explosions’ which seemed to follow moments of peace and calm. At the centre there were two small children, himself and his surviving sister, unseen and known by both parents, with nowhere to hide – or run. He and his sister were pests,Williams writes. He felt, ultimately, responsible for his mother’s behaviour and deeply ashamed at being a failure as a son.  From this he developed his first principle: “Everything I said and did was wrong” and from this the second, third and fourth principles… measures  to overcome what appears impossible to overcome. (p.24). This was a child who, at the age of four, felt death could be better than this. Carried through life, beyond the parental relationship, these principles developed to counter overwhelming experiences of anger and privation, resulted in the emergence of a person whose capacity to relate to self and to others was deeply disrupted. By the age of eight the child had ‘made a permanent break from almost everything human’. ( TFP: 76) Williams writes:

No idiom for living develops, and the infant comes to rely upon imitation, abandoning its own personality in favor of a performance that may last a lifetime, polished and honed as circumstances dictate (TFP:74.

The process of losing yourself to self deception takes a long time. What starts  out as  a struggle to survive overwhelming events by hollowing out the mind in search of a bearable reality, culminates in a dread of truth and allegiance to subterfuge as the mind is filled with illusions and lies. (TFP:77)

One only knows this when the lens has been cleared and the necessity for a false self begins to be relinquished, providing room for the emergence of the Fifth Principle – ‘Fuck ’em’!

Williams writes the second book in the trilogy Scum not just with in the voice of the subject, but that of the subject’s mind in his Adolescence, from the age of about twelve to twenty. This is an adolescent ‘without a mind’, he says. “Thinking founders, language does not stick, emotion becomes an arch-enemy’. He asks, ‘How do you write about such things when language – words, talking, writing – has failed’? ( S: Preface). In his solution, a flow of consciousness, we, the readers, are taken into the form of experience… a young person holding on, barely able if at all able to link words with events and feelings. We are taken into – inside – the child’s mind, behind his eyes, feeling disconnected, bewildered with him. Fears of breakdown loom, we watch in horror as the the boy’s mind darts back and forth in terror even as there is some hope.

What Bollas describes as the ‘Oriental mind’ or Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen Daedalus in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may guide our stance. It is the form of experience, not, as in the previous work, its narrative, that is being realised, even if there is another, voice, the writer’s voice, guiding its direction. It works. Listen:

Why these words? How did they know when to stop talking know what to say next? Silence desk lids open – how? All this day every day no hope of work exhausted by noon fending off  thousand orienting disorienting events once twice caught sight of why they were there a shaft of dust sunlight painted a stripe across the room everyone settled at desks ready to begin   he   a   part   of  them   convulsed ribsknifed pressed out stone still awake out cold stabbed dying flesh pounded dust dust to dust crushing machinery oblivious to the fact the job long since complete donkey work rampant parasite contraption evaded by dissolving melting if this fails become an alien. (S:14).

Somehow the Boy Williams is able to hold on. There is a ‘romance’ with a teacher, a moment of hope for something different and desparate uncomprehending disappointment when that teacher betrays him.  And there is the French teacher, a quiet unassuming man, who enables the Boy Williams  to allow a new language  to enter his mind. He somehow able to respond to the French teacher’s attempt to help him, accepting an offer  to go to France to teach English to schoolboys. Here he  begins to glimpse his selfhood. His goodness – and life.  It is this teacher’s gift, the ability to see into the real soul of another, that enables the Boy Williams recognition that there is another way of being. Life saving.

In both books Williams reaches into that space to touch and describe a young person’s fearful tethering with life – so fragile, even as he acts living.  It is the therapist’s lot to know /experience this inner world well enough, fearlessly enough, to meet it, to form the capacity to reach an other who appears unreachable, who masks themselves with performance. Theirs is a false self designed to protect from cataclysm.

And the clinician who writes these books? And readers? There is the matter of defensiveness as Elisabeth points out in her blog cited earlier in this piece. Why does it matter whether  these books and writings are autobiography; that a clinician says out loud for everyone to hear: I know about this through living it?  Or that a reader sees her own story? Or is it that Williams ‘recognises’, if that is the word, that autobiography is ultimately fiction – an account of self but also a creation? Or is it an amalgam of self and many others – others known as their world resonates with that of the writer? Internal reality is complicated. The past (self) has its own subjectivity that cannot be revisited as it was, only as it is remembered. Even so, memory – and the truth of it – is notoriously unreliable, fraught with subjectivity, ultimately unknowable.

These quandaries  face us all as we attempt to relate to and understand an other – whether through literature, clinical work, or in our encounter with the mystery of another person. In both these superbly written books, Williams provides much to mull over.

References:

DW Winnicott, Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Christopher Bollas, China on the Mind, 2012.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4217

The Archbishop and the Queensland Girl…1916

06 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1910s, Australian History, Douglas Price, Queensland, Religious History, Reviews

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It looks tedious at first. Part of the dry stuff that goes into academic journals detailing nuances of cultural development and debate. Not that I object as such: I research and write history in my spare time. But the fight, in 1911 over doctrine between the Rector of All Saints Church in Brisbane, Douglas Price, and the Anglican Archbishop of Queensland, St Clair George Alfred Donaldson that threatened to diminish, if not extinguish Donaldson’s mission and authority is the stuff of drama and tragedy.The entire event was reported across the nation. It was the subject of a number of letters to the editor as observers struggled with the nature of Canon Law, the divinity of Christ and persons. For Price’s contention, that the divine rests within us all refused the divinity of God in and of itself. The Archbishop did not agree and asked for Price’s resignation at his own convenience. On 10 January 1911 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Archdeacon had stepped in to force Price’s immediate resignation.

Price was followed by a number of his congregation who eventually invited him to head a new church – the modernists. He eventually died in 1916. His followers attempted to keep the flame alive through a series of memorial lectures held between 1920 and 1924. After that he faded into obscurity.

Price was a writer, too. He published his sermons along with several novels in which he attempted to explore the mind of his subjects. One of a Crowd: The Story of a Queensland Girl Drawn Mainly From Life, published, it seems, just before his death in 1916, explores the nature of vocation and mission. It is a highly sympathetic portrait of a young woman finding her way – within herself – in contrast with those expectations of women were frequently limited to marriage and motherhood.  He begins with Karen Petri, a child orphaned and institutionalised at the age of five. But before this point she had already learned a central lesson as Price vividly portrays in this argument between two small children. Here he is also granting consciousness to small children – a new thing in those days – as well as his intention to study the growth of a young woman’s mind through her emotional experiences. Nature has its own place in Price’s work; its place is akin to Sophocles Greek chorus, explaining moods, moving the story forward. We live in relation to nature within and without. This is Price’s first chapter – in full.

It was her birthday, and she was three years old. The full tide of the day had come, and Noon, weary but victorious, lay basking in the garden, while the sun yawned lazily over the world, sleepy with sunshine, dreaming its dream of creaseless, incredible blue.

On this first day of her memories Karen Petri sat in the garden, all among the yellow daisies which June had dipped so lavishly in liquid gold. A little lizard, lithe and cunning, looked at her cautiously as it sunned its sacred body in the light. But she paid no heed to the lizard, she had something more interesting to do. She was singing softly to herself, and making imaginary tea in an old cracked teapot filled to the brim with sulphur coloured sand.

On either side of the teapot there were groups of quaint Chinamen everlastingly engaged in the drinking of invisible tea. Time wrote no wrinkle on their brows, nor as yet had aught disturbed the even tenor of their enamelled plasticity. Nevertheless, the Finger of Fate caught even now at the threads of their blameless existence.

Within the teapot’s glossy depths there was something cabalistic, occult; it was a well of mystery, lit by flashes of rare colour and richness of shade, with a glassy polish smoother even than the child’s own skin. Doubtless some fairy dwelt within this burnished cavern, by whose enchantments silver water was transmuted into amber tea.

Karen loved her teapot better than any doll, and upon rare occasions when she could surreptitiously fill it with real water her delight knew no bounds.

‘Tea, tea, beautiful tea,’ she  sang; and the breeze, drunk with pollen, caught her words contemptuously and scattered them into the air. Presently a step – O eyes of me! – a stranger: a small boy in a sailor suit, with a pink pugnose and a face flecked with freckles. His mother was calling on hers, and had bid him ‘run away and play’. He ran.

The gilded flowers beckoned him mysteriously, the brown bees sang their sweet songs of toil, the white fire fell from the sun, overhead a bird was calling to its mate; but the boy cared for none of these things.

He had secured a stone to sling at a butterfly when, suddenly he saw Karen. Their eyes met, and fell, and met again. Both were dumb, and the Spirit of Shyness sheltered them for a time. The Curiosity entered the garden, and whispered slyly to the boy.

‘What you got?’ he demanded.

‘Teapot’, she replied.

‘Give ‘um me’.

‘No’

‘Give ‘um me, I tell you. I’m older than you, an’ if you don’t I’ll grab it’.

‘You shan’t! You mustn’t touch it! Mine!’ Greed and fear began to form in their minds like hail in the heavens ready to fall.

The boy made a swoop, and Karen fled with her treasure clasped tightly in her hands.

In and out among the bushes he chased her impetuously, till her foot caught on a stone and she fell to the ground, winning scars on her forehead which she would carry to the grave. The teapot was shivered into nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces; its destiny was fulfilled and the Chinamen at last broke up their age-long party.

Then blood, screams, tears, hurrying footsteps and general consternation – while flowers looked coyly at the bees and the leaves murmured lovingly to the breeze, and the sun shone benignantly amid the everlasting splendour of the sky, caring no more for Karen and her woes than for the fly in the tent of the spider, or the bird in the clutches of the hawk.

”Tis ever so’. Even our prettiest dolls are stuffed with sawdust. We cling to things that make us happy till someone stronger than ourselves snatches them from us, or causes us to shatter them to bits.

Thus did Karen first encounter Ahriman, all beneath the shining of the sun.

Karen is orphaned and institutionalised – subject to the whims of adults for whom she works as a servant before she enters a convent – for a time. Her musical ability – her singing and playing the piano sustain her as she leaves the religious life and moves to the city to work and music lessons. Price reveals the human underside of the religious life – Karen is no more a servant to the Mother Superior and her assistant than she was before. After an overseas voyage to London with them she is sent back to Australia, alone, although she befriends the author on this return journey.  Finally there is love and marriage and retreat to an idyllic Garden of Eden island in Northern Queensland. Still, Karen struggles…

She had made so many changes, had been uprooted so often before, that she felt confident of being able to adapt herself to the new conditions. Love had brought her an immense happiness, but would it really solve the secret of life? Already she was conscious there was a great part of herself which she could not give to the impetuous Basil, and that with some of her sympathies and thoughts he would probably have but little sympathy.

This troubled her a good deal, for in the books she had read, love was pictured as leading to a perfect understanding, and she wondered whether she herself were at fault. The sacrifice of a possible artistic career had seemed to her no light thing, but Basil had waved it aside almost unfeelingly. He appeared, man-like, to regard himself as her deliverer, whereas to her it was an offering she had made solely for his sake.

But what did these things matter in the presence of the great dream of love? Doubtless they were not very important; nevertheless they were present as a slight dischord, like the occasional whizzing of the wire on the G string, when some masterpiece is played on the violin. Fortunately this feeling was only audible to herself. Never for a moment did she contemplate speaking of it to Basil.

Karen’s inner vitality remains hidden, even as she and her husband, explore the physical bounds of their small island. It is a ‘conceit’, a device among many that occur in this book as Price develops his theme – the nature of the divine within – that a storm occurs…when Basil, along with a group of Aboriginal fisherman, disappear in a huge storm while out at sea. Karen is left entirely alone. The dead body of a wood-pigeon washes at her feet.

Then it was that she  remembered her loneliness upon the island. basil, perhaps might never come back. At first she felt stunned and incapable of realisation. She almost wanted to laugh. 

Karen passes through periods  of fear, desolation. She is terrified her mind will give way before reaching the solace of tears before reaching a realisation, and perhaps Price’s central thesis:

Were all her prayers and her tears emptied into bottomless space, and cast like dead lumber into the abyss? No. No. She knew better than that. Somewhere she had read that the true God is within the wise man’s heart. If that were so, she must try to be brave, for help was within herself, she must not give way to outrageous fears.

With a great effort of the will she tried to control her mind. ‘Come, come’, she said to herself, “I will not be a fool. I will be brave and practical and wise. Whatever happens, I can face it calmly, and just now I was acting like a silly child’.

Almost immediately she became conscious of her strength, and though she still had to hold back her fears as with an almost physical force, she slowly gained the mastery over herself, and by sheer commonsense beat back the thickest battalions of dismay.

The power to help ourselves is ever within, That night she discovered her strength, Robbed of every other consolation, she found the spirit of true divinity in herself. It was then, in a sense, that she came of age; and she knew she could never again feel so helpless as hitherto. It is only in the soul that great things happen, and some of us have to be dipped in the deepest pits of calamity before we discover the fortitude of our real and innermost self. After that discovery we are never quite so feeble again.

Perhaps from the little we know of Price’s story this is autobiographical. Perhaps it is a sermon, veiled as a novel, designed for posterity, outside the censorship of the good bishop. Something beautiful shattered.

 

 

Manhattan Dreaming – Book Review #1

18 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Australian Women Writers Book Reviews, Reviews

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Anita Heiss, Manhattan Dreaming, Bantam Books, 2010.

In pursuit of books by women writers to read and review for the Australian Women Writers Book Review series for 2012 I picked this at random from the shelves of a second-hand bookshop: ‘Soldier and Scholar’ in Castlemaine, Victoria. The cover is inscribed: ‘From Manuka to Manhattan Lauren’s going all the way’.  Manuka is a familiar place to me. Now a trendy shopping  and café centre, Manuka  is close to the parliamentary triangle and hub of the nation’s capital, Canberra. I remember it as the place where the family did the weekly supermarket shopping when it was one of the two main centres on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin in the 1960s. The book’s cover also tells me that the main character, Lauren, is a Koori woman, a professional art curator who lands her dream job: a fellowship at the  Smithsonian Institute in New York. Manhattan Dreaming, I later learn, won a Deadly Award for the author, Anita Heiss, a woman of the Wiradjuri nation in Central New South Wales . The Deadlys, by the way, are awards given annually to Koori people who have achieved in the arts.

The storyline is straightforward enough. Lauren, in her late twenties, with a Masters Degree under her belt, and a job as Senior Curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, is offered the chance of a lifetime to live and work in New York in her field. Supported by her friends keen that she leave behind her no-good, self obsessed boyfriend, a football player for the ‘Canberra Cockatoos’, no less,  and centre of a sex scandal that has featured in these circles over the last few years, Lauren leaves her place, and her country, to venture into the new world  – New York. Not only does she find that things are different over there, but she also has the opportunity, despite herself, to reconsider her relationship with the football player, and to understand what is valuable in a relationship. In New York, she learns, she can be herself and not, as she states, ‘someone’s exotic’. Gradually the sheaths fall from her eyes and she finds true love.

This is ‘chick lit’ stuff – but with another, serious, agenda. Woven throughout the text are matters of  place, family and identity – an education for some readers about the place contemporary Koori culture within the broader Australian setting. Lauren is ‘a Lucas from Goulburn’, (a regional city near Canberra) she tells her new Koori acquaintances in New York. It places her. Her family has been there for generations. Lauren’s family are her stability, her parents’ home, the centre of her world. It is not idyllic;  the Lucas family clearly has its struggles. Lauren’s older brother is in gaol for some unspecified crime – a common event for many Koori families.  Her younger brother does not seem to be doing very much. Leaving Goulburn and her work in Canberra for adventures overseas means leaving her country. But she will always return home.  It is never forever.

In a poignant scene early in the book Heiss  highlights the intimacy of Lauren’s relationship with ‘place’ as her father struggles with the idea of her moving so far away.

English: Taken by me ona recent trip to Canber...

Image via Wikipedia

THE BIG MERINO _ GOULBURN, NSW.

Image via Wikipedia

‘There’s the Big Mushroom in Canberra, and there’s a Big Cow somewhere and a Giant Kangaroo, but ah, no, you women want to go to some Big Fancy Apple in America’. Dad stood up and took his cup to the sink, running water into it as he spoke. ‘I’m sorry love, but the Big Merino has been good enough for our mob for the longest time – no big piece of fruit is going to make me let a daughter of mind go to New York’.  And there is the lovely joke between Lauren and her brother about ‘shagging’ in the eye cavity of the Big Merino! Heiss knows her places.

‘Place’ in Canberra is not so well handled by Heiss. Here her perception of the city and its workings  seems rather two dimensional. 2010 Manuka might be a centre where young professionals gather, along with scattered eateries and nightclubs. I am not sure how the characters ended up in a suburb in Belconnen so far away from the centre where Lauren spends most of her time.  Canberra has a thriving cultural and social life  hidden beneath the façade of institutions and large public buildings. This is a small quibble in the overall texture of the novel. Moving to New York one may find similar issues regarding place. But there is another intercultural event going on as Lauren works out  a new vernacular and variations in dating and relationship rituals from those she is accustomed to at home.  Of course, she is finding new opportunities and common concerns between indigenous people in Australia and the United States.

Overall though this is a tale well told. With deftness of touch Heiss reveals another side to the bad news about Koori culture frequently featured in the Australian press. So often focus is upon the tragedies in the Northern Territory Communities that have become the centre of what the Government refers to as ‘The Intervention’ means that one misses the vibrant and creative work being undertaken by the Laurens of this world.  Historically, even as missionaries and government officials have talked about the dire straights for Koori people living on the fringes of settler communities, there have also been Koori families who have found their way into that community and have been recognised for their contribution. Heiss’s task, to build bridges between settler and indigenous cultures, is well placed. She more than succeeds here.