Category Archives: the psychoanalytic process

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

Popular Psychoanalysis 1 – Bill McRae, ‘The Psychology of Nervousness’

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Bill McRae, Lay analysis, lectures, pioneers, psychoanalysis in lay terms, Public debate, public education, the psychoanalytic process

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William A McRae, The Psychology of Nervousness: The Mind In Conflict, OUP, 1942.

In The Psychology of Nervousness McRae sets out to write ‘the story of our inner judge and jury whose task it is to mete out punishment when we fail to live up to our ideals’.   It was part of McRae’s intention to take psychoanalysis out of the doctor’s consulting room, away from a small and elite ‘avant garde‘. Ordinary people he inferred needed to know about the complexities of the mind the unconscious.  McRae wanted to show people that understanding the motives that led to certain behaviours could and would help alleviate emotional suffering. He wanted people to rethink notions of behaviour as an outcome of ‘moral’ lessons beaten into them in childhood. The book addresses the complex matter of destructive anxiety; how envy, rage and jealousy amongst other things may undermine one’s relationship to self and another.   It is one of the first of its kind in Australia, one of McRae’s three plain language introductions to psychoanalytic theory and treatment published between 1941 and 1945.

McRae does not pretend to be a theorist. He is an educator. He drew on the work of Freud and Alfred Adler and used illustrations from his clinical practice in Perth to develop his points. His ‘patients’ were people like his readers, parents, couples, working men and women, adolescents and children. Some were returned soldiers suffering from war trauma.  All behaviour has meaning, he stated. It was a matter of searching for its motives and to accept that much was unconscious. ‘Just as nine-tenths of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the ocean, so an equally large part of our minds functions beneath the level of everyday consciousness’. Behaviour is not an outcome of moral success or failure, he argued but an expression of the instinctive forces within the self mediated by parental figures from infancy. This recognition, helped along by psychological research was ‘gradually teaching men to appreciate how the instinctive forces in the mind, functioning through his feelings, determine his behaviour to a large extent’. It is also a glimpse into notions of  respectability, good behaviour and the emotional effort required to conform to the Australian society at that time.

Although McRae does not cite group theory as such he was firmly of the opinion that the individual is shaped by the group. As the child grows from infancy to adulthood instinctive forces are tamed, primitive forces, civilised..

Today, a person who is afraid dares not try to run away in many instances, simply because he fears more the rebuke of his friends who may call him a coward. Often he cannot give way to his burning resentment, for society may not countenance the form of revenge which he contemplates. Likewise when he craves to express the hunger of the reproductive forces within himself, he must learn control, for the rules of society are more powerful than the instinctive urges of the individual.

Social Darwinist ideas underpin the text: McRae describes how humans banded into clans, groups, communities, society to combat nature and thus enable the development of the civilised mind.

Just as a small child has to learn the art of co-operating with others in the home, so primitive man had to gradually educate himself to work with the group. Just as the child is completely selfish, and instinctively brushes aside the wishes of others, so primitive man, in the childhood of the race, acted in the same way. Through discipline and punishment, the child learns to obey the voice of its parents; primitive man, through the laws of the group, was forced to heed the rule of the majority. The power of thinking, however, came to his rescue.

The ability to think separates [humans] from the jungle past. Even so, he continues,  destructive forces – desires to rape, kill and go to war – may break their bonds in some individuals and social groups. ‘Man will not realise that at heart he is still a cave man’. It is a struggle for all of us.

The first chapter, ‘Guilt Feelings and the Need For Punishment’ takes us into the heart of the matter – and a fundamental precept of psychodynamic therapy.  It is hard to convey the understanding, yet so simple when it is understood, McRae says, ‘that the character of the individual is formed in the first few years of life,and that ever afterwards his behaviour is dictated and directed by this underlying style or pattern’.

McRae is particularly interested in Adler’s theory of the Inferiority Complex. For him it seems, the inferiority complex explains much.It is formed in the early interactions between parent and child – a point reiterated throughout his book. In a typical passage McRae writes

The style or pattern of life, formed in the first five or six years of a child’s life is extremely important, because this style of life is an unconscious one in later years. If a feeling of inferiority has resulted from the training the child has received during these years, that feeling will be embedded in the unconscious in later life, and the child will be heir to all those psychological ills that plague sufferers from Inferiority Complexes. Allied with the feelings of inferiority are usually feelings of fear and guilt, also unconscious – a fear of the world, which the owner has never been allowed to face with a feeling of courage or adequacy, and a feeling of guilt that is, perhaps, the natural enough consequence of a lack of love for strict parents, or the envy of others more fortunate.  

Repressed feelings of fear and guilt…are potent factors in self destruction, he continued. ‘Inferiority Complexes, with their attendant unconscious fears and guilt, are also self destructive’. A chapter on dreams summarises Freud’s theory of the unconscious – about wishes, desires fantasies and symbolization before proceeding to look at unconscious processes in marriage as couple navigate the birth of children, parenthood and the cycle of life.

McRae, however, seems to have all the answers – his version of psychoanalytic theory and dream interpretation is somewhat reductive – along the lines of ‘this means this and that is equal to that. Even if he is trying to get his readers to think afresh about behavior and experience, beyond conscious apprehension.

In analytical work I find that many women feel that the change of life has robbed them of the very essence of womanhood, for few of them are well enough adjusted to realise that their period of usefulness is by no means over when they are no longer able to bear children. Psychologically, this accounts for many of the difficulties which many women experience when the change of life looms ahead of them, for these conflicts set up sorts of nervous reactions. Such women unconsciously resent the passage of time, and often nervous anxieties produce sleeplessness, which may be related to a fear of growing old and dying. This explains what adolescent daughters often find their mothers so trying, for their young charm and freshness intensify the mother’s jealousy, which is unconscious, but finds apparently legitimate reasons to express itself. 

Reception of The Psychology of Nervousness was  lukewarm. It was noted in the press across Australia  particularly in Western Australia. It was  warmly recommended to readers by the editor of the ‘problem page’ in Perth’s Daily News. The editors of the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, far north Queensland was somewhat more direct.  The Psychology of Nervousness was ‘the least convincing’ of McRae’s three books on everyday psychology, they wrote.

The general reader is rightly cautious about disagreeing with experienced opinion in such matters as this book deals with, but he will be hard put to find support from his own knowledge for many of the claims this writer makes. The manifestations of the unconscious mind seem altogether too wayward and remote, and while it may be granted that the unconscious mind, at times, works in anything but a logical way and is a latent influence exerting great effect on an individual’s life, the layman feels that psychologists tend to resort too frequently to the unconscious mind for explanation of certain types of human behaviour. The reason quite often may he a purely physiological one or at least a combination of body chemistry and mind. It may all amount to a question of first cause and that is a great field for argument.

Perhaps McRae’s analysis too reductive  for them.

The general reader falls into this line of thought when he reads that if a child is thrashed for stealing he thenceforward unconsciously looks for and feels the need of punishment whenever he commits theft again. Again: “There have been few “perfect crimes’ because the culprit usually leaves a clue which proves his undoing. He unconsciously desires punishment, so makes a little error in order to be detected.” This seems to endow people with an extraordinarily high ethical sense and to discount the force of self preservation.

Perhaps, the editors suggested, it was better to let things lie even if they were interested in McRae’s chapter on shell-shock and war neurosis and hysterical conversion symptoms.

One valuable advance in psychology has been the demonstration of how internal conflict can affect the organs of the body and produce disease. Mc Rae’s observations on the subject are highly interesting. We can understand that when a conflict is solved the Individual finds life more harmonious and that he gains in physical and mental health but conflicts seem to he part of the price of man’s existence and they must have had considerable influence on the progress of the world. How much do art and science owe to discords of mind?

McRae had faced such objections before. In his final chapter he stands by his position.

I do not require that it should completely satisfy the philosopher and the aesthete. I know that it works, that it heals the sick and comforts the weary, and that, because of this, must be right. If its concepts offend some, the answer that I give them is not an elaborate justification, but a simple indication of someone who has been cured, someone who has been made happier.

He then describes what is involved in an analysis… explaining the notion of the transference, free associations, dreaming and the negative transference – and matters concerning length of treatment, and the costs.

Sadly William McRae does not make the gallery of psychoanalytic pioneers, the subjects of the exhibition, Inner Worlds, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra during 2011.  I wonder though, how many people struggling with their particular daemons and personal pains found something of relevance, and direction in his books? How many people sought treatment as a result?  A year later in 1943 Mcrae’s public lecture series on psychoanalysis for the University of Western Australia drew an enrolment of 297…