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(2007).
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 52:207-231

‘What Works?’ Response to the Paper by James Astor: ‘K’
A personal account of an analysis with Michael Fordham and
subsequent conversations with James Astor. A number of themes
are developed concerning the expression of feeling, use of
language, and the relevance of aesthetic values to the practice and
reporting of analysis.
Introduction
The following paper is an autobiographical account of two relationships—
one analytic, the other akin to a conversation—with different (therapeutic)
outcomes. It is structured in such a way that these relationships are
simultaneously evoked and examined. Interwoven and gradually extending
outwards are several passages of reflection—principally concerning the
expression of feeling in analysis, the subtlety of language, and the
(psychological) importance of beauty. This last theme implicitly brings the
various strands together. Finally, the occasion prompting the original paper is
not forgotten.
‘I often found that there were feeling and emotion in what I said not
through any conscious application of a method but because I simply found
what he was saying deeply moving and upsetting, (my italics). This is a
statement by James Astor (JA) about himself and about me. As far as I am
concerned, it should be preserved in amber. For what it speaks of is
connectedness-in-feeling and without such connectedness I do not think it
would be possible to be analysed.
What else can one say about such feeling? That it is spontaneous,
unrehearsed, unthought. It occurs before thinking takes place—like a surprise.
It cannot deliberately be accessed or made available. It lies outside, and is
anterior to, what James Astor calls ‘any conscious application of a method’.
It involves a sharing—the transmission and absorption of feeling from one
person to another.
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[Ms first received July 2006; final version December 2006]
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It is expressive of what Joseph Conrad has called ‘the subtle but invincible
conviction of solidarity’ that binds human beings together—'the dead to the
living and the living to the unborn’.
It leads to a being-with position, looking out. That is why JA can write: ‘I
felt I was in the analysis with him’ and ‘I found myself engaging with him
as if I was thinking out loud about a shared difficulty, which together we
could arrive at some new understanding about’. Though JA subsequently
reflects analytically on where he finds himself the position is again not
arrived at through a conscious process. Rather, he discovers himself there.
Why do I seek to define and re-define? Because I find such connectedness-
in-feeling helpful. One isn't alone. That's a burden less. That someone else
can be affected by what one says lends substance and reality to one's feelings.
It confers, however briefly, a sense of self and of identity. It makes one feel
recognized. It opens the possibility of being understood. It is host to
reciprocation.
There is another aspect of James Astor's statement on which I should like
to comment. It resides in the word ‘moving’. When we are moved what is
moved in us is usually our feeling or feelings about something. I believe inner
change, the hope of analysis, is also accomplished like this, through our
feelings being moved—about ourselves, others, the world. If the change is to
be beneficial it depends, of course, on our being moved for the better. But
better or worse, how we are moved is through our feelings. ‘Only emotion
endures’, says Ezra Pound in one of his literary essays. ‘And what did you
want of life’ another American poet, Raymond Carver, asks of himself in his
last poem: ‘To call myself beloved, to feel myself / Beloved on the earth’. I
am not for one moment suggesting many other factors do not come into it—
ideas, thoughts, sensations, intuitions—a whole panoply of reactions. But it is
hard to imagine psychological change taking place without our feelings being
fundamentally involved. Otherwise things wouldn't make sense. The mind
would have got too much in the way.
Another phrase I should like to address: ‘not through any conscious
application of a method’. The method to which JA is referring is, I think, the
analytic method in one of its many shapes or forms or variations. And I
mention this because it presents me, as the person at the end of a wish to be
helped, with a conundrum. If I am saying that what helps me is a response that
lies outside the analytic method, moreover that without it, no analysis could
take place, what price that method? At what point is its entry relevant? I ask
these questions because I have spent many years of my life—more than I care
to remember—as the subject of analytic method and neither of my previous
analysts negotiated these questions with me. They started analysing me from
the moment I walked through the door. I do not argue with this. That was their
job and presumably they were convinced of its usefulness. And, of course, I
freely agreed to participate, imagining the same. But I can see now that, such
as they were, both analyses were set in motion without crucial issues being
sorted out. And the result was, in both instances, that my analysts set about
analysing me before I was ready or had truly given permission. Accordingly, I
retain a
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feeling that what subsequently took place was, to use the vernacular, all a bit
previous.
Let me explain further by responding to another line: ‘[He] did not want to
be translated, he wanted to be received’. Again this is a statement that
instantly makes me want to clap. It is entirely correct. Again it confers upon
me a sense of being recognized. If my memory serves I supplied the first bit,
JA the second, and, as far as I recall, my bit went in two phases. At our first
meeting I said I didn't want any more interpretations. I'd had them up to the
gills and, as far as I could tell, they'd never done me much good. Did so-
called mutative interpretations actually exist, I wondered? They were, I
thought, a nice idea, like unicorns, but I'd never encountered one nor come
across anyone who had. Perhaps they were a notion invented by analysts to
make themselves believe they were doing some good. Because of this, or
more likely, because he hadn't, for quite a while, had anyone turning up at his
door not wanting interpretations, JA took a few meetings to adjust to my
request. When, for instance, I said my previous analysis had not seemed to
touch ‘the spring of [my] responsive emotions‘—another quote from Conrad
—he remarked that the image combined male and female characteristics. I
could only smile wanly at the acuity. On another occasion he empathically
imagined himself into the kind of cul-de-sac thought sequences I pursued,
which left me no pleasure in anything and which amounted, as he saw, to a
suicidal drifting. But, in doing so, he injected a bewildered note of his own
which, knowing I was a reluctant gardener, led him to descend, abruptly, to
earth: ‘You do this, this and this and, well, there's nothing—you might as well
go to the bottom of the garden and dig for worms!’ At another meeting he
made one final attempt—a lengthy, complex interpretation, the gist of which I
cannot remember. This is because in mid-flow, simultaneously rebuking
himself and plucking the words off my tongue, he stopped and—catching my
eye—said: ‘Too many words!‘
Again I am fairly certain that applying the salve of black comedy was not
JA's conscious intention. But thereafter, whenever I felt low, being ‘down in
the wormery’ came subversively to mind, joining that small lexicon of
holdfast phrases we all, perhaps, privately acquire to invoke when we really
feel up against it. ‘These fragments’, as T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘I have shored
against my ruins’.
That was the one phase. The second was inaugurated, as it were, by JA's
trouble with words. I say this not as a cavil. The moment displayed both his
modesty and his highly developed capacity for making quick, immediate
adjustment to another person—although, again, I am not sure that modifying
the King of Prussia's words from Shaffer's Amadeus was foremost in his
mind, though it is possible he was deliberately echoing an expression I had
already used in relation to another of his interpretations. Whatever the case,
the mention of words caused me to resurrect an unresolved issue from my
previous analysis to which he refers above. Words. Ah, yes. Words— words,
words, to which I always append another expression from Hamlet, ‘miching
mellacho‘—sneaking
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mischief—to remind myself constantly how subtle, rich, playful, deceptive,
altogether problematic, our use of language is. And especially so in analysis,
the ‘talking cure’, where the importance of accurate communication, for both
analyst and patient, is at a premium and where words form such a large part
of our means for doing so. I therefore could not help noticing that my second
analyst, Michael Fordham (MF), used language in a rather different way from
me—his largely influenced by analytic theory and discourse, mine by the
imaginative literature and arts I'd taught and by which I'd been strongly
affected. And that in a way was the point. To my ears Michael Fordham
tended to use words that had an abstract, denotative quality I found difficult to
absorb, whereas I preferred, and could more easily assimilate, language used
resonantly and evocatively. When I brought the matter up, MF immediately
took the point and launched, with relish, into Coleridge's famous opening
lines:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
For a moment we'd sat there, resting, as if the sonorous beauty had
suddenly lifted us out of our quotidian lives. Then I'd quipped: ‘Not a bad
choice for an analyst!’ Later, learning I was particularly interested in the
novels of Conrad he mentioned that his father had known Edward Garnett, the
first editor of Conrad's work. And—'to show that analysts can write novels
too ‘—he'd handed me a volume of Wilfrid Bion's trilogy to read, quoting its
striking epigraph, ‘happy holocaust‘—as if challenging me not to be
impressed.
But despite his empathic efforts—his searching for a middle ground—I
must have remained unconvinced for I continued to introduce pieces of poetry
into our conversation—just as I am doing here—as if insisting upon it as a
better source for communicating about the psyche than the academically,
intellectually tinged language he mainly used. And as if to support the hidden
contention I brought rhythmic scraps of my own:
Here we are, bivouacked in time,
perched in the folds of a high ridge
overlooking the field of tomorrow's battle. Outside
the ceaseless passage of men and arms:
horses jostling in the dark, sudden flares, curses
carried on the wind. Inside, an inch above our heads,
the rain drums thunderously on the canvas.
The Falklands campaign was underway and, as a peacetime child, I'd been
imagining what it was like to be in the midst of a war, and was trying to gain a
long perspective by merging contemporary images with those I'd recently seen
in a medieval painting. ‘Each of us seeks/the still moment/before action’, I
added, and then more portentously: ‘History is at once/too great and small /
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for humankind‘—trying to encompass, in a couple of lines, the contemplation
of individual destiny within the implacably dehumanizing effects of war.
Michael Fordham stared at me as if momentarily nonplussed. Then, without
commenting on the language or my use of (not very good) free verse to shape
my feelings he selected the ‘folds of a high ridge’ and linked these to the
breast and wondered what the ‘battle’ might be about in this connection. It
was my turn to be at a loss. It wasn't that I couldn't understand the allusion or
that, on this occasion, an image hadn't been evoked—the rise of a woman's
chest-bone, the soft slope of her cleavage. Perhaps, if he'd gone on to link,
say, the vicissitudes of breast feeding with the acquisition of language or the
distortions of war we might have had an interesting conversation. But, left as
it was, his intervention seemed arbitrary, not entirely connected to the present
moment. And unless one were pre-disposed to think in, say, Kleinian terms, I
couldn't see, quite, how the words I'd used suggested that particular image
rather than another. I sensed that an idea, through a subtle redeployment of
language, was being imported. I didn't think there was anything devious about
this. Perhaps it was a good idea. But what it also did was to diminish or
narrow the field of reference upon which I was drawing. It ignored the
engagement with the outside world as distinct from the inner—my attempt to
grapple with a real, historical event taking place, every day, before our eyes.
It began to localize whereas I, instead, was trying, un-defensively, to get at a
general truth. And it left unanswered the question I was searching to ask of
analysis: words being what they are, common to us all, yet closely and
personally attached; couldn't analysis all too easily amount to no more than
conversion to a different kind of speech, amount to no more, say, than
allowing oneself to be translated? After all, hadn't I met people who, rather
than having analytic thought and language at their disposal, seemed possessed
by them and not always to their advantage?
That, then, comes to the end of my contribution to the sentence I quoted
earlier. In due course I should like to add some further remarks about analysis
and language. The second half—‘he wished to be received‘—I owe to James
Astor who added to all that I said an existential and summarizing inference or
perception of his own. And since it belongs to JA I shall briefly record how,
perhaps even before he consciously knew why, he started to put it into
practice.
Meeting for the first time we exchanged a glance or two and, after I had
mumbled something about my journey, he indicated a chair and said: ‘Well,
let's get down to it’. This was crisply delivered and with a slight straightening
of the shoulders that might not have been out of place at the start of a business
meeting—as if to say: ‘There's a job of work to be done’. And note that it
wasn't ‘let's get on with it’, but down, as if, wherever the down might be, it
was a normal direction to head off in for someone who was unfussily
indicating he might have been there before. I began to explain that I'd not
seemed to manage very well in analysis, that things had ended rather badly,
that I'd not really felt understood—'the cry down the centuries’, as I put it. I'd
been left with a question or two I wanted to sort out.
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Even as I spoke I became aware that the person sitting opposite was not
merely listening intently. He was listening in an unusual way. It was as if,
moment upon moment, he was allowing every part of himself, body as well as
mind—the involuntary twitch of a leg, a shift in posture, the slight raising of a
hand—to register the import of what I was saying and what I was like. It was
towards the end of the interview, I recall, that he began to adopt the mentally
conjoint position he describes above. This occurred as I reached the end of
my complaint about the worthlessness of interpretations. I don't know quite
what I expected— that he might question or challenge what, after all,
amounted to a scathing attack. Perhaps he would talk, as had Michael
Fordham, about how I threatened ‘the frame’ and adduce reasons for why I
might do this. But he did nothing of the kind. Much to my surprise I found him
not merely running mentally alongside but coming up with a comparable
instance of his own. He constantly found it necessary, he said, to ask the
trainees he supervised whether the interpretations they set store by actually
did make a difference and, if so, how they could tell. I looked out of the
window. London rooftops, a straggling sycamore, the steady passage of a
plane from left to right of the glass. The open-mindedness seemed genuine, not
solely for my benefit. If not doubt, it contained a note of real, undecided
enquiry. Whether he, too, looked out of the window I do not know, since the
view was very familiar to him and he was occupied bringing his thoughts to a
conclusion. When he did, they crystallized in a question, asked in a tone that
now contained a hint of rueful defiance—as of a man who had struggled long
years and had yet to answer it to his satisfaction. It wasn't asked of me either.
Instead, glancing downwards and then up and towards the window and the
white sky above, he threw it, with a wry laugh, out onto the air:‘What works?’
he said. And then again: ‘What works?’ And then—a space appeared in my
mind.
In mid-sentence James Astor writes: ‘indecision, felt as a space between’.
In his paper JA imagines occupying a space between alternative
understandings of what took place in an analysis. This emerges from what he
calls his ‘indecision ‘— his inability to decide between two points of view
or even to know, to begin with, why he should be occupied with them. This, I
believe, is one of his characteristic stances, if I may call it so, and just as
above it allows him in due course to develop, in my opinion, a balanced and
open-minded assessment of the situation, so his ability to create a mental
space or sense of roominess has allowed me, however tentatively, to begin
mentally wandering about and seeing what might be worth finding—like a
small child. Here, indeed, one might invoke Winnicott's ‘transitional area’ or,
more pertinently for my current exploration, Keats's ‘negative capability’, to
indicate the human resource that may underlie and allow it to arise—‘no
irritable reaching after fact and reason’, ‘remaining
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content with half-knowledge’. For what again appearstobethe caseinmysearch
for what's helpful is not the application of analytic method but phenomena that
devolve, as it were, from aspects of personality.
Of course, even after I had caused James Astor to desist from offering
interpretations, analysis often cropped up in our conversation. Despite an
ambivalence which had grown more profound the longer I experienced the
practice, I yet reserved a pale interest in analytic thought and ideas and, from
time to time, would ask about new developments or research or want to know
how the Society of Analytical Psychology was faring and what issues were
facing it. But equally our talk would consist of sharing reactions to TV
programmes, the political scene, a newspaper article that struck a chord, the
latest book by Sebald or Javier Marias. I am particularly fond of music and,
for my part, would pass on my latest, rather esoteric, enthusiasms—neglected
works of the Bohemian composer, Vorisek, the trios of Hummel, or the ballad
and wedding songs played with a blackberry branch and horsehair bow by the
Romanian gypsy ‘lauter’, Nicolae Neacşu. I would mention social events in
the small village where I live, the beautiful countryside beyond. And always,
dolefully, I'd report how humdrum, unfulfilled, my life was. ‘No purpose’, I'd
repeat, like a mantra.
When I asked myself what was happening in our meetings, like the wavy
rooftops they seemed to escape easy definition. I noticed a pattern—topical
exchange, information passing, loose seriousness beneath. From an analytic
point of view they were different from what I had experienced before— freer,
more airy. There was a sense in which, having seen off that bugbear,
interpretation, I felt more able to be … well … to be. And I'm not sure it
wasn't the same for JA, for he told me of matters which, had they occurred to
him while the usual parameters were being observed, I doubt would have
been mentioned—his wish to withdraw from analytic work to concentrate on
other projects, his concern—passionate—about the bureaucratic effects of
regulation. He knew I was an old hand analytically who in the past had ‘tested
the method to its limits’ and most of what I said must have seemed to confirm
this. I can imagine him thinking at some stage: ‘Well, clearly, there's no point
in my trying to analyse this man, even if he would allow it, which he won't.
He's in a bad way so I don't feel like chucking him out. So I might as well
carry on, sit here every once in a while, and see what happens’.
But might it not be, I wondered, the beginnings of an analysis conducted on
the principle of double bluff? I say this not to impugn James Astor's integrity
but rather to draw attention to the lengths to which I was going to try to sort
out, in my own mind, what, as opposed to anything else, analysis really was
and whether it had benefits which so far had eluded me. Perhaps, for instance,
what I had needed all along was psychotherapy—a more practical, time-
limited, objective-orientated approach. But if that was the case, I reflected, no
one, neither of my analysts nor others I had met in the course of being
assessed or referred or whom I had consulted for various reasons later on,
had ever chosen to point this out to me. Yet wasn't there an important issue
here—not so much
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about discrimination between two disciplines—but how closely and
accurately needs were apprehended and defined? I couldn't remember what
reasons I had given many years ago for wanting to enter analysis or what I had
thought I might get out of it. I retained a memory that they were vague and, to a
degree, improvised. It is very likely I was uncertain and unclear. But if so,
what might have been a fruitful point of departure for either psychotherapy or
analysis—my very inability to be aware of and state my needs—was never
pursued. Had it been I might have been saved a lot of trouble. I thought I had
better get down to it. And weren't they very simple? Apart from not being
interpreted, I said, I needed to be agreed with, and I needed encouragement.
Two further sentences from the paper: ‘What may have been different
about the way I worked was that I would describe what I understood K to
have said in a way that acknowledged the affective content openly, in what
John Steiner has called analyst-centred interpretations. This style removes as
far as possible the projective content of the interpretation’. I have selected
these sentences because I think they are the first point at which James Astor
reflects analytically on the way he and I are relating, as distinct from analytic
commentary on the situation that obtained in my analysis with Fordham. And I
do so not to remark on the content or the variation in technique but to point out
that the primary function of the reflection is that of locating for JA where, in
analytic terms, he has arrived at. It is—as is much analytic thinking and,
inevitably, writing—post hoc, after the event. Again I am not suggesting life
could be otherwise or that subsequent thought cannot be accurate or relevant.
But what it isn't, in this instance, is an analytic reflection that reaches into the
material accumulating in our meetings. What there is of that is chiefly in
recapitulation of the work done with MF. Nor, given the main purpose of the
paper—honouring his life and work—would it be appropriate. But I cannot
help observing that, for whatever reason, it leaves unobstructed the track I
was on before. It is quite possible that under different circumstances JA
would have much to say analytically about the material, but realizes it isn't
useful or helpful to tell me. Equally, following my instruction he may not care
to think analytically at all or, if the habit is hard to break, tries instantly to
forget or un-remember. Either way, whether he thinks or unthinks doesn't
matter. For what James Astor appears to understand better than anything else,
instinctively, intuitively, pre-rationally, is that what counts most with me is
not only a feeling response, but a spontaneous one.
In this way I allude to the need for what Anne Alvarez has called ‘live
company’, occasioned by a baby and childhood spent close to a chronically
ill and unhappy mother, and to a youth in which, having largely ignored my
existence thus far, my father took to criticizing and undermining me to such an
extent that I could only believe positive comments if they were impromptu and
unsolicited and my doubting mind could not pick them to pieces. I am
speaking of comments from others. I cannot recall a word of real interest from
my father, let alone praise.
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With these remarks I enter upon the main theme of the above paper. Since
JA's representation of my point of view is broadly accurate I do not want to
evoke further episodes from the analysis at this juncture. Its sad outcome was,
I think, brought about by the interplay of factors beyond the control of either
Michael Fordham or myself. Subject to mental and emotional cruelty I
suppressed much of the hurt and anger associated with my father's rejecting
behaviour in order to cope, and could only have been contacted by an
intelligence of feeling that reached far beyond the terseness and off-
handedness (and infrequency) with which I spoke about him. My analyst felt
himself a failure in supporting his father and, to a degree, Jung, from whom he
seems to have twice suffered something like rejection. He may also have
muted his emotional life because of fear of his own passionate nature. As a
result he was unable to provide the connectedness-in-feeling I needed, whilst
I was unable to express enough of the hurt and anger to enable him to make
more progress. Because of my sensitivity to language I detected the feeling
problem early on but had no idea what it meant. Fordham's mental acuity
allowed him to understand my defences but not to engage with the damage that
lay behind them. Accordingly, both of us slipped into unconsciousness—a
‘state of identity‘—and although each tried hard, neither were able to emerge.
At the end both felt confused and a failure. I thought I was to blame because of
some inherent stubbornness but lost faith in analysis because it rested on
human oversights that had proved destructive. MF thought he had applied the
method correctly but couldn't in the last resort understand why things had gone
badly and felt he had let a patient down.
This summary will make clear why I have chosen not to focus on the
analytic content of James Astor's paper but instead to use it as a kind of
springboard to explore what might lugubriously be called the human pre-
conditions for the operation of the analytic method. Before that I shall need to
describe briefly the sequence of mental and emotional events that, after a
number of years, brought me to his door, and once again try to evoke the
feeling content of our meetings.
Owing to my father's unpleasantness I am, as will be obvious, sensitive to
any experience of rejection. Unfortunately just such a process occurred within
the analysis. It was set in motion by Fordham's curt response to my suggestion
that the impasse overtaking us might be due to neglect of the paternal
transference. Of course, I didn't put it like that. At the time I was becoming
demoralized by what I experienced as a lack of direction. I was beginning to
feel as if I were in a waking dream, or spellbound or had unaccountably
slipped underwater. I therefore spoke dully. What I said was: ‘I think there's
something missing, “not there”, in this analysis’. Then, as I tried to be less
vague: ‘s omething's not being taken up’. And finally: ‘I think it's to do with
my father’. This was offered as an attempt to be helpful and expressed the
commitment I then felt towards the
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analytic process. Consequently, MF's tetchy ‘O that—we've done all that’
was hurtful. But also bewildering. The impatience seemed to imply it was a
matter I had brought up repeatedly. Yet I'd last mentioned my father a good
twelve month before and had never dwelled long on any aspect of my
relationship with him because I found it so painful. I therefore could not
understand to what the ‘all’ or ‘done’ referred.
That, as I say, was the beginning. It was followed by what, from my point
of view, was the far more upsetting episode of Fordham's change of mind
about the paper I'd written—already something of a last throw on my part—
and finally by his termination of the analysis itself. I should add that I didn't
protest. By that time I had given up hope and could no longer see any point in
continuing. But I was not in good shape. While still in analysis the pain and
fury I was no longer able to carry mentally had passed into my body where it
brought about a long term, enervating, psychosomatic condition. The effect of
the inadvertent process of rejection, recapitulating what had happened earlier
in my life, drew me close to a state of trauma. I could barely scrape up a
shred of self-belief, far less hold to any idea that my earlier misgivings might
have been well placed. Eminent as he was, I assumed Michael Fordham had
been right to ignore them and to continue to focus on my relationship with my
sorrowful mother to explain my ever-increasing misery. I therefore thought I
was to blame for the end of the analysis—some destructive, impenetrable
resistance I had yet to understand. Clinical papers in which I made ghostly,
fragmentary appearances seemed to imply as much. Engulfed by distress, I
gave up—became, as my wife rightly observed, ‘shabby’. ‘Broken’ was the
word I used.
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.
Another for the lexicon. Certainly Beckett spoke to the minimalist position I
now found myself in. But it was a remark of my wife that first broke the
morbid torpor. It was abrupt and plain. ‘You weren't helped by analysis. You
were diminished’. My wife is a forthright, intelligent and loving person. She
has suffered many years watching alongside as I have struggled to extract a
meaning from analysis that was not there, unable herself to risk a questioning
word, so desperately and foolishly had I committed myself to the idea that
sooner or later I would find that meaning and help would arrive. I may have
protested feebly, unwilling to acknowledge my wrong-headedness or the
many wasted years. But her truth held sway. It was undeniable. That was
exactly how I had felt—as if I had been using all my strength to cram into an
area that was too small for me.
Appropriate puncturing of an inflated ego? I don't think so. Reculer pour
mieux sauter —necessary regression? Perhaps. A claustrum in projection?
Possibly. A large part of myself left out, unrecognized? Certainly.
Yet it needed something else to revive sufficient confidence to seek
answers to the ‘question or two’ I had in mind. The prompting came not so
much from an unexpected quarter as in a curious sequence of thought. As I
have said, I am fond of both imaginative literature and music. The last affects
me in the same way as, apparently, it affected Michael Fordham, and I now
recall our sharing
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a pleasure in Bach's ‘confounding of the congregation with diverse melodies’
and solemnly discussing the possibility—I forget who came up with the idea
—that Mozart's earliest musical ideas might have been inspired by the tinkle
of his urine in a pisspot. So powerful, indeed, is the effect of music that even
when I steel myself in advance I am quite unable to listen to certain works
without breaking down in tears. Listening to it is a usual and sustaining
occupation, particularly during bleak periods. It has been called the ‘art of
arts’ and said to be, I think by John Berger in a short story, ‘about survival’. I
take this to mean that while music may call out our most refined and organized
responses it is yet rooted in the most primitive and earliest of body memories
—the beat of a heart, the pulse-like rhythm—the dance—of life itself.
On the occasion I have in mind I had chosen to listen to Beethoven's Violin
Concerto. It is a work with which I soon get into difficulties. The ascending
entry of the solo part in the first movement reminds me incontestably of the
rising of the human spirit out of darkness. Whether or not I got that far I am
uncertain because I next remember coming round —I had evidently been
transported elsewhere—with several unbidden questions in my head. How, if
music could so communicate and I so respond, had analysis left me so
unmoved, except, that is, for an avalanche of pain added to that I already
knew of? Did analysts, perhaps, need to be more like artists? Music, and
imaginative literature, seemed to teach and uplift on their own. Wasn't beauty
—experienced as an astonishing, vivifying power—the real food of the soul?
And why did analytic thought appear to have so little to say about it?
It was a while before I pursued the latter questions. At the time it was the
first, the reminder that I had no difficulty fully responding when fully
communicated with, that served to propel me to action. But I hesitated. If my
guesses were correct I knew information could emerge that, in the wrong
hands, might deleteriously affect Fordham's reputation. Since I thought my
experience might be unusual and, in other respects I knew of, that reputation
well deserved, I had no wish to be party to slighting it. There was another
resistance too. As a means of trying to come to terms with my father's cruelty I
had sought to understand what might have caused him to behave as he did. I
came up with several viable hypotheses. None, however, could remove the
resentment I felt at being forced to muster an interest in his life when he had
shown so little in mine. The hangover of these and other reservations dragged
at my steps. Yet the thought that unless my queries were answered I might be
doing myself an injustice—more, that the situation might contain an inkling of
change for the better—persisted.
Accordingly, after dithering for several months, I wrote to James Astor,
whom I knew to have been his colleague and friend, asking for a consultation.
I explained in an enclosure that I thought Fordham may have had a problem in
the area of feeling, and particularly feeling connected with father-son
relationship and I instanced a few examples.
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I do not want to repeat what James Astor told me over a number of
meetings and which he summarizes above. What is important to record here is
the shift of feeling that took place in me as he did so: first surprise, at his
readiness to share what he knew and the number of facts that seemed to
support my point of view; dismay at what I learned about Fordham's life in
respect of his mother, sister and the sad end of his father; relief, none the less,
and a certain satisfaction that there appeared good grounds for my hunch;
gratitude that what I was saying was at last being taken seriously; and finally,
a recognition of how lonely, apart from my wife, I had felt up to that point.
Again it will be seen that, although the subject of our conversation pertained
to analysis, no analytic exchange took place. Clearly, it is the information
itself that acts as the main agent for the shifts of feeling. But I think there is
another factor involved, that is, the personal qualities of the man to whom I
was speaking. Phrases like ‘receptiveness’, ‘non-judgmental attention’,
‘empathic imagination’, ‘capacity for fellow feeling’ abound in the literature
and have become too tired to convey more than a simulacrum of what one
experiences in practice—quick attunement to what one is saying, an
immediacy of response, humour, a readiness to be of assistance, clarifying
remarks, a waiting upon what one wishes to say, a matter-of-fact acceptance
of what one is about. I am sure that all these aspects of the way James Astor
related to me were instrumental in my being able to bring to our meetings
more of how I felt in respect of the past and, increasingly, to bring those
feelings to the present moment. Correspondingly, JA has told me that our
conversation about language played a part in his subsequently writing a paper
about the presentation of self in analysis and fiction.
Perhaps the mention of fiction is not accidental for it is hard to imagine,
outside the scope of a novel or play, how the interplay of personal qualities
could be convincingly portrayed or their therapeutic value demonstrated. But
that they do have such value is well known, even though few commentators go
beyond enumeration and characterization of the qualities themselves. It
follows that other qualities may have a negative effect. This was the case with
MF and the ‘family arrogance’ mentioned above. Not only did he ignore the
message about paternal transference when I brought it up, he ignored it on
several subsequent occasions—blindness or avoidance as well, perhaps, but
also someone who did not like his view challenged. Thus, if the opening
pages of the piece I wrote shortly afterwards—the paper Fordham thought to
include in a collection of his own, then changed his mind about—are read in
this context, it will be seen that it is precisely the trait of arrogance I single
out. I argue that in Defences of the Self Fordham assumes a superior position
to a patient about knowledge of reality and unreality despite the fact that, as
the ambiguous syntax and expression show, he has yet to separate himself out
from the patient properly in his mind. It is worth adding that in this respect the
paper can be read as an unconscious perception of, and an oblique
commentary on, the ‘state of identity’ already obtaining between us.
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I need to say parenthetically that, other than as a description of regression,
the rest of the piece should not be taken at face value. It was written when I
was ill and the analysis failing. How conscious I was of the latter I am unsure.
Certainly, except for the opening pages, it was written compulsively and with
a measure of desperation and, if a favourable portrait of Fordham emerges, it
should be recognized that, to an extent, the piece was written to please.
Earlier I described it as ‘a last throw’, and by this I mean that at the time I
was protecting myself against knowledge of what the impasse, which I still
regarded as my fault, might imply and was presenting a favourable account to
convince both MF and myself that things were not as bad as they seemed. I
was also trying to demonstrate that I was capable of gratitude, knew how
analysis worked, and could appreciate its value. But even this was not quite
what it seems. I think at another level the paper stands as testimony to the
desperation of a small child who fancifully imagines that if he gives to the
father (an author) what he believes will please him he will in return be
understood, accepted and loved. I would suggest that I ‘acted out’ this
position in default of my analyst recognizing the depth of hurt to which I had
been subject. Consequently, he too got caught up in the enactment.
I cannot recall when I consciously realized that JA was meeting another of
the needs I had mentioned during our early conversations. Rather than
straightforwardly agreeing with me—which he sometimes did—it was more
as if, having listened, he would respond in kind and then add extrapolations of
his own. These I could pursue if I wished or, if not, he would let the matter
drop and let me take up a different thread. He was cognisant, too, of my
feelings. As my thoughts moved from past events to the present the sense of
purposelessness from which I suffered would take hold and I would
sometimes arrive barely able to speak. When I did it would be falteringly and
with uncertainty and I would be annoyed I couldn't be more coherent. But
these hesitations JA took as a matter of course and held to silence until I found
what it was I wanted to say. Not infrequently, this would concern the natural
disasters or calamitous events I had seen on TV. It seemed only the most dire
or extreme situations could speak to the broken-ness I felt behind the lack of
hope. One of these programmes was the BBC series on the Holocaust.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once remarked that no poetry
was possible after Auschwitz. By way of response the Austrian poet, Erich
Fried, wrote a poem entitled ‘Questions about Poetry since Auschwitz’ in
which he imagines the spirit of poetry rising out of the smoke of the cremation
ovens at Birkenau in the form of a small, brown bird that flies over the war-
torn landscape of raped girls, ruined cities and starving people, singing ‘its
song of quiet love’ and gathering on its way a sense of beauty from the
‘colours / of bodies torn to pieces’, ‘the bright flames of village huts’, ‘the
glint / of the changing daylight / in glazed eyes’. Finally it builds a nest ‘of
hair / of paper shreds of rags and bloody feathers’ and waits for mating and
the ‘hatching of / its eternally innocent young’ (1978, pp. 66-7). It is a highly
equivocal poem that simultaneously seems
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to suggest that the spirit of art is unquenchable, that its basis may or may not
be amoral, that it may or may not have a healing power, that any idea that it
truly can survive such devastation is weak-minded folly—and I thought of it
while watching the series. Over several weeks the programmes reconstructed
the development of the extermination policy of the Third Reich, often focusing
on the activities of minor officials who, sometimes obliviously, sometimes
not, performed the small but vital functions without which the policy as a
whole could not have been implemented. And then, once more, one saw the
never-to-be-forgotten footage of families torn apart, grim trains, the death
camps, the emaciated, stalk-like figures. Nothing, one would have thought,
could possibly accompany the starkness of such images. Yet always there was
music—a slow, ethereal threnody: Handel, Mozart, Gorecki, Pärt.
The worst human beings are capable of—and the best: a kind of double
vision. It was overwhelming. What part of this I brought to our meetings I
cannot remember. We did, however, talk about the series because I recall JA
wondering what he would have done if he had occupied one of those minor
official roles. He hoped he would have been able to resist. It was, I thought,
one of the few questions worth asking. The effect of this and the other
calamities I had been bringing was cumulative. I would be talking about some
unrelated subject and suddenly burst into tears, as if seeing again the multitude
of suffering faces that had passed across the TV screen. ‘A chief / Woe,
world-sorrow’, Hopkins calls it. I fought against the engulfment, seeking a
level mind. Then I came into conjunction with the sorrow, and learned
something else. I was crying for myself.
I take these moments, freighted upon the greater calamity of others, and in
the presence of someone relating to me in a quasi-paternal fashion, to be a
nodal point, a loosening of the pain into which Fordham, as he acknowledged,
could not make ‘inroads’. I attribute the shift not only to the internal work I
myself had been doing but also to the fact that James Astor took my point of
view seriously and responded generously. By this I mean his giving of
himself, his time, his interest, his willingness to imagine how I felt and,
perhaps above all, for an expressiveness that his friend and colleague may
have lacked. None of this, so far as I can tell, constituted a method. But it did
constitute the encouragement I needed and made me feel able to bear, for a
short while, my own vulnerability. Not a reciprocation in kind, of course, but
none the less obscurely prompted by what I had spontaneously been given.
I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, not
telling people beauty is the proper and respectable thing. I mean
beauty. You don't argue about an April wind, you feel bucked up
when you meet it. You feel bucked up
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when you come to a swift moving thought in Plato or a fine line in a
statue.
Ezra Pound (1954, p. 45)
Mostly, as I have said, Michael Fordham interpreted impassively—that is,
his communications rarely carried much feeling. This is also indicated by his
comments about Spiegelman above which leave one with the impression that
not only may ‘raw emotional responses’ be transformed—appropriately—
into interpretations, but feelings per se, including complex feelings, and this
appears to be confirmed by ‘The supposed limits of interpretation’, where he
seems to imply that expressing himself ‘with emotional conviction’ rather than
‘with my mind’ was unusual. It is not surprising therefore, since I had either
been ignored or ruthlessly criticized by my father, and the effects of this were
not otherwise being dealt with in the analysis, that I should sometimes have
unconsciously manipulated Fordham into giving a definite and spontaneous
emotional response. Thus I recall one session in which, after listening to his
interpretation of a dream, I wondered aloud, as I had done (tediously) many
times before, what dreams were for, they had no practical value, and so on
and so forth, and went on to ask why he bothered with them. His patience
quite worn out, he finally said, after one or two more formal remarks, and
with a note of good-humoured exasperation: ‘Because I like them!’ To which
I remember replying: ‘Now, with that, I have no difficulty’.
In so far as they were relatively free of affect his interpretations really
could sound mechanical—I am again referring to the situation in Defences of
the Self. Delivered with his mind I naturally received them with my mind,
grasped and understood them intellectually, but remained emotionally
untouched by them. It is in this sense and for this reason, as much as any
blocking or undoing or deliberate forgetting on my part, that they dropped
away and became ‘meaningless’ to me. Here, indeed, it may be pertinent to
report a dream from the analysis. I am sitting at a table in an underground
cafeteria or restaurant and an old man is proffering thin gruel which I have
difficulty in swallowing because it is unpleasant and unappetizing. As far as I
recall this was interpreted intra-psychically, as a dream about self-
impoverishment. To my mind it appears equally likely to be an unconscious
perception of the lack of emotional substance in Fordham's interpretations.
‘Gruel’ is already thin: ‘a fine flour’, ‘a light liquid food’ (OED). ‘Thin
gruel’ would therefore have very little nutritional value, and this appears to
be why I am having difficulty consuming it. And then there is the pun.
At this juncture I find myself asking whether my experience is found
elsewhere in analytic practice or confined to an individual case where,
unfortunately, an analyst's feeling responses were muted or unavailable in
certain areas due to personal factors. To what extent, if any, is the situation
capable of generalization? Since I am not myself a practitioner, I can only
make a judgement
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on the basis of how analysts report about their work in the literature, and even
here I cannot claim an informed view because I read such literature
infrequently. But my impression is that, so far as their more formal writing is
concerned, it is unusual for analysts to express much feeling about what they
are doing. This is by no means to say that feelings aren't mentioned, but mostly
these either belong to the patient or are feelings put into the analyst by the
patient or are feelings the analyst has as a result of these introjects. What
tends to be lacking is a sense that an analyst has an emotional life of his or her
own.
All this might be explained by the fact that analysts are seeking to report
objectively about their work and to share their findings with like-minded
others. Accordingly, personal utterance is disavowed in favour of academic,
clinical and theoretical modes of discourse that incline towards a neutral style
and tone of voice and where ‘independent’ feeling responses are regarded as
extraneous to the opus. This may seem laudable, but it has its dangers. For
instance, it may allow an analyst to appear more authoritative, reflective and
in control than in reality is the case. It can lead to the inappropriate exclusion
of emotions and passions that might otherwise disturb the calm, orderly
surface of theoretical exposition. Donald Meltzer, for example, years ago
remarked on ‘a certain shyness in speaking about love in the transference and
counter-transference’ and noticed the absence of the ‘vocabulary of
aesthetics’ in psychoanalytic theory. Guggenbuühl-Craig referred to ‘eros on
crutches’. At worst one can envisage a situation where theory or the
adumbration of myth become substitutes for the proper expression of feeling.
‘The emotional self looks to psychology’, says James Hillman, ‘… to connect
us with [the] soul’ (1972, p. 121). And from the linguistic point of view what
happens with analytic writing is that words are used in a less than resourceful
way. By this I mean that the evocative, associative, ambiguous, imagistic and
rhythmic powers of language tend to be neglected.
This, I believe, is to the detriment of the literature for, as even a brief
discursion on a few lines of poetry or dramatic verse can show, incorporating
such properties of language does not lead to a less truthful or objective or less
psychologically informed presentation of human affairs but, on the contrary, to
one which is likely to be more rounded, has broader appeal—is both more
widely accessible and addresses the heart and senses as well as the mind—
and is, therefore, arguably, more capable of revealing the realities of life and
the psyche, or at least holding them up for our inspection, than the narrower,
less expressive forms of rhetoric to which analysts usually confine
themselves.
Here, for example, are the opening lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore So do our
minutes hasten to their end.
One could begin by asking why the poem should start with two words of
nearly identical meaning. The reason becomes apparent in the next part of the
line. It allows Shakespeare to play natural rhythm of speech—the way the
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line is spoken—against metre, the basic rhythmic structure which here is
iambic (disyllabic) until one comes to ‘towards’ where Shakespeare inserts
an anapaestic (tri-syllabic) foot. Thus we are forced to read or speak the
word quickly— like, indeed, a wave rippling. Here, then, language is
enacting meaning. Note, too, that Shakespeare is using ‘make’ in its
appropriate nautical sense: to flow towards the land. When, having
interrupted the basic rhythm, he reverts to a strict iambic pentameter in the
next line, it creates a sense of quickening. Again his use of language is active
and dynamic.
Turning to a different image of water, it will be remembered that after
murdering King Duncan, Macbeth is almost immediately struck with guilt and
horrified imaginings. He feels his crime is so appalling that at one point he
wonders whether all the water in the world could wash his bloody hands
clean. He answers himself:
No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.
Again the second and third lines say more or less the same thing. But this
isn't straightforward tautology, the ‘vice of language’ as the ancient
rhetoricians called it. Rather it is a particular kind of tautology, a device
known as commoratio (‘delay, dwelling on a point’), where repetition is used
for the purpose of emphasis, here reflecting Macbeth's obsessional nature.
Again Shakespeare's choice and combination of adjective and verb are
skilful: a hard, polysyllabic word—‘multitudinous‘—followed by the
predominantly soft syllabled ‘incarnadine’ to create a hyperbolic image of
wave-crowded oceans, or the many oceans of the world, suffused with blood.
Incidentally, employing the word ‘incarnadine‘—flesh-coloured, crimson,
blood-red, as a verb: to tinge with incarnadine, to redden—is Shakespeare's
coinage. The following line becomes monosyllabic and ‘one’ is so placed that
it can refer backwards or forwards. Shakespeare can mean making the ‘green
one‘—all those oceans imaged as a single entity—‘red’ with blood; or he can
mean making ‘the green‘—the expanse of greenness of a sea—‘one red’, i.e.,
uniformly, ubiquitously red’. With a linguistic genius one can only assume
both are intended, that the syntactical mingling of red and green is deliberate
and, in a way, makes the point over again. Macbeth's guilt is unstoppable.
There's more about his psyche too. The phonetic ‘busyness’ of the first line,
contrasting with the simplicity of the second, allows Shakespeare to suggest
more about the inner working of his mind—his crime stretching endlessly in
his imagination, contracting as the guilt takes hold. And there is the move
away from any ennobling effect of latinate diction.
This is Shakespeare small scale. But he is, of course, capable of using
language in such ways, play after play to enact entire, highly complex themes
and movements of mind and feeling. What he demonstrates time and again is
an utterly precise depiction of a particular state of mind—and the precision
comes from a whole series of lexical choices.
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None of us would want to claim a hundredth of Shakespeare's aural and
emotional sensitivity. What I am suggesting is merely that analysts should be
more aware of the resources of language—after all, it is the medium of their
profession—and should always do rather more than reaching for the nearest
word to hand. But I am not suggesting this is easy. Choosing the right word—
when there are so many lying about—can take time, and the time for its
rightness may pass. There is the accent, too. Unless said in the right voice,
even the right words may miss their mark. Small wonder if analysts should
quail before the task or ask themselves whether words really make a
difference. Small wonder if, eschewing the more poetic refinements of
language themselves, they should none the less stud their accounts with
quotations from poems and imaginative literature whose eloquence might
seem reassuringly to suggest that they do.
The irony here draws upon what Adam Phillips has called the ‘uneasy’
relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry which he explores in his
miscellany Promises, Promises —‘uneasy’ because the former appears to
need the latter rather more than vice-versa (2000, p. 13). From Freud
onwards, Phillips suggests, through Klein, Bion, Lacan and others, poets and
poetry have always served, within the psychoanalytic tradition at least, as ego
ideals with seemingly privileged and easy access to the unconscious. As such
they have been co-opted to fill theoretical spaces in, or provide subliminal
inspiration for, various aspects of analytic thinking and method. Phillips's
examples are Bion's use of Keats's notion of ‘negative capability’ and the
influence upon Winnicott of the British tradition of nonsense poetry. But what
Phillips contends may lie more deeply behind the regular invocation of poets
and poetry—‘words self-evidently compelling, self-evidently good‘—is that
it helps mitigate or contain two ‘daunting fears’ that haunt the profession.
‘Knowing people in language is either impossible or no good; and knowing
people is impossible or no good or beside the point’ (ibid., p. 34; author's
italics). Whatever one may think of this—and it seems ponderable to me—it
sounds, I believe, the right cautionary note. It is difficult to gain authentic
knowledge of someone else, and words— yes, I do have to use a poet—'s
train/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden/Under the tension, slip,
slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place/Will not stay
still’ (T.S. Eliot 1969, p. 175). Unsurprisingly, Phillips's hopes for analytic
therapy are both modest and astute: ‘happiness and inspiration … [rather
than] self-knowledge, rigorous thinking or the Depths of Being’, ‘truthfulness
not truth’, ‘small gains rather than revelation’. I also note, having sometimes
felt I had reason to ask whether analysts might tie themselves up in so many
theoretical or mythological knots as to become, humanly speaking, unable to
see the wood for the trees, that Phillips describes himself as reacting to a
profession that ‘has become … more metaphysical and more committed to so-
called “research” as it has lost confidence in what it really has to offer,
which is often quite simple. Psychoanalysis does not need any more abstruse
or sentimental abstractions … it just needs more good sentences’ (T.S. Eliot
1969, p. xvi)
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For me the operative word in this is ‘simple’. For if I ask myself what
observations were helpful in my analysis, most were straightforward—for
instance, that I ‘kept things on a shelf in [my] mind’ or that my mother was
someone who ‘s ympathized but could not be supportive’ or, from the paper to
which I am responding, that I have a wish ‘to be received’. Perhaps it is
because I am unusually dense—or sophisticated—that only such simple
remarks seem to have mattered to me. I am quite aware that mental anguish
sometimes allows only a little of the outside world to register. But I also
know that, unguided and unattached to feeling, detached from sensory or
intuitive input, the mind can over-complicate—if for no other reason than to
keep itself exercised—can create, in William Blake's terms, ‘cloven fictions’
and dispel an already present, pre-existent clarity. Naturally I have asked
myself, too, why I should continue to summon poets. What gaps might they be
filling? What secret fear of the therapeutic frailty of language? But, then, I am
not trying to be analytic, and as far as I can tell—and I do not require coaxing
in this—it is only because I like the language of poets and find it harmonious
and often, though not necessarily, instructive. Which is to say, that I find it
beautiful.
With these remarks I arrive at the subject to which this piece has constantly
been alluding and which implicitly draws its various strands together—
namely, beauty, and its close attendant, the heart. Both figure in the phrases I
used during my analysis, and are referred to above: ‘[His father's] scorn and
violence were like a dagger to the heart… where the aesthetic feelings lay’.
Keeping to a personal footing I shall shortly pursue this image further and then
consider beauty more generally—another instance, perhaps, of ‘what works’.
As elsewhere the focus is not, strictly speaking, an analytic one. Nevertheless,
I make use of what analytic thought is available in this area, particularly that
of the depth psychologist, James Hillman, in The Thought of the Heart and
other papers, the psychoanalyst, Donald Meltzer, and Meg Harris Williams,
in the Apprehension of Beauty, and Nicola Glover's more recent study
Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School. In different ways all three
confirm what I suspected in my musical reverie: that beauty and the aesthetic
response play a central role in our lives, yet have only gradually come to
prominence in analytic theory and from there begun to influence practice and
the way analysts report about their work. Seeking to account for this relative
neglect Meltzer refers to the ‘poisoned atmosphere of institutionalized
psychoanalysis’ while Hillman asks: ‘Are we afraid of [beauty's] power?‘
As the figure of speech implies, the heart to which I referred was a product
of my imagination searching for a way to convey to Michael Fordham how
deeply I felt I had been hurt by my father's constant criticism and verbal
attacks. It is viewed as the repository of pain and rage and as a place of
shock: ‘dagger to the
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heart’ evokes a sudden attack, and instantly piercing. One is therefore
concerned not only with the sharpness of a blade but also with the undefended
softness of what the blade strikes into. These are preliminary, personal
associations. As far as I know my father was never physically violent.
Nevertheless, my simile suggests I experienced his attacks as murderous in
intensity and intention, though I am not implying he was consciously aware of
such a purpose. But that was their moral and emotional impact. For what he
attacked were core— heartfelt—aspects of personality: aliveness and vitality,
passion, independence of mind, what Hillman refers to as the leonine
‘courage to live’. If I ask myself why the hurt should have hurt so much, it
could only surface in a few visceral memories; I answer that I was already
subject to two problematic identifications: that with a loving and sensitive but
sick and vulnerable mother who was herself so bullied and denigrated that her
face gradually turned to a mask of brimming sorrow; and with a sister driven
half mad with persecution and fear, and whose yearning for paternal affection
was so thwarted it had to be satisfied with a fixed belief that kind, elderly
gentlemen in the media were sending her coded messages of secret and
especial love.
I do not want to dwell on the rigours such preoccupations may have held
for my states of mind as I grew up. The point here is that my emotional life,
conceived of as centring in the heart, was full of pain and fury at what I saw
around me and what I myself experienced—yet itself rested on an insecure
foundation. It was with this that Fordham, so much better at visualizing the
straits of mother-child relationship than of paternal tyranny, was helpful and
supportive, providing the insight, for example, that enabled me to see that the
ground of the existential terror to which, as an adult, I was still susceptible,
lay in the predicament I faced as a small child dependent on a sick mother for
survival. Again I do not wish to dwell on details other than to say that her
illness caused fits during which, before my scattered eyes, she seemed to die
and then, phantasmagorically, return to glazed, uncertain life. And though
Fordham may have insisted too heavily and too exclusively upon my
incorporation of her unhappiness, it was undoubtedly true that I was highly
sensitive to her suffering and came to harbour a loving but omnipotent wish to
cure her. For precisely the pain of it was this: that, despite the hardness of her
lot, she did not succumb, did not become inured, still flinched at every
wrathful word, struggled forth from every fit. Kept alive, as it's said, by hope.
Only to be wounded afresh.
Thus does the heart tell its jagged story. The harrowing it had to witness,
however, did not prevent my developing a responsiveness to beauty. What
that, in turn, had to contend with were my father's attacks—no doubt
Oedipally inspired—on any ability I might have had to make creative use of
it. Thus my own efforts at writing were attended by a chronic sense of self-
doubt and an experience of inner emptiness, derived from early childhood,
that often made it difficult to proceed. But happily none of this caused me to
relinquish the attachment I felt towards beauty nor did I fail to take notice of it
in literature, music and nature or, indeed, in the words and behaviour of those
I came into
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contact with. I did not shape any particular ideas in respect of it, nor
consciously engage in matters of taste or discrimination. It was enough to
know that it existed and, when I happened upon it, that it affected me deeply—
a counterpoise, so to say, to the unhappiness I was otherwise having to deal
with. It was also the place where I could exercise my mind appreciatively
rather than in the hypercritical and destructive ways I knew of from my father.
Yet I did not especially seek it out—either for that purpose or for solace or
refuge. It seemed a tougher proposition than that. One could absorb it
passively or luxuriantly if one wished. One could be charmed and stilled. But,
as in Platonic philosophy, it also seemed en-spiriting and powerful—‘what is
lovable in a strong and vehement sense’. And like love, one gave it name
upon name and none, or all, seemed to fit.
Beauty, in other words, offers possibilities. This may be due to its
elusiveness but, I think, more to do with its power to astonish, to stop us in
our tracks, force us to take a second look. Everyone knows W. H. Davies's
lines: ‘What is this life, if full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’.
This is precisely what beauty accomplishes. It brings us to a halt in which, for
a moment, we can no longer regard the world with tired eyes or closed minds
or blocked hearts, but are given the possibility of incipiently re-examining it. I
may be pressing the point too far but I think it might paradoxically be said that
what beauty affords us are discrete moments of becoming—the world held in
potentia, as it were. This might seem odd if one considers beauty in relation
to works of art, for example. Don't we expect of the artist exactly the
opposite? He or she should capture a version of beauty and make it
permanently available, against the withering effects of time, say, or because
‘[it] interposes itself between us and the hostile universe … [and] imposes a
form on our terrors as well as our desires’ (Picasso). Such observations
cannot be gainsaid. But what I would wish to add is that we are also drawn to
art for another fundamental purpose: it provides us with the opportunity of
encountering an object whose meaning, in so far as the concept can be
ascribed to it, cannot be exhausted. And I would suggest this derives from
another characteristic of beauty—that is, beauty is not capable of finally being
reduced, fixed, or systematized into any other form but itself. Abstraction
surrenders to it. It slips in under the ratiocinative urges of the mind. It bestows
its own fugitive terms. ‘It took dominion everywhere./The jar was gray and
bare./It did not give of bird or bush,/Like nothing else in Tennessee’ (Stevens
1953, p. 36).
The distinct, the singular, the Scotian quidditas —the this-ness of a thing:
that which defines it uniquely as itself. Beauty invites or compels us into life
and provides the opportunities through which we can most savour it, know
that it is delightful, and likely to satisfy us—body and soul. It has the power to
charm and soothe, but also to disrupt, cast mentally anew, transform. The
responses we have to it are organized and congruent with order. Where we
see it threatened, it encourages us to protect and preserve and, if necessary,
restore. If not in itself a generative principle, admixed with desire it becomes
the occasion for and of generation.
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Psychologically and otherwise, beauty matters. Meltzer: ‘There is much
evidence … that being … untouched [by beauty] is not compatible with
survival or at least survival of the mind’ (1988, p. 29).
When we take part in an analysis, either as patient or analyst, it may be
forgotten that the distinctions we make to understand psychological life and
upon which analytic theory and method depend may not exist in nature. Beauty
and the aesthetic response tend to remind us of this fact. Indeed it is almost the
point of beauty to say that we respond to it directly and in a wholehearted,
unitary way. Perhaps this is why both Freudian and Jungian traditions have
seemed uncomfortable with the subject, preferring to treat it only when
separated off in works of art and in relation to the lives of the artists who
created them. As an everyday matter, of which almost all of us will have
experience, it has largely been overlooked until comparatively recently. What
appears to have happened is that, serving initially as an opportunity to display
analytic ideas, the facts of aesthetic experience have instead gradually forced
analytic theory and method to change. This is particularly evident in the
Freudian tradition where, as Nicola Glover's study shows, psychoanalysts
have needed to re-think their ideas about barriers between ego and id and
distinctions between secondary and primary process both of which, it is now
suggested, may contain structure and organization. This in turn has led to
uncertainty about what and what does not constitute regression and raised the
possibility that the matrix of unconsciousness may itself be ‘constructive’.
Meanwhile, the Jungian tradition has had to wait until the work of James
Hillman for the subject of beauty to be brought to the fore. But this reasserts
the connection between aesthetic and moral response— kalon kagathon —
surprisingly severed by Jung himself, and emphasizes that, far from being an
incidental factor in our lives, the sense of beauty is crucial for our
psychological well being and can serve as a guide along the path of
individuation. Much of Hillman's work is focused on drawing attention to
what he calls the ‘repression’ of beauty in western society and the damaging
effects of that repression. This wider dimension has less occupied the
Freudian tradition, but there are similarities in other respects. In Bion's later
work, for example, we find emphasis simultaneously being laid on the
importance of love of truth (K link) and on registering the analytic encounter
as if it were an evolving aesthetic form.
This would appear to be the right direction. Attending to aesthetic values
seems to counter-balance any inclination to rely too exclusively on a
scientific approach and perhaps opens up the possibility of greater freedom,
though not less discipline, for the way in which analysts practise and report
about their work. Fernando Pessoa's observation that ‘impressions are
incommunicable unless we make them literary’ (2001, p. 107) might serve as
a guideline here. And if it true, as Apuleius suggests, that the psyche itself is
beautiful, then a
- 228 -
patient's allusion to aesthetic experience or the conjuring of a beautiful image
may represent not so much a particular trait of personality or a decorative
habiliment of mind, but, more importantly, be the expression of a vital feeling
of aliveness, and of connection to an authentic sense of self. ‘We possess
beauty’, says Plotinus, ‘when we are true to our own being’.
I see again the small room with its corrugated roof, attached to the end of
the yellow-bricked house. Along the front patio, past the wisteria-draped
main doorway—wild strawberries at one's feet, sprays of valerian, the tiered
lawns below. The glass doors through which one enters, the soft clunk behind.
To the right, shelves bowed by the heaviness of books from floor to ceiling.
Opposite, the turquoise couch and two pictures above: a sedge-coloured oil
painting of a gnarled group of trees and a Nicholson whose vibrant red central
square and adjacent blue are surrounded by warm, varied, rectangular greys.
On the left wall, a picture of children at play and, beneath, a framed citation
from the Society of Analytical Psychology, hanging askew. Further along, on
the other side of the kitchen door, another small oil, of the yellow house under
construction. Below, more shelves filled with books, stationery, pots of pens,
pencils, paintbrushes, boxes of matches. To the front, overlooking the garden's
sloping greenery, a little desk whose back is daubed in a child's meandering
white script, and on which sits a computer. Beside, a low round metal table
with a large circular ashtray on which rest several pipes and, next to this, a
high, wing-backed chair and another chair opposite. Alongside, an art
nouveau table-lamp standing on a flat, boxed atlas lying on a low-slung filing
cabinet on wheels. These seem artlessly to compose a triadic image of an
analyst's life.
He enters from the kitchen, still bulky and robust despite his more than
eighty years, his complexion waxy and pallid from the smoking and the lack of
exercise and air. He lowers himself into the wing-backed chair, letting it first
take his weight, allowing his feet to rock momentarily off the ground. A
contented click of the tongue, perhaps, a pipe being grasped by a large,
peasant hand. This, and his small round eyes and rounded eyebrows lend his
appearance a simian air. Above, on the corrugated roof, the patter of birds’
feet. He glances in my direction, usually waiting for me to speak. But
sometimes it is otherwise. Once, as I sat down, I heard a voice chirruping:
‘Come to your womb-room?’ The old man is looking at me quizzically to see
what I make of the joke.
Michael Fordham died a few years after my analysis. My memories of him
cannot be uncomplicated. I loved and respected him for the long time he spent
unselfishly seeking to understand and help me and, to a point, where my
mother was concerned, he succeeded. But I also recall, as I have described,
much unnecessary pain and a sense of wasted years. Towards the end I felt
barely alive. Whatever else may be said, analysis rests on human factors and,
on this occasion, such factors, exerting themselves in the difficulties that arose
between
- 229 -
us, determined the final outcome. That is why this report about my experience
has had to take an autobiographical form and pitch itself beneath the method
and theory supposedly designed to guard against such eventualities.
But this is not what I wish as a final word. Frequently, like everyone else,
I used analytic sessions to bemoan my fate. Once, I remember, I put this in the
form of saying to Fordham: ‘It's all right for you. You are a man who has done
good in the world. But I …’. I shall spare the reader further reminiscence
about my letting down the universe. It is the tone of voice I want to recapture.
It was low-key, matter-of-fact, parenthetic. I had in mind Fordham's long and
founding service to the Society, his editorship of Jung's Collected Works, his
own numerous contributions of papers and books on analytic psychology,
drawn from many years’ work with many patients. As far as I was concerned I
was merely stating the obvious. But I subsequently discovered this was not a
view he held securely about himself. Towards the end of my analysis he
acknowledged that he had ‘made a blunder’ and that ‘things had been rather
close to the bone‘—though I had been too exhausted to care or ask what he
meant. As James Astor has indicated, he continued to be open to doubt. I
mention all this because after his death I began to read The Making of An
Analyst and found exactly the same sentence in its preface: ‘I am a man who
has done good in the world’. It is, of course, a common expression and could
have come into his mind from anywhere. But he must have been writing the
memoir when I used it and it is easy to imagine that he might have been more
ready to accept its truth because it was said unemphatically, almost
impersonally, but without reserve. At least, that is what I hope. Let his Shade
pass.
Translations of Abstract
Il s'agit du récit personnel d'une analyse avec Michael Fordham et de
conversations ultérieures avec James Astor. Un grand nombre de thèmes est
abordé, notamment ceux de l'expression du sentiment, de l'usage du langage et
de la pertinence des valeurs esthétiques pour la pratique et l' écriture
analytiques.
Eine persönliche Bestandsaufnahme einer Analyse, die Michael Fordham
durchgeführt hat, sowie nachfolgender Gespräche mit James Astor. Eine
Reihe von Themen wird entwickelt, die den Ausdruck von Gefühlen, den
Gebrauch von Sprache und die Relevanz der ästhetischen Werte für Praxis
und Darstellung von Analysen betreffen.
Un resoconto personale di una analisi con Michael Fordham e susseguente
conversazione con James Astor. Ne emergono molti temi che riguardano
l'espressione dei sentimenti, l'uso del linguaggio e l'importanza dei valori
estetici per la pratica e il racconto di una analisi.
- 230 -
Una opinión personal de un análisis con Michael Fordham y las
subsiguientes conversaciones con James Astor. Numerosos temas se
desarrollan en relación a la expresión de sentimientos, el uso del lenguaje, y
la revelacieon de valores estéticos en la práctica y reporte del análisis.
References
Eliot, T. S. (1969). The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber.
Fried, E. (1978). 100 Poems Without A Country, trans. Stuart Hood. London:
Calder.
Hillman, J. (1972). The Myth of Analysis. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Meltzer, D. (1988). The Apprehension of Beauty. Strath Tay: Clunie Press.
[→]
Pessoa, F. (2001). The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith. London:
Penguin.
Phillips, A. (2000). Promises, Promises. London: Faber.
Pound, E. (1954). Literary Essays. London: Faber.
Stevens, W. (1953). Selected Poems. London: Faber.
[Ms first received July 2006; final version December
- 231 -
Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
(2007). ‘What Works?’ Response to the Paper by James Astor. J. Anal.
Psychol., 52:207-231

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Journal of Analytical Psychology, 52:207-231

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