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Winner of the 2010 Student Essay Contest: Amy Blume-Marcovici
Id of the garden: A case study
Amy C. Blume-Marcovici
This is a room you would expect to find at a psychiatric hospital. The lights are dim but sharp, the color of a worn-out highlighter. There are no windows. The floor is checkered linoleum: black and white, as if that is the way the world works. And for many of the people here, it is a black and white world, in and out of psychiatric hospitals like this. They operate inside a sort of Kleinian masterpiece: constantly vacillating between hope and despair, love and hate, libido and aggression with nothing in between but silence. At times, the silence here is frightening.
Today, however, it is not silent. As an intake coordinator, I have done four admissions already, and it's only noon. I've gotten my interviews down to thirty minutes, moving from a mini-mental status to trauma history with the grace of a fighter pilot.
I'm hungry. It's lunchtime. When I was young, we were not allowed to eat between meals. Kitchen's closed, my mom would say. And that was that. I can picture her face: soft and ironic as she speaks. I suddenly want to feel the sound of those words, and so I whisper them:
"Kitchen's closed."
"What?" my new intake asks and I snap back to the present. "Can't eat" she moans, rolling onto her side. The mattress sags. "I can't, can't." Her bare feet rest on cold metal that is the end of the bed frame. Her thin ankles, swollen with liver spots, are shackled. I flip through her paperwork. She's been in the mental health system since she was 22. Now she's 60. Psychosis NOS. She mumbles something inaudible and I glance up. It's my turn:
"What?"
She looks at me but doesn't answer my question. Suddenly she bursts into a boisterous laugh, lips curled back to reveal a cave of mushy, red decay. Her round face turns so purple I wonder if I should get the nurse, but she stops laughing as quickly as she began. She turns onto her back and stares at the ceiling, quiet and pensive. I wonder what she sees there, in the stain and flake of the plaster. I could ask her: Tell me what it looks like to you. What might this ceiling be? I imagine her answer: a morbid, an ALOG, animal content.
The security guard waiting outside peaks in. I'd forgotten he was there. The Guard. He is a tall man, even in the humbling blue uniform, with sunken eyes. He looks like he could say something wise and funny and sad all at once. Instead he is quiet. "Everything alright?" he asks with his forehead. I smile and nod. A young woman in a room with a cackling patient. He lifts his eyebrows and retreats to the hallway.
"Let's continue," I say. My intake doesn't answer. "Can you tell me where you are?" …Silence… "Do you know why you're here?" …Nothing… I think of Nancy McWilliams' suggestion that psychotically-organized clients require more supportive therapeutic techniques and alter the pitch of my voice to make it gentler, earnest. "Do you know what sort of place this is?" I coo. Still, I get no response.
I breathe in deeply, rustling the paperwork I will soon need her to sign. This could take a long time and my stomach growls. Impatiens are high maintenance, my mother used to say when I got antsy. Flower puns were her favorite. I muse at the way the pun has hybrid itself here: inpatients are high maintenance. Thyme takes time, another she would dole out to her irritated children. I sigh and relax into my chair. "Do you know what day it is?"
Suddenly my intake looks at me. "Day?" She asks as though she has just been woken, eyes caked with fatigue. Her voice cracks as she whispers, "May I tell you my dream?" I am struck by the directness of her question. Saved by a dream! An image of Melanie Klein as a young woman comes to mind: she is lying in a hospital bed in Vienna. The room, despite decades passed, is precisely like this. She is depressed: unresponsive for days until she unexpectedly comes upon Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I imagine her sitting upright in her bed, arching her arms toward the sky. A miracle case thrust back into a life that would be real and coherent and meaningful. The woman who would bring psychoanalytic theory to psychosis, to clients like my intake. A woman saved by a dream.
"I'd be honored," I answer my intake. I am aware that her dream will desecrate my 30-minute average but dreams are a rare find in this place. I can hear my mother's voice: A dream shared is a secret bared. Sometimes my sister and I told each other dreams over bowls of Lucky Charms at breakfast. Mom would listen, strong hands folded beneath her narrow chin, forehead wrinkled in earnest. It is only now that I realize my mother, a mother and a gardener by trade and choice, would have loved psychoanalysis: her belief that dreams expressed something essential about the dreamer – something bold and raw; her perpetual use of metaphor as a means of hinting at a grander truth, as if to reveal the tip of a Freudian iceberg; her love of digging up the roots of plants to show her children the worms and the scent and the dark, active world that lay beneath. The id of a garden. I almost laugh as I picture her in a large armchair, my skinny, long-haired mother smoking a pipe and nodding as a client free-associates on the couch. My mother, the psychoanalyst!
I suddenly wonder why I am thinking so much of my mother today. I can hear her now: Sometimes we don't know why we do things, but that we did them deserves attention. That line, stern and crisp, was a harbinger of punishment for a deed gone wrong. What, today, have I done wrong? I look at the woman before me. My intake. I try to imagine her as a mother for just a moment, her emaciated arms wrapped around a baby. I almost practice whispering – mom – but she cuts me off. The tone of her voice has shifted: low pitch, staccato.
"What you must know is that I grew up in Oklahoma. The farm was. Oh yes," Staccato beat. She puts her hand up to her hollow eyes, as if trying to get a look at something spectacular. But she fails. "Sometimes in the dream I am inside me. Sometimes I'm not. Do you get that?" She doesn't look at me but I nod, one swift movement. "When I'm inside me, I'm a child again. When I'm not, I'm grown up and I watch myself with my little girl." Beat. She smiles at the ceiling. A sad smile. Perhaps human content this time, likely fictional. "In the dream, my daughter is an infant. She's grown now. All grown up. Yes. How old are you?" I don't answer – an attempt at neutrality – and she doesn't ask again. There is a pause and the silence leaves me guilty. I rustle paperwork and she goes on.
"The dream is in a house –always in this house. It is – yes – on our land – on the farm – but it is not our house. Not. Our. House!" She cringes here, shaking her head. Two beats go by. "Yes. I'm in the house. Inside myself. I'm a child again and I look out the window. I see meadows and the gold sky. Oh, so nice! Grandfather is plowing and all the sun is on him. I could look at this – yes!
"Then, outside of me, I have my daughter in my arms. I am watching myself. I'm rocking her to sleep in the small kitchen in that house. But it's not ours! There is something cooking on the stove. Bubbling. It's milk. Burning milk. Yes." Beat. "Then I'm back in myself. I'm a child again but my child is alive. We are both children! Do you get that? We're both children and she's crying and I cannot reach her. She's inside that little kitchen but I'm outside now and I'm too small to open the door. All I want is to get through that door! To get into that room. I cry, too. Our cries are the same. They are exactly the same." She pauses. A complete shift in her face and she smiles. "Sometimes I like knowing that we sound the same, my daughter and I. Get that?"
I think about it for a moment. Does her daughter speak like this, now? A staccato hum? Do I speak as my mom did? Would our cries be in sync? Silent moments pass. The Guard looks in, assessing our condition. He seems to understand that we are okay and he puts his hand up, gesturing to us across a black and white divide, letting us know he is near. A superego in waiting. My intake's face recoils. She turns on her side, away from me. Mattress sag and she continues.
"The kitchen door is so tall. It's covered in wallpaper. Blue and gold paper just like the one my mother put in her bedroom when I was little. I remember. The gold was so bright. So smooth against the fuzzy blue. I was not allowed to touch it. Forbidden." Staccato beat. "This is the paper covering the door to the little kitchen. I will have to ruin it to get inside. Destroy the paper to get my daughter! She is crying so loud now she is starting to melt. All I want is to get to her but I can hardly bear to rip the paper. I'm so scared. I'm scared to touch it!" Beat. "And then the crying stops. Just – yes – suddenly. Instead there is this awful noise. This terrible, terrible drilling. I don't know what it is. I am inside my little body and I am a small child, yet I know that my mind is not little anymore. I should know what is making that noise! I try to get to the window to look out but the window is crashing in on me. The house is caving in! Oh! It is my grandfather – yes – and he's plowing right into the house. He's plowing through the brick walkway and up the front step. He's plowing right through the floorboards. The blades are moving so quick and throwing dirt into my eyes. I can smell the dirt and it is rotten. Dirt is in my mouth and I cannot breathe!
"Then I realize he is plowing right to the kitchen. He is going to rip the wallpaper! He is going to tear it down! He is going to plow right through my baby!" Her voice has gotten loud and her eyes are shut tight. She turns onto her back again, lying like a corpse. The purple has left her face entirely and she is pale. She looks so small. "But then – the most awful part – awful! Awful part. I am outside myself and I realize." Beat. "I realize that it's me. I'm riding the tractor. I'm plowing through the door. I am going to kill the child I love." She moans, once, loudly. One sorrowful staccato. Then, her eyes open. She blinks and her face smoothes. She smiles red decay at the ceiling. INCOM: of this I feel sadly certain.
I feel the pen in my hand. I turn it over and over. I look down at my paperwork – nearly blank. Diagnosis? It daunts. Family history? It chides. I think: on the outside it's empty, but on the inside there's not room for another word. In her own way, through fantasy – through a dream – she completed my assessment. A dream shared…and yet impossible to translate. I close my eyes.
Diagnosis: Schizoid personality, I want to write. I think of long moments of silence and my intake staring at the ceiling like a tiny, frightened child. Diagnosis confirmed by use of primary process defense: withdrawal into fantasy. It dawns on me that my intake is stuck, both in her dream and in her reality, in infancy. I think of Klein's theory that early infancy is characterized by a paranoid-schizoid state and realize that my intake is stuck in that chasm, small and unarmed. Notable split between aspects of self: an inside-me and an outside-me, I imagine myself sketching in the air across the blank page.
Family history: A grandfather, a mother, a daughter. I think of Harry Guntrip's work on object relations. He wrote of the schizoid person's ambivalence toward attachment: her longing for closeness conflicted by a deep fear of obliteration by those who get close. For Guntrip, the schizoid is preoccupied with questions of her own boundaries. Does she exist? Will she be overtaken? My intake's Grandfather comes to mind: a man with all of the sun in the world, and yet able to turn my intake into a monster on a tractor, to take her over completely. A powerful man, safe at a distance – through a window – and yet deadly up close. Mother: a woman with boundaries as fragile and forbidden as wallpaper. Daughter: a child so loved that the boundaries between mother and daughter have become permeable and distorted, merging two humans into one sad and lonely cry. I imagine my pen moving across the page: Disorganized attachment, indicative of Ainsworth's confused and disoriented type.
Homicidal ideation: I think of a mother who loves her child and, yet, believes she may murder her. While not actively homicidal, patient is preoccupied with sources danger and, through introjection, afraid of her own aggressive tendencies.
Mood: Annihilation anxiety. Terror. The patient is paranoid about her own death. Terrified of melting, of being obliterated.
Thought Process: Internal preoccupation. Splitting defense in which patient vacillates between a world that is all-good (the outside-me world in the field beyond the window) and a world that is all-bad (the inside-me world in a suffocating house).
Appetite: I realize my own hunger has dissipated. I am on a roll and I smile at the thought of the psychiatrist reading my imaginary notes. Preoccupation with oral-level issues, I write, thinking of Fairbairn's "love made hungry" which characterized his schizoid position. In their inability to get what they need from their love object (mother, daughter), the schizoid person becomes increasingly hungry for love, increasingly needy. In turn, the strength of their hunger brings the growling fear that love itself will devour and obliterate that which is loved. And thus, a daughter is churned by a tractor. Noted also by continuous mention of a "kitchen".
Sleep: Characterized by nightmares. A time when the id brings forth a world of terror and fears of being taken over, engulfed by an evil house.
Appearance: Thin…I think, looking at the gaunt woman before me. McWilliams theorized that schizoid people tend to be physically thin in order to ward off fears of their own hunger, their own propensity toward engulfment, absorption. Thin by fear, I airbrush. Thin by defense.
Speech: Whispers and staccato beats. Splitting even in her speech. Paucity.
Substance Abuse: Burning milk.
Past trauma: A plow through floorboard. Ripping wallpaper. A murderous tractor.
I sigh. Would this do?
I want to say something. I want to thank her. I want to tell her a dream of my own – a dream I'd had about my mother soon after she died. In the dream, I was looking for my mom, digging frantically through the earth. My hands were raw, fingernails chipping. I could hear the sound of them breaking – snap, snap, snap – as I dug. But I needed to find her. I knew she had to be somewhere in this earth – somewhere in the depths of it. The soul has the deepest roots, she would have said. Mustn't she be somewhere? But then I woke and in my hands were nothing but sheets, sweaty and crinkled. In my heart, I was paralyzed with the dread: she's gone.
I thought about us: my intake deep in the trenches of annihilation fears, terrified of being wiped out, smothered by dirt, plowed over by a man with the power of the sun. Paranoid anxiety. And me, clenched by fears of utter abandonment; depressive anxiety surfacing with the force of a death-plow. Is this some sort of projective identification? An intense countertransference? Am I feeling her daughter's anxiety, what Heinrick Racker would have called complementary countertransference? Is her daughter rooting in the dirt, searching for her mother, my intake? Is she crying when her hands come to surface, bloody and failed?
Or am I feeling what my intake feels, Racker's concordant countertransference: this strange sense of being constantly lost in my own fantasy. Am I, like her, lost in primitive withdrawal? And if so, what am I defending against?
I hear The Guard come into the doorway. In his presence, I realize that I have a job to do and it must be done. Stuttering over my words, my voice meek, I ask my question again: "Do you know what day it is?" I expect nothing as I watch my intake scrutinize the plaster.
But I am surprised.
"Day?" she starts. "Yes. Today. Today is Mother's Day."
I drop my pen. On the upper right corner of my paperwork, in my own handwriting: Sunday, May 10, 2009. In haste, I had scribbled the date of my first Mother's Day without a mom a hundred times today. Yet I had no idea.
I feel tears in my eyes and I start to turn away, so my intake cannot see. But for some reason I change my mind. I let the tears come, facing her.
My intake looks at me. Then, a red smile.
"You're melting," she whispers and takes my hand.
References
Ainsworth, M.D., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological
study of the strange situation. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1954). An object-relations theory of the personality. New York: Basic
Books.
Guntrip, H. (1969). Schizoid phenomena, object relations and the self. New York:
International Universities Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis, 27, 99-110.
McWilliams, N. (1994). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure
in the clinical process. New York: The Guilford Press.
Mitchell, S.A. & Black, M.J. (1995). Freud and beyond: A history of modern
psychoanalytic thought. New York: Basic Books.
2008 Student Essay Contest Winner: Dan Livney
Winning Essay in the Student Essay Contest "On encountering the unconscious"
Encountering the Unconscious: A More Than Twice Told Tale
by Dan Livney
Dan Livney is a 2nd year clinical psychology doctoral student at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.
I'm a frustrated fiction writer, there I've said it. But I have a few stories which weave subtle and ambiguous threads of meaning through my life.
Take this one, for instance. I woke up in the morning, this was some years ago, and in my mind was the remainder of a dream. I tried to hold it in my mind and recall as much as I could about it. It had a rare quality. Though dreams having a literary quality may not be uncommon, my dreams, at least, don't usually translate so directly into the written word. This one felt like a short story that I could put down on paper, almost (but not entirely) without modification. Even as I first began to turn it over in my mind, I thought that it seemed to have coherence, structure, and even tone—all the things a good story needs.
I've written a number of things before and since, most of them started and then abandoned. But here was one piece that coalesced from beginning to end, almost effortlessly, onto paper. And I felt that it was, of all things, quite good. I've reread that story dozens of times and shared it with pride with friends. True to its source, it is very much a snapshot out of my subconscious. Over the years I've found that the better I've gotten to know myself the more of myself I've found in it, each time I come back to it.
The dream, and the short story which came out of it, date back about 10 years now. And in that time no new work emerged anywhere near as good as that one. But from time to time, as I continued to show this story to new people, I found that I began to tell another story about that first one. That second story is the topic of this essay. And so here then, recursively, is my "encounter with the unconscious."
The tale, or perhaps part fable, I found myself telling others about a brief moment when one particular desire, to write good fiction, came true.
"When I was a little boy of about 7 or 8, we had a plum tree in our garden
that never gave forth any plums. Then one year, out of nowhere, two appeared, side by side. It was an exciting moment. My father and I watched them grow and bulge, and I wondered how we would know when the right time to finally pick them would be. I came home one day to find that my father had made the decision without me; the plums were resting in the windowsill of our kitchen, which overlooked the garden. There the plums sat, ripening, until they had gotten to be brown and mushy on the inside. Looking for the perfect plums, in his greed and inexperience, he had ruined them. The short story, you see, is kind of like those plums. It showed up out of nowhere, and just sits there, unconnected to anything before or since.
This is a reconstruction of a metaphor I used several times, always to make a similar point. Although eventually I came to suspect that what that point was had never been really clear to me. In Freudian terms, jokes and parapraxes, and perhaps little curious metaphors like this one, suggest the presence of repressed motives. In order to help me try and uncover whatever possible hidden meanings may lie in my story of the plums, I'd like to try a little exercise. What I'd like to do is to make an in vivo examination of my "latent state of mental life" by using Freud's technique of free association. "If we make use of this procedure [psycho-analysis] upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at once writing down what are at first unintelligible associations" (Freud, 1911/1989).
But before I do this, I'd like to ask: what brings my focus to this particular
example? It is, quite simply, its unexamined and maybe paradoxical state. Looked at rationally, my metaphorical tale adds little to my companion's understanding of the short story. In essence what it does do is repeat the idea that this story is unique to my experience. But it avoids other seemingly important questions, such as what meanings or explanations do I give it, or its solitary state. And also, it seems curious to me that I should have been so fond of this anecdote so as to repeat it more than once. To attempt and answer these kinds of questions I'm going to try and let my mind wander over the story of the plums. I will ask the reader to believe me that as I start this exploration I have no prepared answers which amount to any more than a rough outline of a hypothesis or two. Instead I ask the reader to come upon this psychoanalytic exercise along with me, so without prejudice we may both see where it leads.
As I now begin, I ask, what do I make of this narrative? If I were scoring it as a response on the Rorschach using the Exner system, I might note the presence of one "Cooperative" and one "Morbid" Special Scores; a "Botany,"Human" and "Food" content; and one Pair. Unfortunately, this seems like a rather intellectualized beginning, which speaks mostly to how difficult it is to be really honest with yourself and with others, in this case the reader. In finding myself starting out by immediately going to an interpretation which appears to speak more to mind than to emotion, I presume the presence of a resistance. This adds to my belief that the content of the narrative, as much as the content of the original short story-cum-dream, is laden with unconscious meaning. With awareness of my initial misstep, I'm going to try again. This time attempting to be more nearly true to Freud's recipe of saying whatever comes to mind:
Twin plums, testicles…old woman…fear…old shed to one side of the yard; broken down, door half open; gloom inside…fear…sex, adult sex, not childhood images…father…discontent…image: digging a hole in the back of the yard, with a little plastic sphere I was wearing on my head. I'm suddenly aware of someone behind me, I turn and its my father taking a photograph. He thinks it's cute (I suppose) that I'm wearing my little hat, but I feel humiliated. Plums, growth…unconnected. Pick, spic, ice pick, kick…soccer. Image: playing soccer with my father in a local park, falling over backwards after a kick, as if imitating professional players on TV.
I'm going to stop here. I think there should be enough material just in these
few lines to serve my purpose. What is the experience of free associating like for me? Anxiety-provoking. To dive into something with no preconception of where I might end up, it has always frightened me. It scares me most when I first start the process; fear attains a gilt-edge of exhilaration as I become more comfortable with it. Once I stop and come back to try again, perhaps after some days or weeks, the initial feeling is always one of anxiety. My stomach becomes tight, and my mouth dry. I become easily distracted, start thinking of things I'd rather be doing. I'm forced to bring myself back. Eventually I feel slightly flushed and I don't want to continue any longer.
Only now that I've finished with the free-association part of my task; and assuming I was honest, that is, by saying things as they came to mind without trying to edit or curb them, can I now go back and try to make sense of what appeared. I should first acknowledge that obviously this is not the same kind of free association that one might do on a therapist's couch. Whereas on the couch one says whatever comes to mind, here the situation is slightly altered. I'm free associating while contemplating a particular paragraph—it's a case of one episode of free association based upon another. A second difference, of course, is that I'm doing this with only a theoretical reader in mind, rather than with a real person present. Whether this is a "legitimate" methodology for looking at the contents of the unconscious, almost begs the question. I'm not conceptualizing the unconscious as a state or a place, or even as a subset of consciousness or ego, however one chooses to define those words. I believe that the "boundaries" of the unconscious are considerably harder to define. If one looks at the task I've chosen for myself, it would seem that the choice I've made is a conscious one. There are obviously other topics I could have chosen to focus on. I could have chosen to discuss the short story directly rather than the anecdote I've told about it. Or else I could have chosen some entirely other episode from my life to ponder. But I would argue that the choice itself has unconscious parameters—I chose it because with associations and feelings unknown it has been weighing on my mind.
I will put the argument regarding method aside for the moment, while I go back now and examine the contents of my free association sample. To start with, I've asked my father about his recollection of the story of the plums, and among other discrepancies to my own memories, to his recall there was only one plum. Perhaps, as an adult, he would be more likely to remember the situation accurately, or perhaps his unconscious is playing its own tricks, there's no way to know, and I don't think it really matters. Trying to decipher the unconscious residues from a memory is little different than trying to do so from a dream—you start with the recalled event as it is presented, rather than by trying to reconstruct an accurate picture of the event. Thus, the twin image of the plums, and the immediate connection to a sexual image, is noted.
The next image which came to mind was the old woman. During the period of time when we lived in a house with a plum tree in the back yard, an elderly woman who lived across the street was a significant nurturing figure in my life. The next feeling which comes up is fear, followed by a sinister image: the old, spooky shed. Next, fear again, then again a sexual image. The association proceeds to my father and an interaction with him from about the same period. In re-reading my words, I now see that an element of editorializing had crept in ("He thinks it's cute I suppose…"). So what I would note here is there might be a deflection of feelings. Because rather than simply describing the feeling this image evokes as it emerges, maybe sadness, I immediately add a concrete interpretation of the scene.
Moving along with the images, I now return to the plums, and I connect the words "growth" and "unconnected," perhaps related to the way I describe the appearance of the plums as unconnected "to anything before or since." Why this comes up here, I don't see for the moment. Next there is a rhyming association: "Pick, spic, ice pick, kick…soccer" I might interpret the presence of the word "spic" as representative of latent racist tendencies which I would assure the reader I don't have any particular inclination towards), but there could also be another meaning. The offensive quality of this word lies in its derogatory singling out of the (in this case, Hispanic) other as different, and therefore implicitly inferior. Coming as I do from an immigrant family, it seems quite plausible that, especially as a child, I would have felt the full weight of being "different." So, perhaps within this particular word are contained feelings not only of my own inferiority, but also of associated embarrassment of my parents, different as they were from other kids' parents. An "ice pick," which I've rarely encountered in my day to day life, except as murder weapon in spy novels, seems to be an aggressive association. The last image (playing soccer) is again one with my father, but this time it's a more positive one.
To further put the images into context, it should be noted that the free
associations were made a few hours before going with my girlfriend to spend the evening with some members of my family, including my father. It seems reasonable to assume that whatever unconscious representations of repressed mental states are assumed to exist, they can best be understood through the filter of current events.
In fact, as I now move on from a line-by-line reading to trying to organize what I see, it seems that there are two principal motifs appearing in the free associations: interactions with my father, and sexual themes. The question of whether the present draws out certain aspects of the past, or if the past casts a particular shade over the present immediately comes to mind, but I'm going to refrain from entertaining an idea I'm afraid could lead down a circuitous path. In either case the themes evidently coexist in some way. The one presumption I feel inclined to make is that they are not in fact separate, that is, their coexistence is not incidental or otherwise random. For instance, nurturance runs through both of them, and also contextualizes the appearance of the old woman.
I see, too, some ambiguity in the associations. There is fear, mentioned explicitly twice, and implied in the image of the creepy shed. There is humiliation, and aggression. But the sexual allusion is phrased "adult sex, not childhood images." Though not much elaborated on, it's a fairly sanguine phrasing, explicitly avoiding any juvenile connotations. So the juxtaposition of unpleasant images comes with at least two healthy ones: the sexual allusion, and the final image. That last image I read as a childhood expression of aspiration and idealization: "Teach me how to be a great soccer player, so I can grow up to be strong and successful like they are." Perhaps I associate the experience of becoming an adult, in part by having an adult to look up to, as connected to the successful formation of romantic relationships.
So far, I've tried to interpret what hidden meanings can be discerned in my associations to the "tale of the plums." But the other question that comes to mind is, what purpose does the story serve to the interaction? Why do I feel this need (perhaps shy of a compunction) to tell it, as a commentary of sorts on the short story? As I said earlier, I do see the tale as a sort of a distraction. It provides a metaphor for the idea that while I'm proud of this one short story, I'm saddened that I've found myself unable to write more like it. But it adds little beyond that, and thus seems a bit overly elaborate for its purpose. Prior to the metaphor, of course, the short story itself was a form of interaction. So then, when I say that I "I would like to be a writer," what I'm really saying is that this is a certain kind of communication that I would like to do more of.
According to Freud (at least as of the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams), the dream, and as I would claim by extension, any successful piece of fiction, is an attempt at "wish fulfillment." But strangely, with the plum metaphor what I find is perhaps the reverse. With the secondary interaction (the first being when I give another person the short story to read), I introduce a diversion. My stated goals, above, in giving another my short story are to share a personal piece of myself, and to share an accomplishment of which I'm proud. Those things should theoretically be at least some part of the focus of this secondary interaction. Instead my reader receives something else to consider, another tale, which besides its commentary on the short story, is also laden with its own multiple layers of meaning--they receive the dubious gift of plums.
I could postulate that this new gift is an attempt to undo, or at least divert from, the first gift. Perhaps there is some discomfort either with being proud of my accomplishments, or of disclosing so much of myself to another—after all, I am much more aware than a casual reader of how much the short story really tells about me. It could be that elements of my free associations point to either a source, or at one example, or at simply one expression of these discomforts. It could be that my current relationships, appearing here in the form of my girlfriend, are in some way affected by these patterns of hidden or adumbrated meanings. It is also possible that the short story, now perhaps become its own repressed symbol, plays the part in my unconscious of a"desire fulfilled." And perhaps there are other parts of my unconscious that battle away with it as "too good," and therefore unacceptable.
So if I were to summarize my predicament: I started with a dream, which is an unconscious process. While still groggily lying in bed I decide that this is not just any dream, but one that I can and should write down in the form of a short story. What combination of processes, conscious and unconscious, brought me to that decision is, like the source of the dream, far from clear. I surely do not, lying there in bed, think about form and structure and syntax. In writing the story I make an attempt to stay as true as I can to what I remember of my dream, but I believe that some level of conscious translation occurred nevertheless. Once the story is written, I share it with a number of others over a period of years, more than once telling those others a certain metaphor connected to this story. Only after a long time do I make note of the fact that it is a relatively static tale I've repeated—which makes it, like a recurring dream recounted in therapy, one worthy of particular note.
Several months ago when I first started thinking about this essay that I'm writing now, another apparently conscious "choice" started to form in my mind: that I should write about this metaphor of the plums. Then, when I started to write about it, I made yet another apparently conscious choice: that I was going to use the method of free association to examine this tale (that is based on a short story, which is based on a dream).
There are plausible conscious and rational explanations I could make for many of the links in this chain. For example, my desire to write fiction likely has a role to play in my decision to write my dream down as a short story, rather than, say, as a journal entry. And, taken at face value, the story of the plums does tell something about the appearance of the short story: it is certainly not a full-fledged attempt to hide all meanings. If I had wanted to do that I could have simply not shared the short story with anyone in the first place. But I think that, too, at every step there are aspects of my experiences, fears and behaviors, the impulse for which is not entirely apparent.
Of course, I could take an even further step back, and see the original dream itself as one that retains the content of both not fully apprehended experiences from my childhood, combined with, if one is to believe Freud in this, residual experiences from the day's events when the dream occurred. Given all this, and keeping in mind the title of this essay contest, Encountering the Unconscious; when, I would ask, along the thread which seems somehow to connect my childhood to this very moment, and which surely permeates the dream, the short story, the metaphor, the free association sample above, as well as this essay, is the unconscious not encountered? And so to get back now to my earlier question regarding the legitimacy or usefulness of this particular method—while what I have done here may differ from the classical way of apprehending the unconscious, if one accepts the idea that the unconscious is in fact in some way in play everywhere and all the time, (to the point that the differentiation between conscious and unconscious process is not entirely clear, although I grant that some such difference exists), then the discussion about what is the proper way to encounter it becomes little more than a semantic one. I would subscribe here to Freud's equally blurred delineation of the two states when he writes:
…We know for certain that they [latent states of mental life] have abundantpoints of contact with conscious mental processes, and all the categories whichwe employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutionsand so on, can be applied to them. Indeed, we are obliged to say of some ofthese latent states that the only respect in which they differ from consciousones is precisely in the absence of consciousness. (Freud, 1915/1989.)
Lastly, I would underline the iterative nature of my encounter with the unconscious; each step involves a further exploration into the meanings found within previously delved layers of connections. To the extent that there is a conscious effort involved, its aim is to clarify and to attempt to make explicit the dynamics and emotions hidden behind the uncovered symbols.
References:
Freud, S. (1989). On Dreams. (J. Strachey, Trans.). In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud Reader (p.144). London: W. W. Norton & Co. (Original work published in 1911)
Freud, S. (1989). The Unconscious. (J. Strachey, Trans.). In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud Reader (p.575). London: W. W. Norton & Co. (Original work published in 1915)
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OPEN QUESTION
Today's Open Question:
Why is the Unconscious known by what it is not?
Michael Uebel and Steven Stern Share 2009 Schillinger Prize
Two winners share this year's Schillinger prize: Michael Uebel for his essay "Psychoanalysis and the Question of Violence" and Steven Stern for "Session Frequency and the Definition of Psychoanalysis: A Most Urgent Question". The Essay Competition Committee found no clear winner but decided that these two works should share the first prize award. Each author received $600 and an offer to publish his piece here on The Sphinx.
Mother Tongue?
I've been working with Willy, a man in his 80's and a refugee (in his childhood and along with his mother, father and younger brother) from Hitler's Europe. Our psychotherapy has focussed largely on Willy's fraught relationship with his wife of many years--herself a holocaust survivor--around their difficulties with each other, with their children and their grandchildren.
A year or so ago, his oldest daughter died. I had come back from a vacation to his numbness and literally unexpressible grief. It's his inability to experience his grief--and what it took for him to move forward--that I want us to think about.
His daughter's death had not been unexpected. She had had advanced liver disease--the consequence of intravenous drug use earlier in her life, and the consequence, Willy himself had acknowledged many times, of a life of promiscuity and drug abuse. "I lost my daughter many years ago," he would say.
But now he was also saying, "There must be something wrong with me. I can't cry. I can't mourn...." "I don't know, doc," he would say, "What's wrong with me?" Over the weeks that followed he would lapse into a numb silence and then into his repetitive questioning and fruitless self-examination. I sat with him, I felt for him, I tried to give him a way to think about himself--in all the ways psychoanalytic clinicians do: how he might feel; how I might feel, what it all might mean: the frustrated anger with his daughter, the disappointment, his self-protective distancing from his own feelings.... All to no avail.
Then in a session some months after the event, Willy was talking about his wife and their early relationship. He was remembering the early sweetness of married life, how much his wife had wanted a baby girl, a little "meidlele," he said in Yiddish, and how when the baby was born, he said, "We had our little meidlele," and at that his voice broke and he cried!
There was nothing I needed to say at that moment; I offered him the box of tissues; I took one myself.
So the question: What happened there? Why did the word in Yiddish, and his saying it aloud, allow things to move forward--forward with the emotional process of grieving, and, subsequently, forward with the interpretative process as well?
Surely there's something to say about this question from a range of psychoanalytic prespectives. My own feeling is that what is most interesting here is the nature and power of early language--how we talk to ourselves in our intimate and ungarded moments--but I'm eager to hear what others might think.
--Henry Seiden
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