To Overshare Or Not To Overshare?

Kathryn Harrison had a succès de scandale in the late 90s with her memoir The Kiss, in which she recounted the four years of incestuous relationship she had with her father. Thinking to save that book for the program of creative non-fiction works I’m reading this year, I decided to try her out with a different memoir, The Mother Knot. It was 82 pages of dynamite that held me gripped as soon as I’d begun, and yet when I finished, I began to wonder about the last thing that should seem problematic with such a candid and upfront narrator – the truthfulness of the story.

The narrator is weaning the youngest of her three children when the memoir begins. At 26 months, her daughter is relatively grown-up for breastfeeding, but it is a wrench for her mother, and one that darkens her underlying mood. Not long after this, her 10-year-old son develops severe asthma, and in her extreme anxiety over his condition, Kathryn Harrison finds herself drawing dark and superstitious conclusions. Although she nurses him with an assiduity and attention to detail that could not be bettered, her growing belief is that somehow she is the cause of his illness:

It had been four months before my son’s hospitalisation that I’d stopped nursing, relinquished that cherished perception of myself as my children’s primal source of sustenance and love. Now the onset of my son’s asthma attack struck me as an indication of my new impotence. Worse and more irrationally, it seemed to reveal me as dangerous. I saw – felt – a black, destructive spirit, dybbuk or dervish, twisting out of my chest, a force of corruption that sprang from me and infected my son, choked and smothered him.’

Harrison is an intelligent lady, and she’s had a reasonable amount of therapy. She knows that her mindset is related to the complicated and dissatisfactory relationship she had to her own mother, who gave birth to her at 17 and then abandoned her to grandparents six years later. The pregnancy was intended to place some distance between Kathryn’s mother and her grandmother, a relationship that was itself fraught with possessiveness. Kathryn, her mother told her, was intended to be ‘a hostage’, someone to take her place and allow her the freedom she had never had. Understandably, Kathryn as a child found this reasoning hard to follow, aware only that she was unable to please her mother, despite the ballet, the Sunday school and the diets. She emerged from the relationship with an unshakeable conviction that she was bad, polluted and wrong. It didn’t take much in the way of crisis in her adult life to return her to that place of universal guilt, in which she could be responsible even for the illness of her son.

As a strategy of appeasement, she starts to starve herself again. Anorexia turns out to be the ongoing problem: ‘I admitted that anorexia was a maladaption; and I admitted, with chagrin, to more than two decades of remissions mistaken for recoveries.’ Like most anorexics, the practice has much less to do with body shape than it has to do with mental control and darkly divine sacrifice. ‘Would that it were as simple as vanity,’ she tells her husband, when he says, in an attempt at coertion, her how much less attractive she looks too thin. ‘I’d characterized my eating disorder as a shatterproof glass box. I was inside, alone and safe. I could see out, and nothing could get in.’ But a life devoted to the harshest form of self-control is taking its toll. Her doctor threatens her with hospitalisation unless she gets her eating under control, her therapist is losing patience with her, and she fears how angry her husband will be if she can’t take care of herself well enough to be the wife and mother their family needs. In extremis, she knows she must confront the ghost of her mother, dead these past seventeen years, and finally break free.

I’ve quoted the text as much as possible because Kathryn Harrison is an amazing writer. The prose is powerful, vivid, economical, the mysteries of the mind described with exquisite insight and acuity. For a brief memoir, this certainly packs an emotional punch although the touch is light. The arc of the narrative flies like a skimming stone, glancing off the most salient points of her story – her relation to her mother, the vortex of uncontrollable emotions that threaten to pull her down, the epiphany she experiences and the solution she discovers. It is all brilliantly done, and so neat and tidy, not a single word wasted.

This was, I felt, an amazing piece of storytelling. And yet everything that was so well done about it, took it further and further away from life as we live it, and crises as we actually experience them. Where was the resistance, the procrastination, the backsliding that attends every inch of fresh terrain won from the forces of negativity that run their lucrative rackets in the mind? Where were the months spent stumped and hopeless in the therapist’s chair? Deep-rooted problems are beyond stubborn to dig out, and they react poorly to just about any form of treatment. Like computers, minds have default settings, bizarre agreements that were made in the era before reason, or awareness of the true value of things, and they are the very devil to uproot.

But of course, none of this makes for good storytelling, necessarily. One of the best novels I’ve ever read about the therapeutic process is the highly autobiographical The Words To Say It by Marie Cardinal. When that book was translated into English, the translator felt justified in leaving a whole chunk of it out, on the grounds that it was repetitive. This was the point. The myths on which we base our sense of self have to be gone over again and again. And probably again. You may well ask, does it matter if we leave some of this out in the stories we end up telling about ourselves? And I think it does, because storytelling is not innocent, when it comes to the connection between identity and narrative. The tighter the story, the more beautiful it is, the less we want to unravel it. This is the way that those original stories of love and terror bind us in the first place. And then I worry that people in trouble might read this and view it as inspirational, wondering miserably why they are not capable of identifying and solving their problems as slickly. When the truth is that healing is a messy, graceless process, not an edited montage.

But… I would not be honest, either, if I denied what a well-written book this is, or how compellingly it reads, or how piercing its understanding of psychic pain. Read it for its insight and its honesty, but do not believe it is the full truth.

The Examined Life

Best book of the year so far is Stephen Grosz’s compilation of case stories from his thirty years as a psychotherapist, The Examined Life; How We Lose and Find Ourselves. Freud once wrote that he was surprised how his case histories read like short stories, which was a tad disingenuous but never mind. Grosz’s read like little parables, only wrapped around a moment of revelation or understanding, and the result is moving and enlightening.

Recounted with grace and clarity and mostly in the space of a few pages, the stories introduce us to a particular patient or occasionally a particular theme. There’s the patient in an affair with a married man who absolutely refuses to see that he will never commit to her, the widow lurching from one silly, pointless crisis to another as a way of distracting herself from her grief, the small boy who behaves as outrageously as he possibly can, spitting in the therapist’s face every session, the man who is boring as a subversive form of aggressing others. All life is here, in its misshapen splendour, and the beauty of every story is that we get to see these people through the compassionate eyes of Stephen Grosz. There’s neither pity nor irritation, simply sympathetic interest backed up by a razor sharp intelligence. When we reach the moment of higher understanding, when for instance, Grosz realises that the small boy’s spitting is designed to provoke his anger, because that anger tells them both that he can change, that he isn’t as permanently broken as both of them fear, it’s like the moment Kafka talks about, when the book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.

I often think that one of the fundamental goals of life is to be seen – and ideally accepted – exactly as we are. The point of therapy is to make us see and accept ourselves, but the lure of the therapist is wrapped up in the longing for someone else to do it. Indeed, in one of the stories, in which a man with HIV keeps falling asleep in his sessions, Grosz becomes aware that healing his patient is about holding him alive in his own mind. It’s easier for the man to accept the possibility of his death if he knows he lives on elsewhere. So, if one of our goals is to be seen properly by others and mentally held safe there, then one of our biggest basest fears is that our image will simply deteriorate in the minds of others, that they will fail to give us the benefit of the doubt, or their own anxieties and aggressions will deform or distort our true and constant portrait. For me, this is why psychotherapy is so fascinating: it shows us what we can really give one another that matters, and in its practice it shows us how these important things can so easily be bent out of shape or changed into some mutant version of their original, valuable intentions. Still considering this essential notion of being held in thought in other people’s minds, Grosz talks about paranoia and shows how it is used to ward off the altogether more painful belief that other people are actually completely indifferent to us. I suppose it’s a version of Oscar Wilde’s saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

There have been doubts expressed about the ethics of publishing case histories, even though it’s been common practice ever since psychotherapy began. But for anyone who worries about such things, there’s a little note at the back of the book in which Grosz explains that he sought permission from every patient he mentions and let them read the relevant part of the manuscript. I find a tear in my eye every time I read his comment that all were willing to share their experience, and most expressed a hope that their story would help others. This is the whole point of accepting that we are flawed, mistake-oriented creatures who often find supposedly simple things almost impossible to do: from this perspective, we are in touch with our humility. And humility breeds compassion. Both are absolutely essential for loving and being lovable. Everyone should read this book and feel it chip away any ice around their hearts, to let our admirable human capacity for love and compassion flow through.

 

What Sanity Looks Like

My blogging friend, the wonderful Pete from Couch Trip, is a trained psychotherapist, and given the soft spot I have for a bit of psychobabble, I read his best-of lists most attentively. This year he recommended James Masterson, and a fine recommendation it was. I have been reading his book The Search for the Real Self with great pleasure and interest. Masterson’s thesis is that we live in an age of personality disorders, rather than neuroses, and these are notoriously hard to cure. But disorders are very painful; they allow people to live outwardly successful lives but undermine their ability to deal with crises. His approach is to understand disorders as a form of false self, a mask created out of privileged parts of the personality destined to hide the intolerably vulnerable parts. Because such a manoeuvre cuts sufferers off from their real feelings and desires, it inevitably produces destructive behavioural patterns that ‘protect them from feeling ‘bad’ at the cost of a meaningful and fulfilling life.’ Given that disorders and neuroses are usually magnified versions of the sort of struggles we all engage in existentially, I thought that New Year’s Day was a good day for a spot of soul hygiene. What follows is the list Masterson creates of the ten main principles of the ‘real’ self, the indicators that we are in touch with our honest feelings and have healthy interactions with ourselves and others:

 

1. The capacity to experience a wide range of feelings deeply, with liveliness, vigour and spontaneity. When good things happen, we can be happy, when bad things happen, we can be sad or disappointed. In either case, we don’t block or deaden feelings but feel what is appropriate, to the extent that it is appropriate.

2. The capacity to expect appropriate entitlements. We can take accurate measurements of our skills and limitations and what we might expect from them, understanding that in time, we can ‘master our lives and achieve what is good for us.’ It means we don’t expect life to be excessively harsh or unrealistically rewarding, also, that we can expect reasonable behaviour from others.

3. The capacity for self-activation and assertion. This refers to our ability to identify goals, wishes and dreams, to recognise our unique individuality, and to do so independently of the desires and wishes of others. It means we can take steps towards achieving what we wish, and supporting and defending dreams when they come under attack.

4. Acknowledgement of self-esteem. People with a tendency to see only the bad side of things remain oblivious to both their positive qualities and their successes. In order to make it through the bad times, we have to be able to remind ourselves of our genuine worth and abilities. The world is rarely able to provide the recognition we desire, and so a certain amount of it must come from ourselves.

5. The ability to soothe painful feelings. Our real self will not allow us to wallow in misery. We will find suitable comforts and appeasements for ourselves, put problems in perspective and make sensible decisions with regard to the way we move forward.

6. The ability to make and stick to commitments. Relationships and career goals are often tough to achieve, but a solid connection with the real self allows us to commit to them and deal with obstacles and setbacks. We don’t quit too soon or doubt ourselves and others unjustly.

7. Creativity. Masterson’s definition of creativity is a bit unusual but I really like it. He talks about the way that creativity allows us to replace ‘old, familiar patterns of living and problem-solving with new and equally or more successful ones.’ As our situations and circumstances change, we can find the inner creativity to adapt and negotiate. We need to find new ways to cope with loss and to rearrange priorities, to meet new demands and find new means of expressing ourselves. Creativity also allows us to alter the way we think, throwing out unhelpful assumptions, false impressions and bad memories and replacing them with something more useful.

8. Intimacy. The capacity to live fully and sincerely in a relationship without excessive fear of abandonment or engulfment. It also indicates the ability to retain a sense of separateness and autonomy, and avoid the sort of compliance that can lead to resentment or a painful loss of self. If a relationship fails, we can hold onto the belief that another one will be possible in time.

9. The ability to be alone. In touch with our real selves we can be alone without feeling abandoned, and don’t need to rush off into manic distractions to avoid the thoughts and feelings that arise. Fundamentally, it’s the recognition that the ability to find meaning in life comes from within, and is not dependent on another person.

10. Continuity of self. No matter what happens to us, we can still feel in touch with the tensile wire that runs through the centre of the self and holds us together. This capacity allows us to acknowledge the core of the self that exists across space and time. It is, I think, what we might call the first rung on the ladder of spirituality.

Having typed all that out, I feel there should be an eleventh, something along the lines of the ability to read such a list without thinking a) ‘Oh my God, I am such a failure’ or b) ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine thank you very much.’ May the New Year bring us all the courage to change what we can, the strength to accept what we can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!

Dream Story

Years ago I saw the film Eyes Wide Shut directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was a dreadful film, publicised on the fact that Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were playing husband and wife whilst actually being married. Quite what insight anyone thought might be available into their real life identities, I’m not sure. Film is all about the visual surface; it struggles to imply further, invisible dimensions. And that’s probably why it was a poor adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, Dream Story, for the dominant feature of the book is the way it plays with the idea of the parable at all sorts of cunning levels. A parable is a story that says one thing, while meaning something altogether different. It is literature’s cleverest and most baffling device. And dreams are a perfect example of this – for the ‘manifest content’ of the dream, its plot, has very little to do with the ‘latent content’ of the dream, or what it’s about. The dream work is all about disguise, subterfuge, misdirection, the recognition that what you see is not what you get, and that human beings are icebergs – only the smallest uppermost portion is visible, whilst unguessed-at structures lie deep beneath.

It’s a moment of unguarded revelation that kicks off Schnitzler’s novella. Fridolin is a reasonably well-to-do doctor in Vienna, and one night, he and his wife, Albertine, exchange intimate confidences. She confesses a strong physical attraction to a Danish military officer she glimpsed in the hotel on holiday, he confesses to a similar attraction for a young woman in a bathing suit who seemed first to welcome his gaze but ultimately sent him away. Whilst neither of these adventures had any kind of real outcome, Fridolin’s narcissism is deeply wounded, his jealousy retrospectively provoked. Depite the proximity of marriage, husband and wife still have their separate lives, in which all manner of erotic temptation might occur.

These feelings seem to set off a chain of encounters over the course of the night that follows for Fridolin. Called out to a dying patient, he is surprised when the daughter of the deceased makes passionate advances to him. On the street, he bumps into an attractive young prostitute, but fear of disease and insecurity prevent him taking any action. In a coffee house he meets an old acquaintance, Nachtigall, who tells him he will be playing piano at a private orgy that night. His curiosity aroused, Fridolin prises the password out of Nachtigall and determines to follow him. He goes to find a costume to wear, and is surprised again when the daughter of the costumier flirts with him. The pent-up erotic energy of the evening reaches a culmination at the masked party. There he meets a woman with whom, unlike the others, he feels genuine desire. But recognising him as an intruder, she warns him away. Fridolin is determined to have her, but he is shortly accosted by other party-goers and told to leave. Fridolin offers to unmask himself and take whatever punishment might be his due, but the woman steps in and offers herself as a sacrifice in his stead. Fridolin is kicked out and driven away, his conscience heavy, his desire unsated.

When he gets home, he wakes Albertine who tells him about a complicated dream she has been having, one in which she has been with the Danish military officer and laughed to see poor Fridolin crucified. As might be expected, Fridolin is none too happy about this. His sense of injury is magnified by his night of might-have-beens, and he feels that his marriage must end.

The next day, Fridolin retraces his steps, and finds that the glamour and magic of the previous night now reveals its sordid underside. He cannot work up any desire for the daughter of his dead patient, the prostitute is in the hospital, the costumier’s daughter is a whore, and at the mansion where the party was, he is handed a note telling him to go away and never return. The culmination of this negative energy, this entropy, is when he reads in the newspaper about a woman who has taken poison and believes it to be his saviour from the orgy. He goes to the morgue, views the dead body, cannot decide whether she is the same woman or not. But the message to the reader is clear; underneath the scintillating energy of the erotic lies the death drive, what lifts Fridolin to a point of maximum vivacity now takes him down to the darkest depths of death.

Once more he returns home in the small hours of the night, to find that the mask he forgot to return with his costume is lying on his pillow beside the sleeping form of Albertine. Fridolin is overcome with emotion, and his sobs wake his wife. He now recounts to her his adventures and she accepts them easily and kindly and this act of grace soothes Fridolin completely. Husband and wife reach a new understanding, although what it is they understand is a mystery. It wouldn’t be a parable if we knew. Wise Albertine, who seems to have kept the upper hand across this narrative tells her husband:

neither the reality of a single night nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being.’

So we are back to icebergs again, the acknowledgement that the most powerful things that happen to us are often divorced from any kind of explanation, and uncertain as to what effect they have on the soul. There is what happens, and what it means, there are the things we do and who we are, and the one is always made of radically different stuff to the other, the relationship between them enigmatic but potent. Sexuality is the clearest example of this, as it is the place where we are most uniquely ourselves, and both unknowable and inexplicable. It is where the world can open up to us, tender and thrilling, and where it can turn its coldest, most hurtful back. And it is a place of beauty and magic, yet also the realm of the sordid and the deathly.

This was an excellent novella, neat, powerful and with such a contemporary feel. Don’t bother with the film, but read the book instead.

For German Literature Month