I saw Christopher for the second time, and again felt that he was someone I wanted to continue with. But this time he made something clear that I hadn’t appreciated before. Either I take him on to discuss my brother (and our project), or I take him on to be my analyst. If it’s the former, I can take notes, he said, even use a tape recorder. But if it’s the latter, it’ll have to be genuine therapy, and therefore closed. I’ll check this again when I see him next, but I assume the containment and privacy of the analytic process is considered to be essential. This is something that immediately makes me sceptical (why does it have to be private? nothing about psychiatric treatment needs to be…) as does the length of time everyone insists on (years, not months). Of course, to go on a long journey with another person who interests you may be of value. But if it’s about dealing with mental distress or illness, then it is simply less ambitious than CBT (20 sessions or so). It seems self-evident to me that psychoanalysis is a particular cultural product; something that was developed into a successful profession and given lustre by the grandeur of the Freudian legacy. But it now seems threadbare, peripheral, under threat. And it is not fighting back.
Not publicly, anyway. Face-to-face, Christopher is formidable. As mentioned previously, he is also no stranger to the clinical hard edge, and has clearly been around, seen it, done it. He is laying down essential challenges for me. Do I really believe that my brother’s madness is “endogenous” (grown from within) rather than “exogenous” (provoked by outside influences)? Am I using my brother’s experience for my own, instrumental reasons? If so, am I just going to give an outline account of his life (which would be useful), or cross the line into his life (this is Paul Broks’ “door” issue – am I going to go through)?
If I cross over, am I going to damage Archie by taking him into impossible territory – forcing him to confront issues of memory and mind that he has rejected for so long that to do so now could be catastophic? Or will I lose myself in the process?
This is all still vague; I will pursue them with Christopher. His name is Christopher Bollas, and he’s the author of a couple of books — of fiction — the latest being “I have heart the mermaids singing,” a novel of the thoughts, encounters and conversations of a psychoanalyst. It strikes me as a mistake to write a novel if you are an analyst, much in the same way as it may be a mistake to report the exchanges of the analytical encounter. Inside Christopher’s practice he has knowledge and authority. The thoughts are engodenous, so to speak. But a book is exogenous. Novels I’m familiar with – how hard they are write, how few people write them well, how tricky it is to communicate substantial ideas without just putting them into the mouths of characters. There are also the banalities of political debate, the limitations of received opinion. In this book, Christopher relinquishes his authority to literary taste.
What I’m interested in is the force of authority represented by the analyst’s room. Does that survive the decline of the psychoanalytic idea? In Christopher’s case it does. He is old school. I want his talk, not his novel.
The fact that I’ve given his full name, incidentally, indicates that I want to continue with him as someone to discuss the project with, rather than as my own analyst. For that, I’ll have to keep looking.
