Sirens and the Skin, after the party
Hi all, been a while. This summer I ran a reading group at the Poetry Project, with the secret ambition that I would write a whose five chapters followed our sessions. That was a little bit too ambitious, anyway I have a life and that ain’t it. But what a good time it was anyway. “I hope it was good for you too.” Tonight I had to share a few remarks about it in a closed session run by the Poetry Project, kind of a sharing session for the mostly generative workshops. I’m the odd man out there, but I’d written this after all, so I read it. Now you can. I think perhaps after this no more Freudsy stuff until next year.
The Poetry Project > Sirens and the Skin — 5-Session Reading Group with Jackie Ess
What holds us together? Better to ask another question: why doesn't whatever holds us together make everything stick together? We want to engage a sticky subject here, the topic of
My Summer session was quite definitely a reading group rather than a workshop. Doing workshops had become my job. I like my job compared to other jobs I’ve had but I felt for the moment disenchanted with the idea. I had done enough of that. But there were some psychoanalysis papers I had wanted to read for a long time. That cut through my ambivalence. These papers concerned a psychoanalytic approach to autistic experience. Also psychotic experience. Also the experience of those who used to be called the “worried well.” And aren’t we all? This line of theory had produced some rather dubious therapy for autistic children, particularly at the Tavistock Institute in the UK. It is no longer the paradigm. To see how much not, toward the end we read Frances Tustin’s paper, “The Perpetuation of an Error.” Perhaps it had been one all along. Certainly Tustin was one of the originators. What was this all about?
The idea was that there are some characteristic anxieties around the differences between objects. Maybe especially between self and other, or inside and outside. Maybe it is more of a logical problem. It seemed to me possible that this anxiety, which had been thought of by someone like Thomas Ogden as complementing the Kleinian “positions” so that one had the “depressive,” “paranoid-schizoid,” and finally this mysterious factor of the “autistic-contiguous” position. This is the position (Bion: vertex, Ogden: mode) which is characterized by these skin anxieties, that inside and outside should fail. Esther Bick and Donald Meltzer preferred to call it “adhesive identification,” and Tusty Wusty for her part preferred to think about hanging onto hard objects, or feeling impressions of shapes against your skin. Anything to hold yourself together. Something solid that I might be likewise.
Again, I thought that this probably wasn’t autism, but that it might be something (Ogden says as much as well, the more sophisticated of these writers all flirt with simply dropping the concept of autism—is this honesty or giving up on some people or mere conflict avoidance?). I wondered why they all characterized it so rigidly from the position of anxiety. The depressive position is associated with a characteristic anxiety: about my own destructiveness, the two-sidedness and incompleteness of my desire, as well as of the object. But it is connected to a positive turning toward repair. The paranoid-schizoid position is more demonized, but it seems that perhaps it may have something to offer in moments of deep personal change, and on those occasions when we have to stand up for ourselves. Finally one has to be crazy to do it. Hopefully you have a good reason for the things you do, but these aren’t Your reasons. It can be hard to remember what it was like.
Yet the autistic-contiguous or adhesive continued to be thought almost entirely one-sidedly, through its characteristic anxieties. This is where I began to have the tickle of an idea, a concept I called “sirenic desire,” this would be a desire for what carries us beyond ourselves. That was what the book was meant to cover. I thought that many of us might have this for example in hearing the story of the Pied Piper, or of the Sirens, or of the Gaze of Orpheus. More prosaically, perhaps one knows desire before we know it. That there is a little bit of outside inside. I wanted to think about that.
You know, a few years ago I had given some serious thought to becoming a psychoanalyst. There are only a few ways to stay involved with it after all. You can be a patient, or you can be a practitioner, or you can be an intellectual. For example you can be one of the people who always mixes it in with politics or with the study of texts. I was a little bit interested in that. Texts, not politics. We read Borges’s short story “Blue Tigers,” for that reason. I decided that I wouldn’t make a good analyst because I am too much of a talker and not enough of a listener. I like to form ideas like this, and I like to tell people about them. The real thing requires a certain amount of restraint, and tolerance for repetition. I respect the art of it, and bow to the practitioners. At one time I was more optimistic about finding alternative forms such as peer analysis, or somehow borrowing the ideas and putting them to use outside of the analytic frame. I increasingly think that isn’t a good idea. And to the extent it isn’t, I find myself tying up loose ends.
In the end the hero of our sessions, a bit out of left field, was Hans Loewald, a seemingly innocuous theorist in the sense that he introduces very little in the way of original terminology and doesn’t have this quality of convicting history which most theorists make a major part of their personalities. I don’t want to represent him as particularly humble, but he was honestly un-interested in establishing a Loewaldianism or a historical break. He was himself a student of Heidegger, who broke over the latter’s Nazism and became a psychoanalyst. One who spoke very little of politics or philosophy. But one feels both there. Psychoanalysis was after all always getting itself into trouble, positing that certain states of being or say of mind or soul are “primitive,” that they hail from earliest life, or from man’s uncivilized past—someone’s present, and possibly your future. Loewald’s logic of temporality seems to reflect a much more basic sense of primordiality, a kind of ontological priority, which is not merely a matter of avoiding tangles with the child development specialists (look back at the André Green paper from a few letters ago), but seemed to have a kind of phenomenological fidelity. One begins to see the outlines of a normative psychoanalysis in which the structure of time, for example the hardly given fact that there is only one future and one past begins to take on a very different significance. Psychic structure seems to protect eternity, and to protect us from it. Don’t drown.
Along the way we also discussed an unpublished article of Jasmine Gelber and invited Jasmine in for questions. This paper will probably revolutionize psychoanalytic thinking about trans experience. And it might be profitably read by some people without the slightest interest in that. As with Loewald, it seems to be drawing a few threads together, but one comes away changed.
I hope everybody had fun. I’m not certain that this was a very poetic outing, as the Poetry Project goes. Initially I had planned to link a lot of literary text to what we were doing. High and low. You may remember this line from Pippin, “Every man has his daydreams / Every man has his goal / people like the way dreams have of sticking to the soul.” I felt that other than some obvious texts like Borges’s Blue Tigers and Beckett’s Sucking Stones, that this was mostly a waste of time. We had a group that wanted to read psychoanalytic theory so we just did read a lot of it. Loewald, Gelber, Tustin, Ogden, Bick, Meltzer, and a few more. I found it nice to read some of these papers into my “voice memos” and now listen to them on long bike rides like podcasts. Meltzer was on to something but seems to have been a victim of his personality in some ways. They’ll say the same of us.
I’ll close with a poem by Matthew Arnold, the second of a pair (the first is Isolation: To Marguerite). I learned of it from Dom Sebastian Moore’s book, The Inner Loneliness, which seems to me to address all of these issues on a level which psychoanalysis cannot access.
A wise priest once said to me, ‘Alcoholism is a thirst for God’, and I could make little sense of this comment at the time. But we begin to get a dramatically different picture of the human world when we consider that human desperation may come ‘from above’ as well as ‘from below’, that anxiety and depression may not be fully accountable for as a being pulled down from normal healthy social life, but may be an experience of emptiness that looks above the human condition for its remedy.
For all that we may be concerned about a self which is transgressed, how much worse might it be if we weren’t? We may finally have to worry about just the opposite of the adhesive anxiety. Here finally is that poem of Arnold’s,
To Marguerite: Continued
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—
.
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
.
Who order'd, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
.
Basta! Forget my words. Remember a few of Ashbery’s (To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert / With salt tears which will never do anyone any good. / My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows. / Perfume my head with forgetting all around me). No more Freud! Listen to Alice Cohen.