My experience of psychoanalysis is that of an ex-patient, and it is from the perspective of the patient that I offer the following comments on the preliminary debate on the THERIP website relating to the July Conference on ‘The Fragmented World of Psychoanalysis: Is Dialogue Possible?’ As might be expected, they focus on the relationship between theory and practice. I should also note that by profession I am an anthropologist.
1) In Bernardi’s seminal paper, he says: ‘In the field of psychoanalysis, love for truth starts with being willing to think about myself from the vantage point the other offers us.’
Freud observed that the analytic patient ‘must accept that falling in love with her doctor is an inescapable fate’ (S. E. XIV: 161).
If this is the case, when the patient agrees with an interpretation, is she agreeing with what the analyst is saying or she agreeing with the analyst?
2) It is well-known that Freudian patients hover around the parental bed, Winnicottian patients regress, and Jungian patients have interesting dreams. In other words, the patient responds to the analyst by expressing herself in the language and concepts that he gives her. It is not therefore possible to test the truth of a theory by trying it out, as it were, in the context of the session: the analyst will always find what he seeks and the patient will confirm his findings. As Hocart put it, ‘Everyone agrees that savages do not believe in ghosts because they see them, but see them because they believe in them’. It was because of this that Bion advised the practising analyst to divest himself of memory and desire, otherwise he will apply dead theory to living experience and we will never learn anything new. Nor can the ‘truth’ of a paradigm be judged by its therapeutic success. Speaking cross-culturally, one of the most successful treatments of mental disorders is spirit possession. We cannot deny its efficacy, but we do not believe its theory. This of course raises the question of how psychoanalysis works (when it does work) and of modes of communication informed by more tacit knowledge in the context of the session. Andre Green put it like this: ‘A mind requires another mind to become conscious of itself. This is ineffable and cannot be described.’ How can we decide on what Bernardi calls ‘the best argument’, when the truth of things is rarely plausible and always unpredictable?
3) I began an analysis with John Rickman in autumn of 1950. He died of a heart attack the following June, and his patients were distributed among several analysts. I was allotted to William Gillespie, with whom I stayed for some eight years. Later I began another analysis with Wilfred Bion. Lastly, when Bion was in the States, I had an analysis with Hanna Segal. Altogether it came to some 25 years.
Many people have more than one analysis, but four is unusual, and I am often asked to write about it. ‘Yes, yes,’ I reply, ‘when I can find time.’ But this is not the reason. I cannot remember what was said. Each analysis, except the first, consisted of five 50-minute sessions a week, for about 8 years. There must have been tens of thousands of interpretations. But of these I can recall only a handful, which have a particular quality: I disagreed with the interpretation. For example, I was born in India and taken home by my parents at the age of six to live in Aberdeen with my mother’s mother. My elder brother was already there. In the autumn when the trees shed their leaves, the gardener would wheel them in a barrow to a rubbish heap to make leaf mould. I had a child’s toy barrow and would throw a few handfuls of leaves into it before wheeling it to the rubbish heap. I remember my brother commenting that I was stupid not to fill up the barrow. ‘Ah,’ said Dr Rickman, ‘but he did not understand what was happening. First one leaf, then a second leaf, and now the master stroke, the third leaf.’ By which he meant first the mother, then the father, and now the master stroke the brother. It was such a brilliant interpretation that I did not have the heart to disagree with him, but as I recall the incident, I did not put three leaves in the barrow, just a few handfuls.
I had a great respect for Bion as an analyst. He had a remarkable capacity to enter into the mind of his patients – he did not speak ‘about me’, he spoke ‘me’ – but I can recall only one interpretation. He observed that children cannot give back to their parents what their parents have given to them, they can only pass it on to their children. In this context, he said that I could not do anything for my mother because she was dead. At that moment I felt for him a flash of pure hatred, and I realized that everything I do in life, absolutely everything, is to bring a smile to the face of my mother.
I do not remember anything said to me by Dr Gillespie. From my analysis with Segal I recall only a minor disagreement in the interpretation of a dream. She suggested ‘mish-mash’ stood for mashed potato as a baby food, but I thought it referred to the eclecticism of the Middle Group (now the Independents).
Perhaps we forget the interpretations with which we agree, which passing into us, we have become, and remember only those that remain outside.
Whether the vagaries of my memory are typical, I cannot say, but ‘true controversy’ between analysts seems singularly incomplete without the voice of the patient.
4) In seeking to complement the importance of theory, I would like to quote a passage from John Donne, who converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism: ‘God loves not singularity … God loves fellow-beleeving of others Doctrines. No one man alone makes a church, no one Church alone makes a Catholique Church.’
A Catholic who is also an Anglican, a Lacanian who is also a Kleinian. The mind, it seems, can live comfortably with more than one truth.