‘Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember.’ Willa Cather
To admire and to emulate.
Decades ago, there was a prominent psychoanalyst in Melbourne who described one session with a person he had been trying to help in analysis as so unbearable he had to leave the room and cut the session short.
People were in awe that such an eminent analyst should choose to behave so and took it as permission to copy him. There followed a spate of therapists who chose to leave sessions when the going was tough.
As in so many programs I’ve watched, particularly programs for children when the person running the show works on a demonstration, say putting baking soda into coca cola and watching the results explode froth and bubble, they tell children watching to do this only with an adult present.
Perhaps the analyst who gave this talk should have said likewise. Only do this under strict supervision. Don’t go it alone. You could traumatise people or make it so that people keep their worst experience out of the consulting room for fear their therapist might not be able to bear it.
This same analyst wrote a paper, again well received, in which he described the foetus as a parasite. I can’t remember the point he was making, only that the idea of a human foetus as parasite troubled me. A masculine perspective perhaps or something of his own infant experience popping up if he were to reflect on the feelings he had around his pregnant mother when she was carrying a sibling or some such.
Why parasite? Perhaps it’s a fair association but it’s long troubled me for its negative connotations. Not that parasites are all bad. Some serve their purpose. In the animal kingdom at least, don’t we value the bacteria that live in our guts as parasites of sorts because they help to digest our food. The good bacteria. Not the stuff that makes us sick.
And mistletoe, from the plant kingdom. This piece chopped from our oak tree. Brought there by birds bearing seeds.
The presence of babies in utero can certainly make mothers feel sick but as I understand, it’s not the foetus so much as the hormones that course through a woman’s body and do so to keep the embryo attached to the uterine wall. It’s the process whereby they arrive that can be so sick making.
At least in the first trimester and for some unfortunate souls throughout the pregnancy. I was not one such. I felt sick for the first several weeks but thereafter pregnancy was a joy, beyond the occasional fears about whether my pregnancy would last and dreams of giving birth to a chicken or some other such fantastical fears.
It’s spring here in Melbourne but you’d think it mid-winter with ninety per cent chance of rain and a top temperature of 11 degrees. Cold as it gets in our winters. ‘There is memory in weather’, Paul Lynch writes in one of the bleakest books I’ve read in some time. Prophet Song a dystopian novel about a totalitarian Ireland in which the everyday people, a family of six, the Stack family are slowly destroyed to the point the only ones left, the mother, her daughter an adolescent, and baby son remain as refugees seeking refuge across the waves to Canada.
It is no longer safe in Ireland. Lynch wrote the book to highlight the effects of totalitarianism, displacement, war, and the plight of refugees. It’s a gloriously written book but so painful to read about the struggles this mother endures. It’s written from her point of view. How hope and despair do battle with one another and in the end with all her money spent on bribes, she puts herself and her children into the hands of the people smugglers who promise to get them onto boats and far away. You’re left with the hope of the sea. An ambiguous ending. Will they make it? Or drown?
Even writing these few notes here the sense of the book rises in my gut and leaves me with the same tension I experienced last week when I finished the story and felt the world had ceased to be a safe place in which to live.
I tend to avoid dystopias. As much as they exist in the here and now. To be American at present has its dystopian elements. Who can believe what’s happening there. And Gaza and Ukraine. Other places too of which I know little, other than that they’re embedded in the worst of humankind’s tendency to inflict pain on others.
And all this makes me unbearably sad, and I am already sad because my own work is taking me into dark places with people whom I fear I may not be able to help even as I give my all. My all is insufficient to stem the tide of trauma and abuse they have copped throughout their childhoods.
And this morning the rain is bucketing down and my only comfort is that rain is good for gardens and the roof in this house that we have tried at least six times to get fixed seems finally to be mended at huge cost. Roof repairs do not come cheap.
And the leak in the laundry which we thought we repaired ten years ago sprang up again after he had repaired the ceiling and gave way to a massive bulge that looked as though the water collected behind it would at any minute burst. And on the convex bulge a dark mould grew by day in the humidity of the laundry. I have worn rubber gloves on dry days and tried to eliminate the mould with tough detergents designed to do so. And if I have succeeded, all good, but the stain remains just as painful memories remain.
And I cannot write beyond the pain in my gut and the worry in my head for all the people who are suffering, especially those in my care when I let them down, however much I try to employ all the skill and empathy I have developed over forty years of practice.
Still, I get it wrong. Still, I fail them. Still, I fail to follow my own desires to do no harm. As Helen Garner suggests, writing, like the raising of children cannot be done without causing damage, so too the therapeutic endeavour cannot be undertaken without pain.
We soften some but give rise to other pain, though perhaps not so egregiously as to leave the room when we cannot bear the person’s offering, as long as the person is not literally attacking us beyond the use of words, or worse still with silence.
It was the silent man who did the analyst in. He on the couch in gestures and silence that left his analyst so undermined he could not bear to stay in the room. I know this feeling.
It makes me think of those times in infant observations when a baby cries in pain and as observers there is nothing we can do other than to observe. Or even the time I once watched a sleeping baby for the entire hour of my visit. Her face so full of gestures and dreaming I was mesmerised, but not in the way of dystopia, more in the pleasure of watching a small life evolve.
That small baby is not trying to copy anyone, though she will learn in the fullness of time. One way to learn is to emulate. To model yourself on the actions of others. To learn the rules of connection and communication. But it’s a tricky process and needs someone who can be there for us to help us understand ourselves better through their own self-understanding. None of it comes easily. Still, it’s worth a try.