Tag: Freud Conference

Outrunning the bears

Have you ever had the sensation of
lying in bed at night alert to every sound and thought such that sleep evades
you?  Of course you have.  Sleeplessness hits us all at one time
or another.  
Last night I had
fallen asleep for an hour or so but then I woke around midnight with the
awareness that my daughter was not yet home and, although she is an adult and
midnight is not late for a young woman of her generation to be out and about, I could not
get back to sleep.  
I started that
awful process of listening for the click of the door.  I wanted her home and then I could sleep.  I wanted to hear from her that she was
okay.  I wanted the click of the
door, the front lights to blink on at her arrival, the key in the lock.  I went through her mobile number in my
head again and again as I do on such nights when I keep hoping one or other of my
daughters will arrive home safe. 
My thoughts fluctuated between
telling myself to go to sleep, be patient and the urge to dial those
numbers.  Eventually I text messaged her.  I spent some time rehearsing the
message.  
‘I trust all’s
okay.’  
I pressed the send
button and then resumed waiting.  And the waiting got worse as we rolled onto one o’clock in the morning.  You see, I knew my daughter had gone out
on a blind date.  You know, the sort where you do not know the person
you are meeting.  
A dinner in a
restaurant which must have been over by then.  She’s an adult, I told myself.  She’s over twenty one, stop worrying. 
Thoughts of myself at that age ran through, all
the crazy things I have done, endangered my life.   My mind ran amok.  The days events ran through.  
I had been to the Freud conference,
that wondrous annual event where two or three speakers, usually of international
renown, get up and talk about things related to psychoanalysis and how psychoanalytic ideas features on the world stage in practice and applied.  
Yesterday Julian Burnside gave us an inside look at the
lives of certain asylum seekers that makes me further ashamed to live in this
country and turn a blind eye to such profound injustice. Earlier Nancy Hollander had talked about the situation in America where Latino migrants are
treated equally badly in the United States.  She thought
in terms of the systemic nature of these abuses, and how important it is to recognise them and the impact of the social world in analytic work.  Traditionally in psychoanalysis the emphasis has been on the internal world.
Hollander told the joke about a man who
goes shopping in order to prepare for his camping trip.  He goes into a camping store and buys his tent, his sleeping bag, all the stuff a person needs for such an event, but as
he rocks up to the counter, the shop keeper says.  
‘What about your runners?  You’ll need runners.’
 And the man says.  ‘No, I won’t need runners.  I’m going on a camping trip.  You don’t need runners for camping.’
 And the man says, ‘you’ll need
runners to be able to outrun any bears that come along.’
And the man says ‘I could never outrun a
bear, runners or not.’ 
‘But you could outrun your friend.’  
The joke ended there and we all
laughed nervously because the point was made.  This is the essence of neo-liberalism, the idea that the
fittest survive and the rest serve the purpose of the fittest – as food for the
bears. 
Better the bears get the asylum seekers, the unwanted migrants. Better
the immigrants take all those crumby jobs, while we who are more comfortable maintain the
status quo.
I feel even more ashamed of myself
than ever before.  And then after
the talks in the early evening, we went on a tour of the Cunningham Dax Gallery, an
exhibition of art works mainly completed by inmates of Royal Park, some over
fifty-seventy years ago, paintings that reflect the pain of their mental illness and
their incarceration in a mental hospital, and I felt further ashamed.  
Then one of my companions at the talk
said to me over a glass of wine: These people here, these other folks in the audience –
including, I presume he meant, he and I – will go home feeling unsettled for a while, but
then we’ll go back to our everyday lives cleansed of our distress and ready
to resume our busy full lives, strangely refreshed by the experience, as if we
have done enough in simply hearing the talk.  Nothing more we can do.
Helpless as I felt last night with
my daughter out in the dark with a stranger and me fearing the worst, I feel worse about the asylum seekers, not far from here and scattered throughout Australia and beyond  living desperate lives in
no man’s land waiting for asylum after enduring the most appalling experiences
elsewhere.
 I cannot write here all the stories that Julian Burnside told us,
especially of the man who sent Burnside a videotape of another man whose relatives
watched while guards gauged out his eyes and lay the eye balls on a towel
nearby.  This man had been refused asylum and now feared this fate for himself.
And I worry more for my daughters to be growing up in a country whose
behaviour emulates that of the Nazis in Germany some seventy years ago. 
We know and yet we turn a blind
eye. 
How many of you reading here will abandon reading at this point.  I realised as I listened yesterday to
Julian Burnside that I did not want to hear what he had to say, that he was
planting images in my mind of such horror that I could barely stop myself from
bursting into tears.  How can we
continue to allow such cruelty in our treatment of asylum seekers?
And then there is my daughter out
in night with a stranger and what can I do?  It’s not enough to sign petitions – the easy thing – Julian
Burnside reckons, better to write to our local member and his/her opposition
counterpart.  Write a letter tell
them your vote depends on this.  Ask questions and when you get the
standard pro forma back, write another letter.
Burnside then acknowledged that the two dominant parties care only about the marginal seats,
care only about securing their votes in order to retain or gain power.  They therefore pander to the sentiments
of the ‘unsafe seats’, many of whose constituents are the most disenfranchised
of our society and they perhaps most of all resent the incomers and fear there is not
enough to go around. 
They endorse the cruel treatment of
asylum seekers in the belief that there will be more for them but in terms of
what I have recently discovered as ‘biopower’, they along with the rest of us who remain silent actually support the state
infrastructures, the government ruling class that means we wind up policing our
own, via the introduction of such things as the privatisation of asylum
seekers, whereby those who care for detainees are merely prison guards and
asylum seekers who have broken no laws are treated as criminals.
You must be exhausted reading this,
not nearly as exhausted as me, for even after my daughter texted me finally at
1.35 am to say that all was well and she’d see me in the morning, I still could not
sleep. 
If she has elected to stay out with
the stranger I trust her judgement. 
I must.  She’s a grown up, but the world is so cruel
and terrible things can happen and I have not seen her yet and all those
atrocities happen in this ‘fair’ land day after day in the name of the law and
in the name of good governance and I feel sick to the pit of my stomach.  

Not for me cold tea. I much prefer it hot.

I’m out of whack.  This morning when I
started to make my usual cup of tea I found myself making coffee instead – the
whole coffee shebang, complete with frothy milk.  I usually drink coffee
later in the day and start off my waking hours with Earl Grey tea. 
Before I realised I was making coffee instead
of tea, I had been lost in my thoughts, which is easy to do on a Sunday morning
early before any one else is up, including my husband who likes to leave his
tea until it gets cold.  Not for me, cold tea, I much prefer it
hot. 
Life is feeling too hot at the moment and my
head is full.  I wondered as I fiddled with water from the kettle and milk
from the fridge, why I did not know the reason behind one of my daughters being
up early this morning well before me.  Unheard of on a Sunday
morning.  Perhaps she had told me.  And that’s the thing, I can’t
remember. 
I can’t remember either what was the question
that Helen Garner asked at a conference yesterday, not a writing conference,
mind you, but the famous Freud conference, one in which psychoanalytic ideas
get thrown around. 
I have gone every year for the last several
years to the Freud conference and each time it is a thrilling event, for me at
least, not only the topics discussed, but the audience interaction.  The
audience interaction is the most amazing of all.  It is one of those
conferences where half at least of the audience of around two hundred people
know one another, a small conference by some people’s standards but by the
standards of the psychoanalytic community in Melbourne it is huge. 
I expect Helen Garner was there for ideas that
might filter into her book on the Farquharson case.  The Farquharson
affair is the sad story of a man who killed his three sons on Fathers day
ostensibly as an act of revenge against his estranged wife. He pleaded
innocent, saying that he had lost control of his car through a coughing fit as
he approached the water into which he drove with his sons.  He managed to
free himself, but not the sons.  The jury would not buy his defense.
 Farquharson, as I understand it, after an unsuccessful appeal, is now in
prison. 
I write about it all here dispassionately, but
it has rattled me, all this talk of homicide and madness.  I could write
about it with my academic hat on, but my point here is more related to the
behind the scenes experience of being at such a conference, the shiver of
anxiety I felt in a room filled with people many of whom I know, some of whom
I’m fond of, some with whom I have deeply personal connections, mostly via my
work, and others with whom I have no connection at all, and the odd person – I
stress odd – towards whom I feel downright hostile.
I’m writing this in short hand and leave you
to read between the lines.  It is one of those situations where I cannot
be more specific, though I can be specific about this amazing section of the
conference where the writer, lawyer and psychoanalytically trained professor, Elyn Saks, who
also happens to be schizophrenic, spoke about her life and her wonderful book, The Centre Cannot Hold – also the title of the
conference. 
The topic was unsettling but more so the fact
that it was delivered via satellite link-up.  Elyn Saks sat facing the
screen and what to her must have looked like an audience of bobbing heads and
clapping hands.  She sat at a dark desk which was centred in what looked
like a conference room or large office.  We, the audience, could see only her and the chair in which she sat, the table/desk in front of her, all in dark office colours, against a huge white board on a white wall. 
It must have been evening time for Elyn Saks
at eleven am Melbourne time but she did not seem so much tired as surreal.  That
was until she spoke, at which time she came alive, especially during question
time. 
Hers was a plea to recognise that people with
schizophrenia and other sharply defined mental illness can and do lead
successful lives.  One difficulty among many, seems to be that people with
severe mental illness are often told to lower their expectations: Go get a job
in Safeway or something, once you get over the hurdle of a psychotic episode.  Don’t try to do too much.
When I asked a
question of Elyn Saks during discussion time, I felt this
weird collision of worlds.  I held the microphone in my hands and faced
the screen where she sat.  It was like one gigantic skype session,
only with a audience of two hundred people and Elyn Saks alone at the other
end. 
My question, more a comment dealt with the issue of separation, which she describes in her book.  How unbearable she
had found it when her first therapist in London left her, because she and her
husband were moving elsewhere as I recall.  They had to pry Elyn
loose.  I know this feeling well and she spoke to it well.
A family gathering from my mother’s day, when she was one of the little girls in the front row.  For some weird and surreal reason this photo reminds me of the Freud conference, another gathering of sorts, where the ghosts from the past settle on our shoulders and our futures are as yet unimaginable.   

And here’s a quote from Samuel Beckett, to help you on your way: 
‘You must go
on.
           
I can’t go on.
           
You must go on.
           
I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me,
until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s
done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me
to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That
would surprise me, if it opens.)
           
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never
know: in the silence you don’t know.
           
You must go on.
           
I can’t go on.
           
I’ll go on.’ 
Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
Before I stop I must acknowledge my good blog friend, Kath Lockett from the Blurb from the burbs blog, and Goofing off in Geneva, who graced me with a Liebster award.  With many thanks, Kath.