Untangling, Joan K. Peters, Psychoanalysis, Memoir, Personal therapy account, psychotherapy,
When I was at the psychoanalytic meetings in San Francisco last February, Joan Peters was on a panel with Jonathan Rosen. Both had written memoirs. The panel was to address the question of whether memoir writing was similar to the psychoanalytic process. Rosen took up most of the oxygen on the panel – his story, The Best Minds (reviewed here) was about growing up with a friend who became schizophrenic and who was grievously failed by the psychiatric system and by Yale University. His presentation was provocative and it was clear that he had not come to resolution about what had happened to his friend and a roomful of therapists began responding to him – partly defensively and partly, I think, out of concern.
Joan Peters and her book, Untangling, got a little lost in
the shuffle. It is a memoir about her
two analyses, one in her twenties and thirties and one later in life, in her
sixties and seventies. Each analysis, both with a woman analyst, lasted for more
than a decade. As she noted, when she
went into analysis, she looked for other first person accounts and could find very
few. When her second analyst suggested
she could write about her experience, she, as a novelist and composition
professor, jumped at the chance to contribute to the literature.
In terms of the stated purpose of the panel - to determine if a memoir served a psychoanalytic function I, at least, concluded that for Rosen it did not. If anything it cemented into place his views that he had been robbed of his friend and his friend had been robbed of his life because the establishment neither knew how serious his situation was nor what to do about it even though his friend was advertising his need for responsible care – not the makeshift hippie-dippie care that he, from Rosen's perspective, received. That he had lost his friend was memorialized, but not mourned, in the writing of the memoir.
In my earlier review, I scoffed at a bit at
Peters’ Untangling book being a part of the panel.
After all, she was in analysis.
How could her memoir of an analysis serve an analytic function? Well, having now read it, it could. If she said so at the panel, I didn’t hear it,
but it is right there in the book.
Writing it was integral to internalizing aspects of the analysis and that,
in turn, was very important to bringing the second analysis to a semi-permeable
close. So, when Peters read my review
of the Rosen book, she encouraged me to read and comment on hers, and I took that on
as an assignment, and you see the result here.
Like other assignments in my life, this one took a while to complete. It wasn’t just that it was an assignment - though that may have caused a little foot dragging. When I heard her when she said that there aren’t
many records available from the patient’s point of view about an analysis, I realized that I have read many of the few that there are. In my research, I listen to recorded
analyses. All analysts read many, many
reports of analyses from the perspective of the analyst. But it is important to me to hear patients talking
about their experience. Does it square
with what I’ve observed and what I’ve read from the analyst’s perspective? So it was not just an assignment, but a professional obligation - as a clinician and as a researcher. Sigh...
I didn’t read the book during the academic year. Yes, I was too busy – though I did read Rosen’s
book. What kept me away from her
book? Both books were recommended by the
panel moderator, Judy Kantrowitz, a woman I trust. But that reading this
book felt more like work than pleasure was a big chunk of it. And,
frankly, when I opened it, reading it did feel like work. It was like reading a 200 page case
report. Case reports are usually 20-30
pages, so this felt like a lot of work.
The book is also uncomfortable to read because it is
incredibly revealing. Peters talks
frankly about her family, her upbringing and about her life, before during and
after each analysis. She talks about her
sexual life – an integral and important part of her analyses. And she also talks about her naked need for
her analyst, especially in her second analysis.
As an analyst, I should be comfortable hearing all of this, but reading in a first person account was a little like how I imagine having public sex (presumably at a nudist colony) must be – uncomfortably revealing – that made me self-conscious
in my identification with her. Perhaps it was also that I
was feeling voyeuristic reading a memoir and thus outside of my professional role about very personal aspects of a person's life, but, if so, I was also
feeling uncomfortable with her violation of privacy norms in the public sphere,
even in the age of Oprah openness.
There was another level on which this book felt
uncomfortable. In the second analysis,
the patient became, in technical terms, quite regressed. In less technical terms, she became very
childlike. She apparently did this
largely in the confines of the relationship with the analyst – the rest of her
life, with the exception of some symptomatic functioning like restless legs when
she was sleeping and sometimes when she was awake – was largely unaffected by
this regression within the treatment. Her
marriage appears to have progressed along just fine and she was able to bring
her teaching career to a close. But, in
her relationship with her therapist she became quite demanding and needy. She emailed and texted in the night and her
analyst regularly travelled to meet with her when the analyst’s office was unavailable
for one of days of their thrice weekly meetings, then, during COVID lockdown, her therapist travelled to her for every meeting.
Her demands on the analyst led me to empathize with her analyst and to feel
the challenge of meeting the needs of this demanding patient.
The book is a description, in roughly chronological order,
of Peters’ life and the ways that the two analyses fit into it. The first analysis occurred when she was twenty
eight and her lesbian lover insisted she seek treatment because she was waking
screaming from nightmares 2 or 3 times a week.
Otherwise fine with a life that had its share of bumps and bruises as
she had been bounced from her first academic job by a misogynistic and
conservative faculty, she was now in a supportive relationship and comfortable
cultural niche in New York City, representing herself as a feminist in her
writing and politically, but something was amiss.
She described the first analyst as introducing her to
herself. She learned what she missed out
on when her mother went back to work when her father died when she was two
years old. She learned that her mother’s
careful composure – holding herself rigidly together to do the modeling work that
she did and holding herself apart from her daughter more generally, so that Joan knew not
to touch her when she crawled into her bed after waking from a nightmare – had a
profound impact on her. She learned that
the isolation she felt was somewhat mediated by the closer relationship she had
with her eight years older brother who was able to provide some of the nurturing
she craved. But she also learned that his care for her wasn’t enough to overcome the sense that she was not enticing enough to draw her mother out or to evince care from her.
This first analysis felt familiar – it included a very analytic
approach of creating a space where the analyst and the patient can together
look at the things that the patient has not been able to look at on her own and
find that they are not so scary when they look at them together. This has been called a process of creating a
third – a kind of vantage point of objectivity from which they could observe
the patient’s subjectivity objectively. It
also nicely illustrated that this process brings insight, not just into what
happened, but into who it is that the patient has become in the context of the
relationships that shaped her life.
All that said, there was something sterile about the first analysis. The analyst was,
despite being a fellow New York Jew and someone Peters could relate to on many
levels, largely unknown to her and somewhat sphinx or oracle like in her
pronouncements about Peters’ history and her functioning. It was as if Peters, as a member of what I
call the nomad class, had severed her relationships with her family enough that
she was distracted from the daily pain of not being in contact, but was haunted
by that earlier lack, and it came back with a vengeance at night. The analyst could explain why this was happening, but the experience was left to be dealt with in the night, not in the consulting room.
The sense that the earlier analysis helped Peters make sense of her life sustained her through a series of transitions and she was able to create a more stable life including, somewhat surprisingly to me and to her, a traditional marriage to a traditional and pretty straight-laced man. Before you get your hackles up about psychoanalysis and conversion therapy, this part of her life, Peters says, was not a problematic area. Her analyst's position was that sex was sex and the genders of the people in the room were much less important than the physical intimacy that occurred. In fact, her “transition” to men was led by a relationship with a gay man who encouraged her to engage with men sexually, but not to get involved with them. Neither she nor her (third) husband had very romantic fantasies about marriage and this, she says, accounts for their discovering and connecting with each other in the loving way that they were able to.
At this point Jane Austen, as Peters notes, would have been proud and we
could have written her off as being set up to live happily ever after. While
she has remained married to the same man for 40 years and is still deeply in
love with him, she continued to struggle with depressive jags – though not as
deep as before the analysis, and she asks herself:
Would my life have as good without
analysis? I didn’t think so. I was way too captivated by mother to be free
from her unhappiness; I was as stuck in my past as an insect in amber, despite
having remembered so little of it.
She muddled along just fine, though, living Freud’s life of ordinary
unhappiness, more or less, until she had difficulties with her adoptive daughter
in 2014. After having tried various
outcome focused approaches to engaging with her daughter, she interviewed two analysts and
selected Kristi Walsh to be her second analyst.
The tenor of the second analysis was very different, though, as she
described when she was on the panel, all of the same issues emerged. She was still the same person who had gone
through her first analysis, she had the same history and now the issue involved
how that history was impacting her experience of being a mother.
The issues may have been the same, but the process of the
treatment and the feel of it were very different. Where before she learned that she had not had
access to her mother through most of her life, in this analysis, she felt her
mother’s absence – but also her desire to be mothered. She said this emerged from her analyst being available to her and caring for her in ways that her mother never had. This, in turn, brought out an additional
force/feeling that she termed the Anti-Force.
My understanding of the anti-force is that when she would experience the
desire/need to be mothered when she was a child and was frustrated by not
getting it, the anti-force pushed that genie back into the bottle. One of the ways that it did this was to
convince hers that she was bad and therefore, didn’t deserve her mother’s
care.
That system worked well enough when she was a child. Now that she was an adult with reasonable levels
of self-esteem, she was not so willing to simply hole up and not put pressure on
the Mommy that experienced the analyst as being. She wrote to the analyst between sessions,
wondering where she was or prodding her to give her things. She was angry with the analyst in session for
things that her non-anti-force brain felt were not really reasonable, but somehow
her little girl self felt were reasonable things to accuse her of or to demand of
her. Meanwhile her analyst was walking
her through the experiences she was having – interpreting the feelings and the
actions she was engaging in.
I must admit to two different feelings of identification with the analyst. I felt for her – for the intensity of the feelings that Peters was directing towards her – both the feelings of idealization and attachment – and the feelings of hatred and anger. Neither felt deserved or a true reflection of who the analyst actually was – but both would, I was certain, have felt real to the analyst, as if she were solely responsible for creating them, instead of simply being the foil for feelings that were directed towards long-gone people. Especially because I sensed that the analyst is a good egg, I believe that she would have taken the rebukes and criticisms personally.
The second set of feelings of identification had a different
quality. I heard the interpretations, as
Peters remembered them, and the recommendations of things to read. These became, I think, tentpoles – things that
could be remembered out of the thousands of things that had passed between
them. I recognized them – I had said
similar things. I think they were
helpful to Peters and I hope they were helpful to my patients, but when
compared with the intensity of the feeling states that Peters was reporting,
they felt lame and insubstantial. They
felt well-intentioned but about as useful as an umbrella in thunderstorm where
the protection from above is useless against the rain blown from the sides, and
the pole itself might be attracting lightning.
In a word, I think I felt the limits of empathy. I remember when a partner had made two moves
for me and I thought I had been empathic with them, then they I made a move and
realized, “Oh, this is worse than I imagined.”
I think it may be important for us, as therapists, not to know how difficult
the experience is for the patients that we are shepherding through this very
difficult process. Even when they are
shouting at us that we don’t know and we are claiming that we do, we probably
are not, in that moment, experiencing exactly what they are feeling nor what they want
us to feel in response to that. If we did, we would probably be
as stuck as they are. On the other hand,
this doesn’t protect us from feeling beaten – in the way that a parent feels
beaten by the intensity of the need for love that their child demands of them.
The reenactment of the childhood experience - where the patient is demanding of the therapist what the child demands of the parent - should be one in which the patient, like the child, does not know the impact of what they are doing. I think we are born with a feeling of entitlement to a certain level of care. I think we know, on some level, just how incapable we are of sustaining ourselves - and we sense that these people - our caregivers - have chosen for us to come into the world. I am not sure of this position - it would certainly not have flown in the 18th or 19th century - but I think that we believe some version of this today, not just popularly, but, as Daniel Stern has pointed out, empirically.
One of the reasons, then, that there may not be as many
memoirs of treatment as we might think there would be is that it is challenging
to capture the intensity of the interchange in a treatment that goes as deeply
as this one did. And it may be somewhat embarrassing
to revisit this exchange when feeling better – to realize the depth of immaturity
that regression leads us into. I think
it is a testament to this pair that the analyst encouraged her patient to write
about her experience, and that the patient felt comfortable doing that – that Peters
did not feel ashamed of her violent, aggressive love for her analyst, but felt
that her violent aggressive love had been accepted and reciprocated (there are various ways that the therapist asserted herself in ways that were both accepting, but also limiting, and these - as with a teenager - were both desired by the patient, even needed by her, but also resented).
I also think that people don’t write about analyses because
of the incredible amount of personal material that is being exposed. Analysts are much more likely to write about
cases. It is not their own material that
is being exposed but that of others, and there are means of preserving the anonymity of the patient - by changing the names and dates and a few insignificant details. The
closest we get to exposing ourselves is to talk about failed cases, but here we are talking about our
professional failings, not the personal failings that we confessed to in our
own personal analyses. Many psychoanalysts
appear to have forgotten that they themselves were in analysis – hopefully they
remember in the privacy of their thoughts as they are interacting with their
patients and empathically attuning themselves to the material that the patients
are going through – as this analyst did, even if that can sound somewhat tinny
and canned to me when I say those things, and even at moments when I hear the report of what the analyst said in this
analysis.
Members of the nomad class are much more likely to have
access to psychoanalysis than the townies who don’t begin – or continue – the process
of nomadship by going off to college and then taking a first job in a location
that may be another step away from home.
Perhaps townies work through these issues more organically, engaging
with their parents and siblings and classmates across the course of their lives
– recursively reliving their lives in parallel with Peters, but doing so in the
context of doing that with the people with whom they lived it the first time (see The Bear for a depiction of this version on television,
rather than, like Peters, with people who act as foils or antennae to channel
the spirits of far away people. Of
course this dichotomy is imaginary, but it begs Peters question – are we better
off for having had analyses?
I am in the middle of doing research where I am following up
with people who had analyses years ago and I am asking them about that
experience. It is helpful, if at times a
bit of a slog, to have read this book and to have heard someone detail both the arc of a long-ago analyses
and a contemporary one and to describe the messiness and the beauty of that
relationship. While this memoir did
serve an important psychoanalytic task – it helped (I believe) Peters to
consolidate what she had gained in the treatment, and this helped her to re-own
the parts of herself that she had given to the analyst for safekeeping and, in
the re-owning, to be able to loosen her grip on the analyst and move towards a
termination, I’m not sure that all that took place here could have happened in
a memoir. As helpful as self-analysis
is, the person of her analyst was not just incidental, but, I think, instrumental
in the process of untangling.
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