Joan Didion; Letters to John; Psychoanalysis; psychotherapy; psychology; memoir; journal
A friend lent me his copy of Joan Didion’s letters to John
as I was finishing, unbeknownst to him, Untangling, by Joan Peters. These are two very different books about very
different treatments, but both are told from the perspective of the patient
about their treatment by a mental health professional, and so it made sense to
read them. It is also the case that a
significant corner of my practice involves meeting with parents about managing
their parenting of adult children with mental health issues and, though the
focus on the daughter faded quickly in Peters’ case, that was front and center
with Didion’s book.
Both authors entered treatment (for Peters, her second
treatment) to address issues related to raising an adoptive daughter. From that common starting point, the two diverge
significantly. Peters’ book is about her
analyses, each last for about eight years meeting three or four times a week; Didion’s
is about the first year of a ten year once a week therapy. Peters’ book is a memoir, Didion’s book is a
series of letters to her husband to keep him up to date on the treatment – and therefore
is more like a journal than a memoir. Peters’
book was intended from the get-go to be published; Didion’s letters were
discovered posthumously and published without her consent, nor John’s, nor her
daughter’s, because all three of the principles are deceased, as is her
therapist.
The issue of (lack of) consent to publish weirdly raised
similar issues with me as with Peters’ book.
I was uncomfortable with the amount of information presented in
both. With Peters’, where she is the
author, I had a someone paternal concern that she may not have realized how
open she was being in her presentation.
Of course, that is not my call at all – but I acknowledge my paternalistic concern in my
review as a feeling state. For Didion, I
have only read The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following her
husband John Dunne’s death (the John in the title of this book). The Year of Magical Thinking is closer to a journal though it is also a
memoir, and her writing was very open – but it was also something she intended
to publish. It is not clear that these letters, again even more like a journal than a memoir, were ever intended to be published. Do
the dead have a right to privacy?
What gets someone in the door to therapy? How do we look for help, especially when part
of the reason we may be looking for help is that those who were to have helped
us have, in sometimes very important ways, failed us? Sometimes we come in because of a
diagnosis. In the 90s, Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD) was an important entry point.
Now third-party payers will say that if someone comes in for ADD, they
should be treated for that and released once that treatment has proven
effective. But what if the diagnosis is
an excuse to ask for help in becoming mentally healthy? I think that, for both of these women, their
presentation of difficulty with their daughters was a legitimate need for help with parenting,
but also an entry point for addressing bigger concerns about their own functioning.
When I meet with parents of adult children with mental
health issues, I generally meet less frequently than weekly after an initial
getting to know you segment. The mental health system can be hard to navigate even for a mental health professional, and part of what I provide is some coaching in this regard, but managing our feelings as parents of adults is also challenging, and this is the therapeutic aspect of the relationship. In those
cases where we do meet more frequently, generally at the insistence of the
parent(s), the treatment becomes more individual or couples therapy - and that's what I think took place in both cases, though in Didion’s case, for most of the
year, the part of the treatment reported on remained focused primarily on the relationship with her
daughter.
Didion, in her letters, fell into a pattern of paraphrasing
what she said to the therapist and putting what the therapist said in quotes. Didion has worked as a reporter and she seems
to be doing that here. The quotations seem
accurate, but also grammatically too well constructed to be verbatim
transcripts of the conversation. Didion
is also a novelist and the psychiatrist is, partly, a construction on her part,
though I think she intends to represent him both fairly and positively.
Since these are letters to her husband, she does not go into
the background of each incident that he already knows about because he knows
about it. At one point she casually
refers to a broken hip as a sign of aging and it takes a while to figure out
that she is not referring to this as a metaphor or as an illustration of her
point, but as the current state of affairs – that she fell at a party and broke
her hip – but of course her husband knew this and so her reference would have
made sense to him. The editing is very
light – we have footnotes that explain who people are when, for instance, only their
first names are mentioned, but there is a lot of context that we have to work
to create on our own. So we don’t know
the details of some of the couple’s statements, for instance, to their daughter
because Didion will say something like, “I told him about the conversation we
had with Quintana we had on Friday.”
Particular pieces may then emerge as she and the psychiatrist then
interrogate what took place.
I found myself reacting to the psychiatrist’s position of a).
being all knowing and b). seeing he and Didion as living parallel lives. I don’t believe that this account is entirely
veridical – in part for the grammatical reasons stated above, but also because
of a mismatch between what the psychiatrist is saying and what he is directing
Didion to do. The psychiatrist, in
Didion’s report, is exhorting her – indeed, telling her directly how she should
give Quintana more space to make her own decisions, to think her own thoughts,
but he is not giving Didion that same space – he is not practicing what he is
preaching.
Partly the ways in which the treatment says “Do as I say,
not as I do” is, I think, a residue of the culture at large that Didion and her
psychiatrist grew up in, partly a residue of the medical and mental health
culture the psychiatrist was trained in, but it may also be an expression of,
for lack of a better word, a wish on the part of Didion, which goes back to her
cultural and familial desire. The
language that the psychiatrist and Didion use is that Quintana was never able
to grow up because Didion depended on Quintana to be there for her. There are clear parallels with Didion’s
mother who didn’t know how to express herself – and Didion became a prolific
writer – expressing herself – becoming, in her writing, the outgoing party
person her father wanted her to be. And
she did this in the context of the relationship with John, and also of Quintana.
The psychiatrist is using language – Didion’s preferred form
of communication – to try to overwrite her lived experience. He is coming out of a tradition of insight
being the means of changing behavior.
What he doesn’t seem to see, at least in this beginning of a very long treatment,
are the ways in which his use of language – as a directive – ends up re-enacting
her experience of being coached by her parents on how she should act while they
modelled the exact opposite of what they were proposing she do. Her father wanted her to be outgoing at
parties with his family the way he was not, and her mother wanted her to engage
with people openly and warmly while she shied away from close contact with
others – including, especially, sexual contact with her husband, Didion’s
father.
What Didion reports is an opening up as a result of the contact
with the psychiatrist. Or, more precisely,
she reports that the psychiatrist sees her opening up as a result of the
treatment. She gets and understands and
fights against her wish to direct Quintana, which she knows will keep her
dependent, and is able to see the wisdom of facilitating her autonomy. At
this point, it is important, I think, to say something about the economics of
this situation.
Didion and Dunne are professional writers. One of the things that I remember from the Year
of Living Magically is that John Dunne said that a writer never goes anywhere
without his pen. I frequently think
about this when I delay writing a blog post and my command of the material fades
across time (as is the case a bit here – I finished this book three days ago
and I have been writing this post in my head over that time). They are disciplined writers. Didion doesn’t (I don’t think) miss a letter
to John once she starts writing them until she is done with them – and I think
she finishes writing to him when the treatment turns away from Quintana and
becomes more overtly about herself (more on that later).
Didion and Dunne earned most of their money from writing
screenplays (they wrote the first draft of the Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born and retained the authorship credit even after they were fired from the
project). They claimed that their true love was
reporting and writing novels. They wrote
the screen plays for the money. But the
money was not peanuts. Quintana is meeting
with her psychiatrist once a week for part of this treatment, Didion’s
psychiatrist is meeting with Quintana’s psychiatrist, Quintana is in day treatment
for part of the time. Quintana lives in a New
York apartment that her parents have bought for her. She quits a job and she is gifted 100,000 to
tide her over – or maybe there is a hope that she will invest it – but if she
doesn’t, there’s more where that comes from.
But it is not just the money that is a lot – it is the
comfort with moving in rarified circles.
Quintana is a photographer and photo editor. She is working for the top magazines. And she is drinking a lot of alcohol. She is shy about presenting her work – she has
won awards for individual photos, but she has never had a gallery show of her own,
which would be her next step.
Didion grew up with her one of her high school friends
becoming a Supreme Court justice. She
and Dunne penned blockbuster movies, hang out with movie stars, and Quintana has
been part of that – but as their appendage.
Being independent and autonomous may be a different hill for her to
climb than for others. When you are born
(or adopted right after birth) on a very high peak, it can look like a long way
down from there. And it can feel
shameful not to be able to maintain yourself at that level.
Just as there seemed to be a lot of directing of Didion by
her therapist – which I think she craved and profited from – there was not as
much emotional connection with Didion or with Quintana as Peters experienced in
her second analysis that she described in Untangling. The empathic connection that Peters
experienced was definitely a mixed bag.
It stirred up for her feelings about not having empathy early in her
life – and triggered her to re-experience, or perhaps experience for the first
time the intense feelings that she figured out how to manage on her own as a
very young child.
Didion’s psychiatrist seemed to be relating to Didion as a
peer. He made frequent self-revelations
about, for instance, his own aging process.
I think that, empirically, people like and respond well to both
direction in psychotherapy and self-revelation.
The former helps them feel less uncertain, and the latter helps them
feel less alone. Didion certainly
appreciated – even almost revered – her psychiatrist. I don’t know where the
treatment ended up, but I would be curious if they became curious about the
quality of their relationship. I don’t
think that was likely to happen though.
They seem to have fallen into a kind of avuncular friendship with the
psychiatrist as the older and wiser guide.
Perhaps he shows up in The Year of Living Magically and I have just forgotten
that.
In any case, the book ends as the treatment of Quintana reaches an impasse. My own guess is that at this point, the treatment took a turn and was more related directly to Didion's life. The reason for the letters was so that John could have insight into the material that came from the sessions with the psychiatrist. Maybe the psychiatrist was presented as more authoritative because Didion wanted to have someone on her side in dealing with John, but that does not make sense. Both she and John, like the parents that I have worked with, seem genuinely invested in supporting their child. They also seem genuinely perplexed about how best to be helpful. My own style is to join them in the perplexity - and to offer some ideas, but to elicit ideas from them. The psychiatrist here is reported to be working from a different, more authoritative position, and that seems to suit Didion just fine - and to be genuinely helpful to she and John, even though Quintana's situation, at least as far as it progresses in the book, does not get through a very difficult period in her life.
The description of Quintana's death offered at the end of the book speculates about the ways in which her drinking may have contributed to the natural causes that led her to predecease Didion, but it does not clarify whether she was able to reduce or end her drinking before her death.
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