Dr Judith Pickering
My first response to Maurice’s article was the image of a blank-screen, of drawing a blank, of having nothing to say. If this were a dinner party, I would just sit and listen in echolalic admiration. A few days later I realized that in fact thoughts stimulated by the ideas presented by Maurice had been bubbling away in my unconscious, until they suddenly cohered. I was struggling, as usual, to craft the book I am currently engaged in writing, a process which feels like sanding wood. I have an uneasy relationship with writing, but have come to enjoy it in a new way after analysis. As a child writing was my escape into an alternative universe, and as such a defence against the lack of real relationships in my life. As Doris Lessing comments, writing can be a substitute for relating and loving: words which, 'like invisible film, like cling film' come 'between you and reality'. 'How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did' (Love, Again, p. 44). In my book I devote a chapter to ‘the narcissism of Echo’ analysing the inverted narcissism of those who for various reasons are drawn to play out an echolalic or mirroring role to narcissistic people, such as the character Francis Hinton, in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me.
'I lacked the patience or the confidence to invent a life for myself, and would always be dependent on the lives of others' realises the narrator in Anita Brookner's A Friend From England (1987). Anita Brookner's novels depict lives of quiet desperation led by sad, lonely, self-contained wall-flowers, observers of life who are always to be found hovering in the shadows of the limelight of their more exhibitionistic counterparts. Such characters are the descendants of the nymph Echo and they find their niche in forming echolalic mirrors to those who live out an undeveloped part of their vivacity. As Scurr points out, 'her fastidious characters suffer intricately, washed up on the moral high ground while the less fastidious sail blithely on in life's stream (Scurr, 2002, p. 24).
Francis is an observer of life, a writer. To write is to imagine communicating and being heard, but unlike the real world, one can order, change and have agency in the fictional world. Fictional characters, like voodoo dolls, may act as objects upon which to displace unbearable emotions. In the case of the character Francis in Anita Brookner’s ‘Look at Me’ no one reads her writings, and thus she maintains the purity of the fantasy that someone will actually see her beneath her mask, unimpeded by the messy interpersonal experience of someone actually reading them, having his or her own thoughts and reactions, taking it to another unpredictable level. Yet when she falls in love with James she feels a revulsion against the isolation that writing brought, and cries:
‘I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state, 'I hurt' or, 'I hate' or, 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten’ (p. 84).
As Ronald Fairbairn pointed out, when there is a real relationship one doesn't need internal objects. We orient ourselves inwards towards an intra-psychic universe when the external world of relations fails us (See Grotstein and Rinsley, 1994, p. 5). Frances, in love, reflects that, 'there were no images in my head. I did not write. I was happy' (p.96).
When I entered analysis I found at first I could no longer write, because it felt too solipsistic, too once-removed. I gradually relearned to write, like someone after a stroke, but it was a very different kind of writing. It was conversational. I had to imagine my audience sitting across from me, and engaging in a two-way dialogue with them. Each piece of writing was a long letter to a friend. Writing my book I have many readers who respond and comment. I write it with someone, each page is read and re-read and discussed: it is relationally alive.
I came across a piece of analytic writing which overcame the alienation of the written word, which I read as if each word was so alive and present it was on fire, burning itself into my heart and mind. It was Thomas Odgen's opening to his Subjects of Analysis:
‘It is too late to turn back. Having read the opening words of this book you have already begun to enter into the unsettling experience of finding yourself becoming a subject whom you have not yet met, but nonetheless recognise. The reader of this book must create a voice with which to speak (think) the words (thoughts) comprising it. Reading is not simply a matter of considering, weighing, or even of trying out the ideas and experiences that are presented by the writer. Reading involves a far more intimate form of encounter. You, the reader, must allow me to occupy you, your thoughts, your mind, since I have no voice with which to speak other than yours. If you are to read this book, you must allow yourself to think my thoughts while I must allow myself to become your thoughts and in that moment neither of us will be able to lay claim to the thought as our own exclusive creation’ (Ogden, 1994 p. 1).
Here was an inter-subjective encounter which felt deeply intimate: one can't be more intimate than allowing oneself to become the container for another's thoughts and ideas. It was deeply reassuring and restored my faith in the encounter of writing and reading.
Dr Judith Pickering
Brookner, A. (1983). Look at me. London: Penguin.
Grotstein, J. & D. Rinsley (Eds.). (1994). Fairbairn and the origins of object relations. London: Free Association.
Lessing, D. (1996). Love, again. London: Flamingo.
Ogden, T. (1994). Subjects of analysis. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Scurr, R. (2002, June 21). Review of Anita Brookner's 'The next big thing'. The Times Literary Suppliment, p. 24.
