Analyze this', or the way with shrinks in British literature

To state that psychoanalysis has exerted an unprecedented influence on twentieth- century cultural thought is to reiterate a banality. Hundreds of books have been written to explore both subtle and obvious associations that psychoanalysis and art, psychoanalysis and literature share in their devotion to ‘human studies’. The most influential books on this subject are Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Rhetoric, Text and Subjectivity (1994) by Marshall Alcorn, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) by Peter Brooks, Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (1996) by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Psychoanalysis, Language and the Body of the Text (1996) by Martin J. Gliserman, Literature and Psychoanalysis (2001) by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature (2003) by Kyle Valentine.

ft must be argued however that the ‘psychoanalytic culture’, or the way medicine, psychology, sociology and applied analysis in various fields have made ample use of Freudian and post-Freudian doctrines, differs to a certain degree on American soil and in the British Isles. As it is stated on the American Psychoanalytic Association site, career paths in psychoanalysis range more widely than one might think. This stems from the fact that psychoanalysis is both a clinical method of treating emotional disorders, and a depth psychological theory that can be used to understand all aspects of human motivation, behaviour, development and relationships. Analysts throughout the United States share their expertise through a variety of complementary careers. Psychoanalysts can be found in the courtroom, the classroom, and the boardroom. They share their insight in literature and theatrical arts. (APSA)

The picture is different in the UK. In an interview, Karen Hewitt says that the difficulty of naming prominent fictional characters who are psychoanalysts indicates the enormous gulf between American culture and British culture. Educated, middleclass Americans, (and not just Jewish ones) seem to take psychoanalysis for granted. We British don’t. First we are much more skeptical; and secondly, we are more likely to turn to helpful amateurs (e.g. friends) than to professionals in this area. Of course literature does not reflect exact statistics, but this difference is important’. (Interview with Karen Hewitt)

Having quoted that, however, I was also challenged to seek for some literary ‘statistics’ of an intriguing character type - a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist. From the start, a clear distinction should be made about who is who and what. A certain amount of research helps to understand the following. A psychologist is the most general definition of a kind of professional activity in the sphere of education, upbringing and counseling. As a character in fiction, a psychologist does not seem to appear in any significant thematic or ideological function. A psychiatrist is a medical specialization which also entitles one with the right to prescribe medicines. A psychiatrist deals with distinctly clinical cases and therefore can hardly be contributory to any fictional concept either. The profession of a psychotherapist embraces such skilled work as therapy and psychological analysis. Meanwhile, a psychoanalyst's type of professional activity is also psychotherapy, but he/she would rely, for the most part, on the special techniques and methodology developed by Sigmund Freud. It looks as if writers do not care for differentiating these two latter specialties and use the notions of a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst synonymously. Experts claim that the only distinction between the two lies in the frequency of visits and final objective. A psychotherapist uses a variety of methods to literally cure the patient of a number of psychological disorders, while a psychoanalyst uses Freudian methods (and those of his followers) with a view of helping the patient understand the deep essence of his/her personality, identify the unconscious motives of the actions and make them accessible to active consciousness.

An additional prerequisite for a psychoanalytic treatment is the patient’s position during a session: he is supposed to be lying on a coach. A psychoanalyst can rightly be called a psychotherapist, but a psychotherapist is not necessarily a psychoanalyst.

The earliest example to note in the list of twentieth-century British novels which engage, to a greater or lesser degree, a character dealing with some form of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, is, probably, Mother Sugar from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), as the main character calls her. This psychoanalyst is totally impotent in her attempts to rid her patient of the ‘writer’s block’, because she sincerely believes that a writer is someone who is totally unable to lead a normal life. For Lessing, the very category of psychoanalysis is part of a huge psychological problem of the whole of society. The author was in the vanguard of a kind of campaign against all forms of psychotherapy, having published her novel The Four-Gated City (1969), in which psychotherapy is depicted as one technique out of many ways of capitalist exploitation, with doctors as its agents.

This indignation gives way with the appearance of John Fowles’ groundbreaking novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) in which we can recognize, very dimly though, a psychoanalyst’s prototype, Dr. Grogan. He claims, and with all rights, to explain Sarah Woodruffs strange psychic conduct: ‘And you must remember that a deranged mind is not a criminal mind. In this case you must think of despair as a disease, no more or less. That girl, Smithson, has a cholera, a typhus of the intellectual faculties’ (Fowles 1996: 215). Psychoanalytic discourse is present in one of the multiple semantic layers in the novel, engaging in a dialogical interchange with other discourses: Victorian, existentialist and romantic. Later this discourse will, more fully and freely, materialize in the revised version of The Magus (1977).

A visible upsurge in the ‘parade’ of psychoanalysts (psychotherapists) in their artistic disguise has taken place in the British novel of the last three decades of the twentieth century. A psychoanalyst, a minor or a major hero, plays an important conceptual role in a whole range of works: Л Severed Head (1969), The Black Prince (1973) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) by Iris Murdoch, as well as her later The Good Apprentice (1985); Jake’s Thing (1978) by Kingsley Amis; The Radiant Way (1987) and A Natural Curiosity (1989) by Margaret Drabble; Therapy (1995) by David Lodge; The House of Sleep (1997) by Jonathan Coe; Out of This World (1997) by Graham Swift; Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995) by Pat Barker; Human Traces (2005) and Englby (2006) by Sebastian Faulks; The Other Side of You (2006) by Salley Vickers; Remember Me (2008) by Melvin Bragg; Something to Tell You (2008) by Hanif Kureishi. In many of these novels the character of the psychoanalyst is portrayed as a caricature and parody, giving certain pathos to the reception of that particular character type. This pathos, however, contributes to a distinguishable tendency of deepening the psychological portrayal and extending the boundaries of the very conception of a human personality.

Lisa Appignanesi in an article in The Guardian points out that a psychoanalyst as a character in a novel, in the course of several decades following the publication of Freud’s most influential works, has become a grotesque figure. This is especially evident in Murdoch’s novels. In A Severed Head Palmer Anderson is a totally manipulative and amoral type. He uses psychoanalysis to get a new woman into bed, to elaborate a frightfully sophisticated theory of the mind only to inspire reverent awe in the weaker man. Palmer is a caricature, ‘an imitation human being: beautifully finished, exquisitely coloured, but imitation’ (Murdoch 2001: 39).

Murdoch adds another specimen of this sort in The Black Prince to the gallery of psychoanalysts: it is Francis Marloe. She makes him not exactly evil, but rather pitiable, even laughable. And the psychoanalyst in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine serves to disprove the very essence of analysis: it appears to attend to totally unethical aims, it covers up the infidelity and a disgusting double life of Blaise Gavender, the novel’s central character-psychoanalyst. ‘Sin was an awful private happiness blotting out all else; only it was not sin, it was glory, it was his good, his very own, manifested at last’ (Murdoch 1976: 71-72).

Only in her last and most mature and least researched novel The Good Apprentice does Murdoch review her lifelong distrust and belligerence towards psychoanalysis. Thomas McCaskerville is an almost impossibly good husband, elder friend and professional psychoanalyst. ‘Thomas’s choice of a profession was no doubt influenced by his peculiar homelessness, and by certain conflicting and deep desires, even passions, occasioned by a proximity of religion as a forbidden fruit’ (Murdoch 1986: 81). He helps the guilt-ridden Edward to come to terms with this incurable heart trauma, he is competent and honest - and what is most laudable - honest to himself:

If the healer identifies with his patient he may mistake his own powers for those of the other. Not everyone is strong enough to ‘play’. Thomas no longer believed in ‘dreaming along’ with his patients, taking over their fantasies and playing the doctor in an endless therapeutic drama of mutual need: the love affair of healer and patient enacting a play of stirred-up egoism. (Murdoch 1986: 77)

Thomas is human in every sense, and Murdoch throws upon him the test in humanity and goodness: how will he appear in the face of adversity, such as the betrayal of his own blindly loved and unconditionally trusted wife? He does the impossible and executes not a human, but a divine act: he forgives as unconditionally as he loves, leaving the final choice with his errant spouse. In many ways his profession prompts this goodness, his informed critical revision of psychoanalytic theories allows Thomas to broaden Freud’s and Jung’s assumptions and make up a concept of his own: ‘We practice dying through a continual destruction of our self-images, inspired not by the self-hatred which seems to be within, but by the truth that seems to be without; such suffering is normal, it goes on all the time, it must go on’ (Murdoch 1986: 82). In Murdoch’s fiction, this progress in the treatment of a psychoanalyst is revealing: if she exposes psychoanalytic methods as worthless in her earlier works, this complex late novel pays tribute to the magic access into the depth of the human mind, and the ‘magician’ here appears to be a shrink.

A few years before the publication of The Good Apprentice, D. M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel (1981) signalled a sort of return to Freud following ‘the cold war’ declared to him by the pre-60s British culture, to the degree of even making the famous scientist an actual fictional character who would help in diagnosing psychic states. In Thomas’s novel Freud is actually a very rational analyst albeit almost helpless in front of the mazes his patient’s unconscious creates for both of them. The character of a psychoanalyst here helps to elucidate the nature of past traumas rooted in the personal and social domains, including the holocaust; he lays bare the significance and even the value of dragging the repressed content out into consciousness. But what is most striking is the nature of the narrative mode itself: the poetic and prosaic, rational and magical, analytical and metaphorical merge for the creation of a disturbing picture of the human psyche.

Worthy of note is Barker’s outstanding First World War trilogy, in which Dr Rivers, the psychotherapist, performs the role never so fully and comprehensively developed before. The real-life prototype allows the writer to examine a whole range of issues which have rested in fiction’s terra incognita^-, war neurosis, psychosomatic states revealing a complex interrelationship between a psychic shock, trauma, memory and the body.

Dr Rivers’s contribution to the image of a psychoanalyst in British fiction has the effect of revival, ‘regeneration’ indeed. He is a father figure for the young officers who are under his care in Craiglochart hospital; his is the 3d-person vantage point in elucidating the meaning of war trauma; he is the healer, the adviser and the mediator between the soldier’ repressed memory and the healing agency of remembering, between the past of their childhoods and the endurable present of the war, between shame and self-esteem, and between fear and courage. It is the psychoanalyst in this trilogy who comes up with the groundbreaking definition of the unconscious evil of our civilisation: ‘A crucifixion. [...] Beneath it [...] Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. [...] the two bloody bargains on which a civilisation claims to be based’ (Barker 1993: 149).

The tendency to treat a shrink with due respect and fictionalize this character-type seems to be catching up. As Appignanesi pointed out, the publication of two new novels may signal a shift in the relationship between the writer and the psychoanalyst, and the latter’s role in fiction. What has been a century-long tug of war between the two over the terrain of the human psyche has perhaps given way to something more startling than a truce. (Appignanesi)

And these novels are The Other Side of You by Vickers and Something to Tell You) by Kureishi. The fact that Jamal, the main hero of the latter book, is a psychoanalyst represents, in Appignanesi’s view, an achievement in its own right. Jamal chooses his profession with due consideration and awareness. He realizes the importance of resolving such issues as ‘the secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close...’ (Kureishi 2008: 3). The paradox of this character is revealing: he is not likable, to the point even of being unreliable (this sensation reverberates with Karen Hewitt’s view on unreliability, see Footpath 2, pp. 2331), he is also unhappy and traumatized by his childhood misadventures. In addition, Jamal is immoral and even licentious. But the novel ends, nevertheless, with a new patient on his couch, the fact that signals the sustainability of a psychoanalytic quest. Kureishi the multicultural author, surprises his readers by admitting, through his ambiguous hero Jamal, that Freud is a poet who made him pay attention to the ‘depth of the everyday’ (Kureishi 2008: 99), to the fact of how much is hidden in seemingly unimportant gestures.

In Vickers’s novel both the psychoanalyst and the patient give life to something completely new. The therapist here is not a magician who possesses the secret knowledge of the soul. He himself suffers the loss of his nearest and dearest, the incurable pain and heartbreak which he is unable to heal in his own psyche.

Human consciousness through a psychoanalytic lens, whether correctly focused or with a few ‘refractory distortions’, presents a curious puzzle in the novels of differing genres and styles. The historiographic metanovel Out of This World by Swift features a series of psychoanalytic sessions alternating with various narrative positions, and having a few different narrators who tell their versions of the events. Sophie is the patient at those sessions, but her dialogues with the analyst have no authorial comments, the sessions are reported imitating the “live” mode, and the observer-narrator of relevant chapters is impassive. These sessions however help to realize the profound nature of the conflict: T guess I belong to the new world now, Doctor K. You see - I even say, T guess” (Swift 1988: 15). The mysterious ‘K’ never fully unfolds, bringing about an almost Kafkaesque presence of the psychoanalyst to the character.

A rather unexpected psychoanalytic type emerges in Coe’s The House of Sleep. Coe the satirist turns this time to the problems of the psyche, sufferings and painful choices. The appearance of a psychoanalyst Dr Watts is but brief and serves as a kind of anagnorisis, the discovery of the truth about the psychotic Doctor Dudden and narcoleptic Sarah. Coe fictionalizes some frightful mysteries of the human consciousness and the properties of memory. The psychoanalyst diagnoses Sarah’s condition and bases his conclusions on the theories of Jacque Derrida, Roland Barthes and Jacque Lacan treating the assimilation of language and the unconscious. Dr Watts builds his analysis on Barthes’ essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’:

Sarah was, of course, obsessed with her eyes: obsessed with their vulnerability, fearful of their being harmed or violated. Was this not at the root of her fraught and ambivalent feelings towards frogs? Did it not explain her unusual choice of words when talking about her school-children: “I wanted to protect my pupils”? Was this not he reason why she had felt so cruelly betrayed by her husband’s means of committing adultery - the placing of an advertisement in a magazine called Private Eye? (Coe 1998: 289)

Coe relies on a new kind of discourse which uses poststructuralist terminology, lexical borrowings from classical psychoanalysis as well as psychoanalytic situations, such as childhood formative traumas and memories, histories of phobias and philias. ‘The ‘eye’ is not only the instrument through which we view the world; it is also the T, the innermost self, that stands at its centre’ (Coe 1998: 292).

This brief overview does not embrace all the nuances and subtleties in the way a character of a psychoanalyst contributes to the fictional world of contemporary British literature. The tendency is nevertheless in place: British writers seem to have overcome the initial suspicion towards this character type and are looking for ways to engage a psychoanalyst more competently into the fictional representation of the human mind.