Writing block… oh… writing block…

It has been a while. I have been a hermit, distanced from online activities, wholly immersed in constructing Chapter 1, figuring out A Case of Seduction (End Gallery 12-17 May 2008), attending a Psychoanalysis and the Arts and Humanities conference (Vicissitudes : Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis) and coping with the end of my analysis. I know, I know that each time I disappear for a while I come back with a list but I have had to put all of my energies on Chapter 1. It has felt like a milestone, with all the effort it takes to actually reach it. Literally, a PhD is like a marathon and I have had to concentrate on putting one foot forward, and then the other and so one, not tripping, advancing a little at a time. And not to mention a really traumatic Christmas period, of course, from which I wish I could have taken some holiday. Alas, I had Masters assessments on 7th January.

I will write about all of those things I mentioned, in particular the end of analysis, once the mourning period eases my throat. I missed being here. Like Sh. and F. mentioned to me at The Freud Museum last Saturday, blogging is a particular form of writing that suits only some people. To me, it is like tidying my desk, or filing my stuff… I tell you what, I really need to clear some things. The mess has really accumulated while I had my guard down.

The analytic vignettes I listened to at the APCS conference were eye openers in relation to a problem I have encountering with my PhD. My sessions are going somewhere (where, I don’t know yet) and my clinical diary. for as long as I kept it, was a useful tool in relation to establishing parallels between artistic and analytic practices.

The trouble began when it was time to think about this endeavour as a public one and I had to conceive of what had gone on as a piece of writing. I did not know where to start. How could I write a PhD involving my own desire without doing written self analysis? How could I avoid replicating what had gone on in the sessions verbatim? How could I be fair to the process without including insights gained post facto? How could I avoid being too personal? How could I avoid being too irrelevant? How could I gain some distance without being objective? How could I keep subjectivity relevant? These and many, many more question I asked while my fingers froze on the keyboard; this has gone on weekly since September and what you are reading are the first words that are typed about it.

The plenary panel ‘Psychoanalysis Under Fire: Kleinian, Winnicottian, Lacanian and Relational Theory and Practice, Part II’ at the last APCS conference, chaired by Esther Rashkin (University of Utah) and comprised by Kate Briggs (University of West Georgia), Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center), Karl Figlio (University of Essex), and Lynne Layton (Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was very useful in relation to my blockage. All presenters spoke, during two 5 minutes interventions with question intervals, about a clinical encounter.

In the best Freudian fashion, I felt the genre of case history was alive, ever compelling and relevant. There were insights and thinking (despite Figlio’s concerns with thinking) but also theories, sources, process, engagement, and, often, change. This is not new, though. When Freud wrote Dora, or Ratman these different types of content were intermingled, and he would even tell you were and how. But I must be too used to reading Freud, or must think of Freud as not alive, as cristallised, in terms of writing.

The case histories at APCS made me realise what the structure for the case history is, and what I had been doing wrong when conceiving the writing of my own: all of those encounters, and all of Freud’s histories were the result of transference and counter-transference. That is, they were relational: analyst-analysand-[supervisor].

I realised that, although Dr Sh— met with me weekly in the analytic room, I left him there when writing the PhD thesis, and so I wrote him off the case history. But, if with my photographs I aim to provoke a particular encounter between viewer and artwork, the parallel was not to work in the thesis if I shunted what stands in in the place of the artwork. My analytic process had not been a self analysis and trying to write it as one just wouldn’t work. Perhaps I had been wishing for emotional, artistic and academic independence (we are, after all considering the end of analysis). Still, if I am to write a clinical vignette in the spirit of Dora and with the energy of what I heard at the APCS, the analyst and the artwork must be acknowledged and given voice within the writing.

A month and a half has elapsed since my last post and I crave giving back to this journal its daily name. Summer holidays have been and gone, a new academic year has started both for the teacher and the student in me. Summer was surprisingly active: two of my supervisors found wonderful new jobs, making the what-am-I-going-to-do alarm go off (false alarm, as it turned out, at least for the time being); I have taken around 130 photographs for the project, around which 10-12 are usable for my forthcoming show in May; I have learned to drive and drove to a Scottish isle and back without more than a scratch to the bumper of my hired car; I have written 8,000 words for the most painstakingly difficult paper which I am not yet sure if it will be publish although I now know that writing my thesis, after what I have been through, should be half a doddle; I wrote another short article for an exhibition catalogue; my parents visited and brought anxiety; I secured funding for the 2007 APCS conference and will talk about mothers, daughters and cryptophores in New Brunswick (2-4 November); I am in the process of considering ending my analysis for financial reasons.

Now you see why it has been difficult to keep any record of it all while it was happening. This journal, at least, got the summer holiday I did not manage. But now I am back, not exactly refreshed but inspired. This is mainly due to my photographs. I can’t yet put them in here as they need a couple of tweaks here an there. Instead, I will leave you with the wonderful Fischli and Weiss, whose recent catalogue has provided a humorous but poignant context for my own summer art-making.

Fischli & Weiss, Equilibres - Quiet afternoon (Flirtation, love etc.)
Says it all.

It is all gone quiet in my seduction world. I have been battling with issues of enjoyment, of desire; trying to understand where, if anywhere, the paths of seduction, perversion and fetishism cross; deciding what the picture frame and the frame of fantasy have in common; finding the key to the Lacanian universe; attempting to comprehend the limits between subjective and objective; listening to what the objects I have been creating have to tell me and how they challenge theories I have been reading about… All this, however, doesn’t make me feel I am any nearer to finding out why and how objects seduce.

But I am taking the wrong approach, aren’t I? I have finally realised that this (writing, blogging) is precisely what I should be doing. Let me tell you about my epiphany. I was watching Alan Yentob’s TV programme Imagine, which discussed the meaning of the internet in the context of cultural production, when something clicked. I tuned in mainly because my friends Pickwick and Dickon were to make an appearance in it. They are both talented bloggers, writers who have embraced new technologies and new ways of telling stories, of seeing and referring to the world. In Dickon’s journal, choosing a tie may be a matter of life and death. But Dickon and Pickwick did not get there in day or two. Dickon has been blogging since 1997, when this thing we are doing did not even have a name. His archive of events and thoughts is a testimony to what it is like to live in London in the 20th/21st Centuries. As such, it can also be contrasted with other accounts more or less amusing and well written. Dickon is building his socio-historico-anthropological account little by little, with a rendez-vous or a record release here, a TV appearance or a bad day there.

Now, this is how the epiphany took place: what I realised is that I want it all now. But the PhD is a 5 to 7 year process, one that will be arrived at by the day-to-day accumulation of experiments, data, thoughts, readings, conversations, objects, responses. Knowing about how fantasies relate to desire will not answer my research question; Dickon’s description of his suit on the 3 of August does not constitute social testimony. One has to be patient (How many times have I talked about commitment here?). One has to be systematic. Oh but don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about forgetting the aim of my quest; it needs to be there permanently, I need to think about it with every decision I make. As Malcolm said to me, a PhD is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. The aim, the distance to be ran is there. I cannot write a formulaic short story. You see? This PhD is really more like blogging. Every day a little step. A step about the minutiae of doing research, of thinking about desire, of being seduced, of finding something contradictory. In short, a process, rather than an output; answering rather than an answer. The latter will come, if it has to.

A PhD is a marathon and, with my PhD confirmation looming, I am just at the second water point.

I have always found that writing a diary or journal, including this one, is a difficult task. If, added to the description and reflection on life and a PhD, one finds the complexities of undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, the prospect is almost insurmountable. No one is sane enough for psychoanalysis; there is always an ever so slight repression, a nagging denial, a level of resistance, something unknown and unconscious. The analysand, no matter how distant from the process she wants to be, always ends up in the midsts of transference. Without that, there’s no psychoanalytic treatment, of course. Psychoanalysis makes the research consider various things, amongst which are one’s subjective relationship to the research (the objective-subjective conundrum, or the personal-political, as I have called it before) and the issue of time and its management.

Looking not to feel too isolated in my task, I quickly google “clinical+diary” for inspiration. Top hit is S?°ndor Ferenczi’s book, writen from the opposing site in the relationship, as analyst. I had come across this book before, in an article by Julia Borossa, part of my beloved In the Place of an Object collection of essays. Borossa talked about the vulnerability, the intensity of the analytic relationship but only now that my sessions were evolving from training to treatment the importance of this issue of recounting clicked.

The contradiction between need and fear, what I mostly feel in the sessions, is very difficult to write about. Description of the topics discussed and the analysis of symptoms undertaken as part of the sessions is easy. But that, in a sense, is not getting involved, not dealing with the issue, repressing. How can one work through the facts, the feelings in the writing? How can one work through the facts, the feelings in art? [Sublimation comes to mind]. Time management is crucial here. I have said before that psychoanalysis does not happen without commitment, both in terms of money and of time. It is the same with writing and art. However painful, difficult, unimportant, boring, long, tedious, frustrating it may be, one has to keep at it, day after day, week after week or whatever the time agreement is. This is the only way breakthroughs in the style, the accounts, the works could ever happen. Resistance is pierced, something emerges. Write, Write, Write; Do, Do, Do. Let that be a promise from me, who hasn’t finished a substantial piece of work in a long time.

Freud writes:

It is well known that no way has yet been found to embed the convictions that are gained through analysis within any account of the analysis itself. Certainly nothing would be gained by providing exhaustive minutes of what took place during analytic sessions; moreover, the techniques of the treatment preclude the production of any such minutes.”¹”

There are problems involved in writing a clinical diary of one’s own analysis, and these have been worrying me. They obviously tap into the objective-subjective dilemma I have been having of late. Let me summarize them: when I started this PhD, I was very keen on conducting an objective investigation into the causes and processes of object seduction, assuming this phenmenon operated a little like condensation of water in the form of clouds which then produces rain. In other words, cause and effect. Psychoanalysis has introduced two key ideas, disrupting my cozy but uninteristing thinking: the idea of practice and the idea of self.

In relation to writing, the latter has particular consequences. I find myself suffering the dilemma outlined by Freud in the opening quote of this post. There are, however, two added problems for me: (1) I am in the place of the analysand. Thus, I do most of the work in the analysis situation. Reflection and distance are sometimes made very difficult by the turmoil of feelings brought to bear by the couch. (2) I have to establish a complex relationship between my analysis and my PhD in art practice.

The first idea, that of practice, is proving a challenging and exciting way to resolve the latter. It also liberates me from the clutches of Lacan as a master. Understand psychoanalysis as a practices allows more of an intellectual space, without adopting a submissive position towards the literature, trying to make sense of something, building a philosophical edifice that may stand up, but may also be a mirage when it comes to seduction. See what Freud has to say about it:

[…] and he will assert that he does not see himself as possessing the astuteness necessary to concoct an event that could fulfill ll these requirements at a single stroke. Even this plea, however, will have no effect on the part of the population that has not itself had the experience of analysis. Sophisticated self-deception, some will say; others: an absence of discernment; and no veredict will be reached.”²”

As a practitioner, my intense throughts require a picture, just to be able to focus, to find a metaphor to speak from. This was provided to me on my last visit to Sheffield, whose streets are being opened by heavy machinery, the direction of its roads is being reconsidered and the dust created by all these roadworks gives headaches to its inhabitants. I think I feel like the city!

But let me finish again with Freud. You may begin to notice that it is only recently that I have discovered his writings. His contribution if phenomenal! I don’t seem to agree or see eye to eye with many of his assertions but one needs to remember the achievement of his thought, the graoundbreaking nature of his conclusions ‚Äîeven if they owe a great deal to Shopenhauer’s ode of the mind‚Äî, including the creation of a lexicon that has common usage today. My bugbear with him at the moment is around his input as an anlyst in the Wolfman’s case. I know he meant to use many of his interpretations as mere symptoms to bring what was becoming a stale analysis back into some kind of movement (he uses the execellent metaphor of his patient’s bowels for this). Still, I can’t help but feel I can’t quite follow. Still, as seen in the quote above, analysis is a practice and reporting on a practice that is itself filtered may bring this sort of shortcomings. One thing is clear to me, though. Freud’s writing is rounded, clear and beautiful, his narratives are well constructed in literary terms. I can’t help but think of links between Freud and Sherlock Holmes; and even Freud and Nabokov, even though the poor Russian enchanter (who called Freud “Vienese witch doctor”) will probably be turning in his grave. This paragraph may, however, appease his disapproval:

In this way the course of the treatment illustrated the dictum, long held to be true by the analytic technique, that the length of the road that the analysis must travel with the patient and the wealth of material that must be mastered on that road are as nothing compared to the resistance encountered during the work, and are only worthy of consideration in that they are necessarily proportional to that resistance. It is the same proces as when a hostile army takes weeks and months to cross a stretch of land that an express train could cover ina few hours in peace time, and that one’s own army had crossed in a matter of days a hort time before.”³”

1. Freud, S (2006 [1918]) History of an infantile neurosis [The ‘Wolfman’] in Freud, S & Phillips, A (ed.) The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin. p. 202 [back]
2. Freud, S (2006 [1918]) History of an infantile neurosis [The ‘Wolfman’] in Freud, S & Phillips, A (ed.) The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin. p. 241 [back]
3. Freud, S (2006 [1918]) History of an infantile neurosis [The ‘Wolfman’] in Freud, S & Phillips, A (ed.) The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin. p. 200 [back]

Well, that is it until next September. I have completed the first phase of my analysis and it has given me a substantial amount of material to think about. Psychoanalysis is very different from what I initially thought. Not surprising, since, like art, it is a subject area where id?©es re?ßues are the norm. For instance, one does not lay down on the couch and wait for the analyst‚Äôs question (usually portrayed as ‚Äúso, tell me about your mother‚Äù); one does not listen to interpretations, theoretical ramblings or explanations about the events in one‚Äôs life; one does not exclusively talk about one‚Äôs childhood‚Ķ

Let me explain the process. I knock on the door and J— S— opens and asks me to go through. While I lay in the couch, he closes the door and takes his position in a chair behind my head (that’s right, one does not see the analyst). Then, I start talking and talk for about 50 minutes, with brief interventions by my analyst. These interventions take the form of tying knots, of repeating what I have just said, sometimes in a slightly different way. He usually starts his sentences with: “I think you are saying to me…” or “if I understand correctly…”. At the end of the session, J— S— will say: “this is all the time we have for today”. It is up to me to take or discard issues or topics in each session and I must fully take the risk of facing my own denials frontally, if the analyst (or a slip of my tongue) decides to link things and put two and two together.

One of the correct received ideas of analysis is the emphasis on dream material. However, the hefty interpretations of things meaning this or that are not quite accurate. The analyst and analysand work through the material together and look for interpretations within the analysand’s discourse. There are no book answers or inspired explanations that will make everything all right. Even though he is the subject-supposed-to-know, the analyst does not know about the analysand’s traumas. Things are worked through together and knowledge (I hope) is arrived at in that way; that is why an analysis takes so long and can be so painful and frustrating.

Transference has been the most interesting part of my analysis, so far. Even though I am aware of the term and its theoretical underpinnings, feeling its full strength was a real surprise. It is an inevitable part of the process. I feel it takes the place of a ritual, a contract between analyst and analysand. The thought of it, the explicit and non-explicit (or hmmmms) instances when it is referred to in the process, also act as a manipulative tool and create a full set of expectations and a meaningful void (am I really going to miss analysis over the break or do I already miss analysis because J‚Äî S‚Äî asked me about if I was going to?). Chicken and egg in transference… The relationship between analyst and analysand is not less complex than that of viewer and work, however. The problem, as with almost anything in life, is one of time to discover, learn, love, hate the analyst and the work. It takes time for the analyst/work to take the real position of a and for the viewer to work through it.

Analysis has an impact on one‚Äôs life. It is inevitable. My own analysis it has made me more aware of certain aspects of my life I tried to conceal, it has brought them to the fore and I now know I must deal with them. That is why I am going through the process. My original demande d’analyse has substantially changes throughout these 10 weeks: I thought my reason for undertaking analysis was my PhD when, in fact, I may be using my PhD to resolve other more essential matters (I am beginning top explore why I have chosen “seduction” as the topic of my investigation). The objective and the subjective have been slightly blurred and, as in any mode of analysis, I am breaking the self into pieces and trying to work out what these are like, how they interact together, whether they belong to the same artefact and where am I going to find the glue to put everything back together again…

The clinical diary has somewhat helped toward the process by providing an analysis of analysis, paradoxical as it may sound, I have developed a little methodological tool to record and archive the process. First, during the train journey back, I record the session, through bullet point thoughts on a notebook. When I get home, I write more narrative pieces built on the initial bullet points. These pieces are around 700-word length and contain a description of topics talked about during the session, links to theoretical concepts and reflection about the process and my PhD topic. After writing the pieces, I draw out a few keywords to help me search through the database of entries. The process culminates with a circular motion as, in each train journey to my psychoanalytic appointment, I prepare by reading the bullet points from the last session. I am still not sure whether I write the narrative entries of the diary in the most appropriate way. This has been a learning process about writing practice itself, one which has been affected by the subjective/objective issue. I still feel my entries are too personal and need to be a bit more reflective, relating what happens to what I read and think about seduction, to the analogy between art and analysis I am beginning to explore. I suppose I am in the middle of gathering material and of developing a relationship with my analyst. There is a definite change in the latter entries… However, the personal still seduces me because it represents a strong riddle, a problem, or a challenge (challenge is, according to Baudrillard, what is at the heart of seduction, not desire). However, even though I am a seduced subject, I am not the object of my study.

What is not yet resolved is the link between psychoanalysis and my PhD in Art and Design Seduction. An analogy (one of the many possible ones) between the two is getting clearer for me and this is helping me to write the Swansea paper. Both psychoanalysis and art are highly seductive practices that depend on a ritualistic context that feeds itself on appearances (the couch, the white cube, the distance between the viewer and the work, the position of the analyst, conventions of both spaces). I still think that In the Place of an Object (JCFAR Volume 12, Special Issue 2000), together with Bruce Fink and Lacan’s discourse of the analyst will be crucial to this project. The key will be replicating some of what happened at the CFAR by putting, again, the object in the position of the analyst, letting it become Objet Petit a. My proposed contribution to the findings and discussions of the CFAR show and writings is that the objects will be created (trained?) to take the position of the analyst and the relationship between object and viewer/analysand will be monitored and evaluated.

One of the main problems I see looming is that of avoiding over-killing a topic that needs freedom in order to exist and operate, whilst, at the same time, carrying out a rigorous and systematic investigation. Baudrillard already antagonizes seduction and production and speaks of the impossibility of ‚Äúproducing‚Äù seduction. As someone said to me, I may only be able to manage a strategy to catch a glimpse of seduction‚Ķ like in a analysis, if the situation is too metalinguistic, too solipsistic, too self-referential, one goes round and round in circles and gets lost (hence why psychoanalytic theory does not come up in my sessions…).

Like art practice, like a PhD degree, one’s analysis is a long journey. My motivation and commitment are there for all three.