The writing of it

And so to desk. I did finally write my dissertation, about which I was surprisingly anxious - which might be a hint as to why it's taken even longer to write this blog about it.

I . . . well, I did all the usual things I'm sure everyone does when they have a dissertation to write.

* They sit reading and reading and reading their way through a pile of stuff, most of which looked like a good idea when they first looked it up/printed it/downloaded it but which now starts to seem increasingly irrelevant/tedious/marginal.

* They write an intro which starts to seem tendentious/over-written/unclear/boring.

* They go away to another part of the country, lie on another sofa, reading more books and papers - between going for walks and making phone calls.

* They feel bored.

* They keep going.

* They come back to London and start writing - in between doing all those other things in life that suddenly seem so urgent.

* They finally have something on paper - which seems . . . fantastic/boring/axiomatic/irrelevant/second-hand.

* They go away again, read some more - walk some more, go out to lunch some more, worry some more.

* They finish it. Well close enough to finish it that they think they better show it to someone - particularly because they worry that they perhaps took the tutor's encouraging them to be brave maybe too far. But the supervisor is now long gone.

* The tutor who encouraged them recommends someone else to read it, a former student who (to their relief and gratitude) tells them it's not complete rubbish.

* They do the final tweaks and polishes. They print it and get it bound the way they have to - something that, of course, takes longer than they anticipate.

* They arrive to hand it in with three minutes to spare. They are told by the administrator: 'You will be disappointed to know, Pete, that you are not quite the last . . . Best title so far, though.**'

* They wait what seems like months but is no more than six weeks or so. They get a Saturday morning phone call (or was it Friday) telling them they've passed.

Next up So was it all worth putting myself through all that studying? What did I get out of it?

** Which was . . . 'Love and work. Love. Work. And. Sex, ambition and hate, too, of course. Oh, and desire, sublimation and play. And and. And the spaces in between.' I'll send you a copy if you're interested.

Dithertation

And so, eventually, back to my dissertation - a story I started in a post back in October last year and never got round to finishing. Which is fitting, given my dithering over the dissertation.

(Those of you joining the story here should perhaps know that my original intention for dissertation was to write something about a psychoanalytic view of punk. No one had done it. I had direct experience of the subject. And, more cynically, I thought it had a reach beyond the narrow world of the analytic consulting rooms. Maybe I could even transform it into a piece of writing that I actually got paid for.)

So what is in a dissertation? In my case, eleven thousand words. To some minds, a lot. A hell of a lot, in fact. To other minds, not much at all. At least, that's what everyone told me when I discussed it with them. You're a professional writer, have been for years, it'll be nothing for you. That's what they all said. Friends, family, fellow students: all basically told me to shut up and get on with it.

Which is what I intended to do. My plan was to start getting thoughts and notes together during the first year. Which I did - up to a point. There was so much reading for the course, though, that I never really did that much. It always took second place. Actually, given my other commitments, it was a lot further down my priority list than that.

So by the time I eventually got round to arranging a meeting with the tutor, I didn't exactly have the biggest file full of notes and references. I just had a couple of possible ideas to present and the confidence to reckon I could blather on about them for a bit, fairly articulately and coherently.

So I blathered on a bit to my tutor about punk. She seemed, well, politely uninterested. She asked me, quite reasonably, how I could develop my thoughts and ideas. The implication was clear: you're dead-ending here, my boy.

So I told her about the other idea, the one about love and work. Fuller details are in the previous posting but the gist is that 'love and work' was - supposedly - Freud's response to the question 'What matters in life?' Taking that as a starting point, I'd tease out both the history of the phrase and the way psychoanalysis has had to say about love and work and . . . and. Or, at least, what psychoanalysts have written about those three little big words. Dissertations are nothing if not a big heap of quotes and citations.

My tutor perked up as I talked. She gave me some neat ideas and lines of inquiry - many of which ended up in the finished piece. She pointed out, for example, that psychoanalysts, by and large, talk a lot about the 'work' of the therapeutic endeavour but have little of any consequence to say about what most of us think of when we think of work - the job that we go to most days and which pays for the roof over our head, our food, heat and . . . psychoanalysis bills.

So I had my subject. She suggested some papers I might read and thoughts I might want to think and pursue. She encouraged me to be brave and not worry about my writing being unorthodox in academic terms. Rightly or wrongly, I took this to mean that I could put jokes in it. Not that I told her this. I certainly didn't tell her that, right from my first thoughts on the subject, I'd intended to open it with a lengthy joke. (It made it to the final version, too.)

All that was left to do was arrange a supervisor. She said: you just need someone to help you progress your ideas, right, not someone to help you with the actual writing etc. Right, I said. She asked who I'd like. I told her. She was a bit surprised but said she'd make the call. Which worked.

The only problem was that it was only possible to have one meeting before my supervisor, like all good analysts, headed off for a long summer break. Actually, it wasn't a problem for me. In fact, I was happier that way. I didn't want to be deflected from my own path too much. Like all writers, I just wanted to be told that what I'd written was good enough that pretty much the entire canon of English literature and letters could from now on be boxed up and put into cold storage.

So we had that one meeting, on a sunny lunchtime in north London - of course. I was given some more ideas for papers to read - and a good story about another cache of papers which were stuffed under another analyst's sofa. I went round the corner to one of my favourite Indian homeware shops, bought a couple of stainless steel bowls and went home.

All I had to do now was write the thing. Eleven. Thousand. Words.

Next up The writing of it

PS Some little rewards for making it to here. A card trick. A mouse trick. An explanation of what we are up to in Afghanistan.

Dis dissertation or dat dissertation?

In one of the very first lectures of my course, the lecturer said something like: 'Pay attention to the questions you ask and the thoughts you have now because very often they are what you will find yourself coming to when you do your dissertation.'

When she - I think it was a she, there were a lot of female lecturers, maybe a majority - said it, my first thought, of course, was: bollocks! How can she say that? The second was: well, she's been round this track before and she wouldn't say it if it didn't have history, would she?

So - for once - I did what I was told and thought about what I'd been told. What was in my mind? The lecture was about the aims of psychoanalysis. One thing mentioned was Freud's view of these aims. 'Love and work,' he said. That is, a capacity for both those two things was a working definition of both psychic health itself and the aims of his couch trip - by extension, all forms of talking therapies, too. Maybe, added the lecturer, Freud said this or maybe he didn't. No one seems quite sure.

I found myself thinking about this. My journalistic head asked: did Freud say it? if not, who did? There's a story there, surely. Maybe it would make a dissertation.

The trouble was that I felt I had already committed myself to a different subject for my dissertation. At the interview for the course, I'd been asked what I might be doing my dissertation on. Bit premature, I thought, but I said what had been on my mind: punk.

As someone who had been around punk as a writer, I'd long thought that there had never been much of interest written about its psychological character - let alone anything of substance viewed through the psychoanalytic prism.

There had been historical books and memoirs - I'd even written one myself. There had been sociological studies, feminist views and post-modernist structural analyses. God, have there been post-modernist structural analyses.

But there had been nothing specific on its psychology. The material was there and plentiful, I thought. The reconstruction of self by taking on new, often self-lacerating names - Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten etc. The fantastic - maybe even fantastical - anger. The dressing-up - ripped, torn, chains, self-mutilation. The rhetoric - dystopic, millennial.

Even more interesting was the fact that this stuff appealed so deeply to well-educated young men from comfortable backgrounds. The notion that punk was a working class thing was, of course, always so much, well, bollocks. Art class thing, perhaps. Working class thing, no.

More, I'd known some of the people first-hand and read many of the memoirs. I was struck by the painfulness and dislocations of so many of the main players' personal histories. There were a good number of familial suicides and alcoholic and junkie parents - enough that I'm surprised it's never drawn comment. There were also, of course, lots of alcoholics and junkies in the bands - and among the writers.

There was a lot of parental abuse, too - though not always presented as such. Johnny Rotten wrote about how his father broke his son's leg, twice. Once, by whacking his bed with a tyre iron. Twice, if my memory isn't tricking me, by running into him with a JCB. Both accidents, wrote Johnny.

I also remember seeing a lot of what I later came to know as self-harm. People burning themselves with cigarettes. One woman, in particular - a girl, really - slashing her belly with broken bottles, then claiming - without much conviction - that she had been attacked.

For my dissertation, I intended to explore the way the psychopathology of the punk 'elite' and its iconography found a home in the psyche of otherwise regular people - or, at least, the ones Freud elsewhere referred to as subject to no more than 'common unhappiness'. What echoes did punk's hysteria and 'madness' find in us all?

I think my title would have been a take on Richard Hell's t-shirt slogan: Please kill me now (the polite nihilism of punk). Or maybe on Leni Riefenstahl's Nuremburg romp: The triumph of the ill.

That seemed a good enough starting point to me. So when, over the first year, fellow students asked about my dissertation plans, that's what I told them I was doing. They seemed to think it was a good idea, too.

I did, though, sometimes also make a joke that my other idea was about love and work - no more than a joke really, based on an old gag about a pub sign painter and how you can get the word 'and' five consecutive times in one sentence. You can guess the rest.

Next up Dis or dat, I still have to write the bloody thing

Close encounter of a personal kind, three

So there I was in the part of Kilburn that now calls itself Brondesbury, with a plate of barbecue and a glass of red wine. Listening to the conversation around me, I realised that I was surrounded by a partyfull of psychoanalysts.

Which led me to thinking about what might be the correct collective noun for psychoanalysts. Not a partyfull, that’s for sure. The thought of a roomful of them dancing to, say, mid-period grime or deep crunk is not an enticing one.

(What would be their collective musical taste? Bach, mostly, I reckon, and for the pop pickers among them, I guess late Bob Marley. Oh, and I’m sure nearly all of them have a copy of the Buena Vista Social Club.)

So, if it’s a murder of crows, what is it of analysts? An anxiety? A doubt? A neurosis? A regression?

I fell to talking about this with the woman sitting next to me. She was an analyst, of course. One or other of us suggested a couch of analysts.

She asked me about myself. I told her I was doing the MSc course. She knew all about it. I added that all I had left to do was my dissertation.

‘It’s due sometime in mid-August,’ I added.

‘August 14,’ she said.

How could she know the exact date when I couldn’t remember it myself? The question must have been clear on my face. She told me the answer: one of her patients was one of my fellow students.

A listen of analysts?

(To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Was she betraying a confidence? She didn’t tell me who it was but still . . .)

Next up Work, love, dissertation