Back on the chain-of-thought-gang

Something of a break since I last updated this, no? Why? Thinking mostly - wondering how to progress with this series of self-questionings, about Freud and why I did the course etc?

What gave me pause for thought were comments posted on my last posting. (You can look them up a little further down the page - and add your own views if you want.) They were smart and intriguing and worthwhile comments and questionings of what I'd written. They raised really interesting points, some of which I felt I could answer easily and others which I thought would inevitably raise other questions - which, in turn, might be best resolved with more evidence etc.

Which is what gave me pause (nearly a month of it) for thought. It wasn't that I wasn't willing to engage in the discussion and debate. I was fine with it. Relished it, in fact. As anyone who has known me for more than, oh, thirty seconds can confirm, I rarely shrink from an argument. As some gamblers will bet on raindrops progress down a wet window, so I'll easily slip into a debate on why that might be happening. Too easily, I guess.

And that was the trouble. As much as I itched to get into a nitty-gritty, down-on-the-mat, punch-them-in-the-kidneys 'discussion', I knew that, very soon, there would be no one left in the room watching or listening. It would alienate just everyone - except car-crash fanciers.

Which led to another problem. I thought the questions raised deserved to be answered. I didn't want to seem to be avoiding them. So . . .

That's why I shut up for a bit. And?

Rather than not answer the questions, I'll just not answer them on the blog. I'll do it either directly on the comments - which means you can have a look if you want but it's not in-your-face. Or, if I think it's too detailed/boring even for the comments section, I'll answer my inquisitors directly. (They are not unknown unknowns. They have previous. They are, of course, friends of mine.)

Meanwhile, I'll just plough on with answering my old friend's challenges here on the main page. Which is what I'll be doing next here. Well, almost. First, there will be a little something else . . .

Next up A visit to the motherfucking theatre

Meanwhile some diversionary moments . . .

DM1 The scent of a man

DM2 The magic of a woman*

DM3 The rottenness in the state of Denmark

DM4 Home is where you park your jetplane

* Despite her name, she's a Londoner, by the way - and a serious artist, too, of course. Which puts me in mind of those great chroniclers of modern manners, Chas 'n' Dave:
'I've been to the east and I've been out west
And I've been the world around
But I ain't seen none come anywhere near
The girls from London town.'

Freud and the case for the prosecution, part one*

So, in the words of my old school pal, what do I think about the old boy now? Do Freud's thoughts and writings still have anything to offer me or anyone else? Having spent two years reading and discussing an enormous pile of his writings, what do I reckon? What have I learned?

My pal put the counter-case to me about Freud, organising it under headings, all of them starting with a D, the first of which was . . .

Distance

My pal wrote, of Freudian thought and practice: 'It can make people think too much of what happened long ago in childhood, and especially in their relationship with parents. Unfortunately, the events are fixed, and it's easy to spend too long blaming one's family and one's upbringing.'

My answer Yes, but.** There are two questions here, I guess. One, do our early years and relationships have long-term, central impact on our adult life? Two, if they do, can we do anything helpful with that knowledge?

One There is, quite clearly, ample evidence of various kinds about the impact of early experience. (Not that I'm excluding genetic factors, of course. There is ample evidence for them, too.)

The clearest, simplest evidence is probably from attachment theory - not Freud, I know, but he didn't quote it, I think, mostly because it wasn't around in his day. There's a thing called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).


It's twenty questions and lasts about an hour. Get a pregnant woman to answer it and you can predict with astonishing accuracy the emotional tenor and psychological make-up of her unborn child - as a toddler, anyway. If you want to guess how the child will fare as a teenager, you do the AAI on the prospective father.

Two Yes, but, again. Events are rarely 'fixed' - certainly not in the realms of our inner life. Our memories are many layered things - as experiments of all kinds show. We create and construct our past in much the same way as we create what we think of as our vision - out of the same rag bag of bits of sequential realities, memories, general knowledge, our innate drive to find patterns, our predictions and, of course, our desires. Which is why optical illusions work. They screw not with our eyes but with our perceptual organisational system. Our eyes' eyes, perhaps.

As eyes are not movie cameras, so our past is not a movie. Our pasts have a relationship to reality but it's a complex, tangential one. Freud had a word for this: Nachträglichkeit***. There's no accepted English translation for it. Mine is: afterwardsness****. The past is not so much a foreign country as a collation of reality and layers of memories and constructions - some of which will be based on memories which are themselves constructions.

Confused? We all are. That's the point.

Freud didn't think of analysis as blaming the parents. He wrote something like: neurotics (ie all of us - though more you than me, of course) suffer from memories. Not events, that is, but memories. To him, analysis was a kind of reality-testing endeavour - a matter of challenging the fantasies (and hence symptoms) by which we lead our lives.

So Larkin was wrong. It's not that your mum and dad fucked you up - though they may have. It's your memory of your mum and dad that fucked you up. Johnny Thunders was right, though: you can't put your arms round a memory. Well, best not to. That way, you can change your past*****.

Next up Determination - is there any free will in Freud?

Some light entertainment From an old pied noir 88er.

* There will be at least four parts, maybe more

** Still my default answer to too many things, I know. I try hard to remind myself to say 'Yes, and' instead but I often fail.

*** It sounds like a 50 Crown word but it isn't. It's quite standard German. They just like their words long. It's the way their language works.

**** The fashionable one in London Freudian circles is 'après coup' - borrowed from the French psychoanalysts who have been making a big noise about it since the 1960s. It's a rotten, inaccurate translation even in French, though. Whatever Freud meant it to be, it wasn't 'after shock'.

***** Time travel movies are, to my puckish mind, essentially populist Oedipal wish fulfilments. As action movies allow us to murder and mutilate (in fantasy) so movies like Back To The Future allow our secret inner world to vicariously flirt with the idea of . . . fucking (up) mum and dad.

Final questions

A couple of months ago, I got an email from my oldest friend (or rather, the friend I've known longest - since grammar school days). He questioned what I'd got out of the course. Not that he was being sceptical, just quizzical.

He wrote: 'You've been immersed in it for two years, so do you shake yourself and move on, or find some of it has stuck?' In particular, he asked me about Freud: 'What you think about the old boy now?'

Obviously, I'd already had similar thoughts but his email went on to pose more questions with his usual acute directness. I always intended to have a go at answering them but I . . . wanted to get my dissertation out of the way first. Well, writing about my dissertation.

Now it's time to go back and come up with some answers - a kind of personal audit of the course.

So what I'm going to do is pose a series of questions from myself (and my ancient friend) and have a go at answering them, one per blog. Perhaps the actual questions will change as I go along but this is the kind of thing I'll be asking myself . . .

* Why did you do the course in the first place? Or rather, how do you now view what you said about your reasons at the time?

* Did you get out of it what you hoped to get out of it? Did your original wishes still add up in the light of how it panned out? In particular, in the light of the fact that the course was, after all, about the darkness and obliqueness of human desires - and the limits of self-knowledge.

* What did you learn about yourself (and others)? From the actual material of the course? From the doing of a course?

* So, Freud: what do I now think about the old boy? Do his thoughts and writings still have anything to offer? Or is it just a load of old Viennese whirl?

* And Lacan? What did I find when I looked in his mirror? And at the picture he kept in a cupboard.

* Will I now become a therapist? A lot of people ask me that one. Even more assume it as a fact.

* What did I really like about it? What didn't I like? Best memories? Worst memories? Etc etc?

A little time-wasting fun?

How about a little men's fashionwear? Or perhaps some guitar music?

Next up That first final question: why did I do it in the first place and was I being honest with myself?

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.

Looking that gift CD in the mouth

Putting this year’s Xmas CD compilation together, I realised that my formula is becoming more and more developed — perhaps formulaic, even. Whichever it is, here are the rules I seem to go by . . .

Rule one There must be some Elvis. This year’s is a posthumous duet. There’s something oddly fitting about Elvis being so prolific since he died. Also, as some of you might know, at the time of his first post-death spotting, in the Stapleton Hall Rd branch of Tesco, I was living just around the corner.

Rule two There must be a track from Phil Spector’s Christmas album. This year, it’s Darlene Love.

Rule three The first track must be a familiar one. See rule two.

Rule four Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about sadness, loss, separation and inevitability of death. See: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Blue Christmas.

Rule five White Christmas must be in there somewhere. The only son of its author Irving Berlin died on Christmas Day. (See rule four.)

Rule six Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about family — its realities as well as its fantasies. See: Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas), Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight).

Rule seven Modern Christmas offers an embodiment of the global hegemony of Anglo-American pop music. See: Noel Blanc, Merry Christmas Polka.

Rule eight Christmas is also a time for self-surprising sexual revelations. See: Christmas Tree, Handsome Santa.

Rule nine There should be unfamiliar versions of familiar songs. See: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight), Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

Rule ten There should be at least one quite unfamiliar new(ish) tune. See: A Change at Christmas (Say It Isn’t So), Christmas Tree.

Rule eleven There should be a track that is familiar to the point of nausea yet which can be refreshed back to its original joy by being placed in new company. See: All I Want For Christmas Is You.

Rule twelve There should be something deeply ethnic. See: Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play.

Rule thirteen There should be something deeply English. See: Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play.

Rule fourteen There should be something by Bing Crosby or Johnny Mercer. Failing that, something by their oftentimes associates, the Andrews Sisters. See: Merry Christmas Polka.

Rule fifteen There should be one or more example of the wonderful world of US black Christmas pop. See: Winter Wonderland, Hot Christmas, 8 Days Of Christmas, Christmas Blues, 'Zat You, Santa Claus?

Rule sixteen There should be wit. See: Handsome Santa, Beatniks Wish, Hot Christmas, 'Zat You, Santa Claus?

Rule seventeen There should be some country. See: Blue Christmas, Little Drummer Boy.

Rule eighteen There should be a surprise, something that people would generally decide they hated before giving it a decent listen in the right company. See: All I Want For Christmas Is You, Children Go Where I Send Thee.

Rule nineteen There should be something that sounds like it was recorded in a cornflake factory. See: White Christmas (Sugar Boy Crawford).

Rule twenty There should be something by a girlie indie singer with an off-putting name and shtick which is nonetheless surprisingly enticing. See: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Not Now But in the Coming.

PS In the original draft of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, the next line was 'because it may be your last'.

Next up (perhaps) That dithertation.

A Christmas gift for you (and you and you and you)

Some Christmases I manage to get a proper CD compilation together and mailed to people. Last Christmas and the one before, I did just that.

Some Christmases I run so late putting it together, I get no further than a beta version to hand out on Christmas Eve. That’s this year.

So here is this year’s playlist. If you’ve got a CD, now you know what’s on it. If you haven’t got one and want one, try posting a comment on this posting. Even Santa sometimes comes late.

1 White Christmas Darlene Love
2 Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Death Cab for Cutie
3 Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) The Smithereens
4 Happy Xmas (War Is Over) John Holt
5 A Change at Christmas (Say It Isn’t So) The Flaming Lips
6 8 Days Of Christmas Destiny's Child
7 Christmas Tree Lady Gaga (ft. Space Cowboy)
8 Merry Christmas Polka The Andrews Sisters
9 Beatniks Wish Patsy Ray & The Beatniks
10 Hot Christmas The Elves
11 Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Aimee Mann
12 Not Now But in the Coming Katharine Whalen
13 Noel Blanc Jean Sablon
14 White Christmas Sugar Boy Crawford
15 Children Go Where I Send Thee Daryl Hall And John Oates
16 Winter Wonderland Allen Toussaint
17 The Little Drummer Boy Johnny Cash
18 'Zat You, Santa Claus? Louis Armstrong & The Commanders
19 Please, Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) Sean Na Na
20 Blue Christmas Ernest Tubb
21 Christmas Blues Ralph Willis
22 Merry Christmas Baby Elvis Presley & Gretchen Wilson
23 All I Want For Christmas Is You Mariah Carey
24 Handsome Santa Marah (ft. Zuzu Petal)
25 Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play Symondsbury Mummer's play

PS So, you might well ask, what happened to the posting about my dissertation that I keep promising. Well, I guess it’s now become a dithertation. Pretty soon, too, it’ll be part of a new year’s resolution thing.

Next up (Tomorrow, in fact. Honest Injun.) An explication of a kind about how I put this CD together.