Primrose Hill: drugs and polymorphous perversity

I live just down the road from where Freud first lived when he fled to London. He landed at Dover on the morning of June 6, 1938, took the train to Victoria Station, then a taxi to 39 Elsworthy Road, via the tourist sights of London which he requested to see — Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament etc.

Six years later, to the day, British and Allied troops landed on the beaches of Omaha, Gold, Sword etc. (I don’t think the identicality of date was deliberate, or significant even.)

On the ferry, Freud slept and dreamed that he would land not at Dover but at Pevensey — ie where William the Bastard disembarked and, after a battle up the road, recreated himself as William The Conqueror. Freud claimed that all dreams were, at heart, fantasy wish-fulfilments. This dream is the best example I’ve found so far.

It’s a nice, big house, 39 Elsworthy Road. Red-brick, quoined, with a stone portico and the slightly anthropomorphised front elevation that’s usual on most houses of its age, shape and kind — ie it looks like a face, deliberately, welcomingly so. Please step in through my mouth, madam.

It’s quite grand actually by modern standards. I should imagine there’s more than one servant’s room. It was probably quite new when Freud moved in. A home for a society doctor or a well-connected barrister perhaps. It would now cost you, oh, £4.5 million, say — more if it had been renovated to today’s local standards. Cyril Burt, the great proponent of IQ tests, lived a dozen or so doors away — though I’m not sure if he was there in Freud’s time.

Freud’s office was on the ground floor at the rear, giving on to a garden which leads, through a private gate, on to the football fields part of Primrose Hill. When he was looking out of the window, there would have been a café on the lee of the hill. But that’s long gone, swept aside during the war, I should imagine, when the whole of the hill was turned into an anti-aircraft gun battery. You can still see where the concrete emplacements were — their boundaries and shape are often marked out by carpets of daisies.

I’ve no idea who lives there now. There’s no blue plaque on it as Freud and his family moved on within months, up the hill towards Hampstead, to 20 Maresfield Gardens. (My wife’s great aunt, who drove a sports car into her eighties, lived over the road at number 45 Maresfield. She told me she saw Anna Freud quite regularly but never quite got round to talking to her.)

Every time I pass the Elsworthy Road house, I think about one of two things.

1. Freud being paid a visit there by Salvador Dali. It went very badly. Dali saw himself as an equal. Freud’s taste in art stopped several centuries before impressionism, let alone Dada and surrealism. Still, two men of the unconscious sitting there miscommunicating: surely one of history’s great meetings.

2. It’s just over the road and down a bit from where Liam Gallagher lived. I find myself thinking about Freud and the Primrose Hill set of recent years. What would he and they have found to say to each other?

Despite having written Three Essays on Sexuality (by general agreement, one of the least sexy books ever), Freud would not have wanted to have anything to do with their wife-swapping and nanny-jumping. It’s true he came up with the concept of polymorphous perversity but he thought that was a thing of childhood and to be put away with childish things rather than used as a way to ensure regular appearances in Grazia or OK! (Though he did allow the press in and was photographed by his desk, I don’t think he sold the exclusive rights.)

Anyway, I think I’m right in saying that he hadn’t had sex for more than forty years — since his last daughter, Anna was born, in 1895. Anna herself, she hadn’t had sex at all. Freud worried about this in his letters. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was because of her intense relationship with him. He analysed her himself, something that would now have him drummed out of the trade. Yet he — and she — couldn’t — or wouldn’t — change. Therapeutic resistance. The two Viennese lightbulbs that didn’t want to change.

As far as anyone knows, Anna never had sex at all — she had a lifelong relationship with an American woman Dorothy Burlingham but it’s said to have been platonic. It’s odd, isn’t it, that something that is popularly (if not correctly) seen as being all about sex should have been created by someone who stopped having sex the year he created it. And carried forward by someone who never had sex at all, who went to her grave a virgin.

So what about that other Primrose Hill set hobby, drug-taking? How would Freud have kept his end up in that matter? Well, by 1938, he tried to avoid taking drugs, even though he was in serious pain from the oral cancer which would kill him the following year.

But in his younger years . . . I don’t share my cousin’s view that he was a coke-head whose addictive personality caused him to come up with a coke-warped set of theories. But I do agree he had his moments.

Here’s what he wrote, on June 2, 1884, to the woman who would become his wife two years later: ‘Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.’

Now, if Freud had pitched up in Primrose Hill with that kind of attitude . . .

The Bourgeois and the Wilde

I was wrong. My family, my friends, my fellow students, the course administrator: they were all right and I was all wrong. I worried about my essay, at great length and in obsessive depth (see my blog of April 24, The student on the couch). I worried that it wouldn’t be academic enough. I worried that it had too many jokes in it — there were two, possibly three, in the first paragraph. I just worried.

But my worries, it seems, were all in vain. I came back from a few days away, in Cornwall, to an email with the words ‘Essay feedback’ in the subject field. And the feedback was that my essay was fine. I passed. I’m pleased. And everyone I’ve been worrying at is relieved.

If you want to know what the essay title was, look here. It’s the second question of the second section, the one that starts ‘In the light of what you have learned . . .’

I wrote about Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest and Louis Bourgeois’ Passage Dangereux in terms of the Oedipus complex. I’ll send you the whole thing if you want. Just email me.

Mockery

Ten days ago, at exactly 1pm, in a carpeted room just off Tottenham Court Rd, I sat down, a cup of coffee in one hand, a Pilot G-1 Grip in the other, and did something that, nearly thirty-five years ago, I promised myself I’d never do again.

I did an exam. Well, a mock exam. Well, part of a mock exam: one question rather than the full four, 45 minutes rather than three hours.

Still, it was an exam and therefore something I’d promised myself I’d never put myself through again. Exams, from the age of nine to twenty-one, term after term, year after year: enough! Yet there I was, in a room with eight or so others. Some of them looked more worried than me. Some didn’t.

So? So . . .

1. Just like everybody told me, my years of professional writing experience meant that I was used to putting thoughts into words quickly — and that my spelling and grammar are close to spot-on first time through. (Why I found it hard to believe them is, I guess, less a matter of scientific reasoning than for psychoanalytic investigation.)

2. Forty-five minutes is not very much time, even if you know a bit about the subject. It’s like writing an extended caption. A few hundred words and you’re there. There’s little room for shape, certainly none for anything but the briefest digression — or gag. It’s intro, substance, outro, re-read, pen down. No time for breath or second thoughts.

3. Last-minute revision still works for me. I did no real preparation, mostly because I was busy on other things. But, if I’m honest, it was also a deliberate thing. I worried that it would be truly, horribly, dispiriting if I did a reasonable amount of revision and then found myself stumbling for words and thoughts in the exam room.

So I did a little revision, a very little. I started at noon for a 1pm exam — 20 minutes at my desk, 15 minutes on the tube. I remembered from before that if you do that little revision, there is no point trying to cover everything or even very much. You have to place your bets carefully but boldly. There is no point in betting on red or black. You’ll know extremely little about everything — which you probably already knew anyway. You have to put the lot on one number. So I bet the farm on one number. I went over one thing only. (The changes in Freud’s drive theory 1915-1923, if you’re interested.)

It came up, too. (I may have bet boldly but it was hardly a stupid bet. It’s come up in every past exam paper I looked at.) I made a fair fist of answering it. I didn’t make too many stupid mistakes, I think — though I did realise later that I inadvertently killed off one of Freud’s sons, in the mud and gore of the Great War.

I’m promised feedback on it from the course tutor. We’ll see.


RIP Bo Diddley 1928-2008

I spent a little time in Chicago with Mr Diddley — as the New York Times always referred to him, with style-book formality, unfortunately, rather than genuine deference to his otherworldly grandeur.

Or rather, I spent a little time looking at Mr Diddley. He quite ignored me. His concern was his guitar and his Rock And Rye — a sticky mix of fruit syrup and whisky. I was just leaving a Clash tour to fly home. He was just joining it. It was at the Aragon ballroom. A wild, old place, all dolled up with all manner of inter-war art nouveau. The dressing room looked out on the El. The promoter, figuring punks liked dirt, supplied a couple of really worn-down, ageing, fishnetted prostitutes. I got fined for drinking a beer in a moving vehicle — I wasn't driving, just drinking.

I'm told by those who stayed with the tour that Bo never failed to give up his tour bus seat to his guitar and that every night he slept sitting up with his Rock And Rye in his arms.

Bye, Bo.

Parapraxes and compromise-formations

From A Child’s Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis

What you call a Freudian slip*, Freudians call a parapraxis*. That is, anything we do or say which points to something that we didn’t think or realise we intended. Greeting someone, for example, by saying ‘So sad to see you.’

That’s called a compromise-formation. The compromise is the unconscious’s way of smuggling unacceptable thoughts into consciousness. The secret, terrible thought is buried in an otherwise innocuous communication. It’s like it’s slipping through passport control on false papers or hidden away in a bunch of nuns.

So? So look at my blog of April 24: The student on the couch. Look at my age. See my age is wrong. I made myself two years younger than I actually am. Oh, dear, I can only assume that’s what my unconscious wishes — not just unacceptably to me but to the laws of physics, too.

* I’ve often thought Freudian Slips would be a wonderful name for a lingerie shop. Particularly in Primrose Hill, the man himself having lived there for a while.

** Horrible word, parapraxis, isn’t it. It was cobbled together, from one part classical Greek and one part classical Latin, by Freud’s English editor, James Strachey, for the 1916 edition of Introd. Lect. Psycho-anal. It translates as something like ‘analogous action’. No wonder people prefer Freudian slip. As usual, Freud’s original German is far clearer and simpler: Fehlleistungen, literally ‘faulty function’ and meaning ‘misperformance’.

Further contributions to the understanding of stage fright: what do psychoanalysts have to say?

When I wrote something about stage fright (Feb 20), I didn’t look to see if psychoanalysts had had anything to say about it. Now I’ve finished my essay, I had the time to look.

Why do psychoanalysts reckon performers sometimes get themselves fritted into non-performance? I found two papers which outlined all the various theories.

Both were by Glen Gabbard, a New York psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and academic. One was written in 1979, the other in 1983. Both begin with quotes from songs: the first from the Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, the second from The Chorus Line’s The Music And The Mirror.

Like a good academic (and author of The Psychology Of The Sopranos), Gabbard read everything there was to read on the subject and summarised it for us lazier people. He found various ideas and theories about stage fright:

* It’s linked to anal erotism.

* It’s like blushing — gratification and punishment are combined in one symptom.

* It’s linked to guilt about early voyeurism — of the parents having sex, if only in the future performer’s fantasy world.

* It’s frozen self-regard — ‘narcissistic intoxication’ with oneself. (I really don’t get this one: narcissistic intoxication is scarcely unusual in performers: in fact, it’s more or less standard: the Madonna Complex maybe.)

* It’s castration anxiety — which the performer’s previous performances have failed to cover up.

* It sets in when the performer worries that the audience can see right through to his infantile sense of omnipotence.

* Performing is a secret attempt to recreate the perfect, idealised world of complete union with the mother — in the womb, perhaps — and the stage-frighted performer is worrying the audience will realise this is what he’s up to.

* A racial memory of being the outcast, ‘the stoned man’ is evoked — a Jungian one this. (By the by, in my — fairly extensive — experience, most performers are stoned men, after breakfast anyway.)

* It’s a flasher thing. ‘The performer is torn between the desire to expose his genitals to prove he is a fully-equipped sexual creature and the fear that the onlookers will find his equipment laughable.’

* The performer is a child. The audience is the adult. The child knows he is being childish and is terrified the adult will realise it.

* It’s linked to envy. ‘Performers tend to be an envious lot.’

* It’s linked to guilt. If I have something, it means it has to have been stolen from someone else. So I feel guilty. So . . .

* It’s narcissism.

Well, maybe. There are various variations on a basic theme there. There’s certainly something deep and uncontrollable going on with stage fright. I’m certain that it has meaning and that it’s a current reading of something historical — as that thing-of-the-past is re-read and reconstructed by the performer.

One idea I thought was a good way of expressing something that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s spent time with musicians or actors. According to this view, performers are ‘mirror-hungry personalities’ — driven to look for approval and ‘sustenance for their famished selves’. They try again and again and fail again and again in ‘their desperate efforts to shore up a damaged self-esteem’. Even temporary success on stage only raises the prospect of future failure. So they fright themselves into inaction — which, at least, elides the possibility of failure.

Two last things. One, a witty line from Gabbard. ‘The childhood wish to romp about in the buff and display one’s genitals for all to see is revived in the act of performing.’ Again: think Madonna etc etc.

Two, a clever line from Gabbard, which resituates stage fright into the kingdom of the positive. ‘Perhaps it is fortunate that few performers ever completely master stage fright, for an intangible sense of communion between the performer and his audience might well be lost as a by-product of the mastery.’ Simple really: no possibility of failing also means no possibility of succeeding.

On re-reading

I maybe shouldn’t admit to this but I will anyway.

The other day, I was doing some reading for my course, a chapter from a book. As I read, it seemed familiar — no, not quite familiar, more like somewhere between the understood and the known. Now and again, I’d find myself thinking: I’ve read this before. And I’d think of climbing off the sofa where I was reading and walking up the stairs to my office to check on my reading log*. Then the next sentence would seem novel and fresh and I couldn’t be bothered to make the journey.

I must have been three-quarters the way through it — and this wasn’t a short, easily read chapter — when I eventually realised that I had read it before. I wish I could tell you exactly what made me realise it but I was so embarrassed at myself that I went into a state of what I can now think of as psychic blushing.

Maybe it wasn’t a sudden realisation, maybe it was a gradual evolution. But, whichever it was, there was a state change. One moment I was a person doing something for the first time. The next I was a person doing something they’d already done before. Or rather, one moment I was a person doing something they’d already done before and the next I was a person knowing they’d done something before. It wasn’t comfortable.

I decided: incipient Alzheimer’s. Of course. I thought: you stupid fool, you are too old to go back to university.

I went to my office and checked. Yes, I had read it before, about six months ago. There it was in the file, highlighted and annotated. I noticed one little thing — though I didn’t grasp its significance till later. I’d marked quite different things first time round.

Some time later, when I’d stopped blushing and trying to hide from myself, I thought again about my forgetting. I found myself thinking about those different marks. Had I really understood it that badly on first reading? I went back, looked again at those marks and highlightings. I realised that they were different for a reason. I’d read it for a different unit on the course so I was reading it through a different pair of — metaphorical — glasses.

More than that, I was a different person. The I that had read it first time was not the I who had read it the other day. Things had changed. I’d read more. I’d learned more. I grasped more, more quickly — on this subject at least.

I thought of two Frenchmen. Rimbaud: j’est un autre (I is another). And Pierre Bayard, psychoanalyst and author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (see Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading, February 29, 2008). Here, I decided, was a fine example of what Bayard suggests is the utility of not-reading. Or rather, regressing to a state of having-not-read. By forgetting, I had made it possible for me to slip the conceptual bonds of my previous understanding of the text. My suppression of my original reading had facilitated the creation of a new text. I was now not just its reader but its writer, too.

I had freed myself from myself to be myself: the core conceptual aim of psychoanalysis some would say.

So maybe I wasn’t so senile after all. Or maybe wishful thinking is an early indicator of senility.

* Actually, all my reading is logged on a custom database I built — which is why I know exactly how many papers etc I’ve read and how many I’ve finished (see Studying by numbers, April 29, 2008). But I’m much too embarrassed about that to tell you. I am proud, though, of its colour scheme.

Studying by numbers

Time, I thought, for a (slightly obsessional) report on how far I’ve got so far. At the end of the autumn term, I did a reckoning of what I’d managed, in numbers. I posted it on January 11. Here’s an update, till the end of the spring term. The total since the start is in brackets.

28 (65) Seminars attended
2 (2) Seminars missed
2 (4/5) Seminars late for
4 (4) Films watched (part of the course, early Sunday mornings)
2 (2) Dissertation presentations attended
1 (1) Essays written
36 (113) Books, papers, etc read*
28 (79) Books, papers, etc finished
13 (13) Extra books and papers read (or skimmed) for essay
2 (4) Parties invited to
1 (2) Parties attended
10 (16) Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
2 (1) Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
3 (22) Mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
4 (0) Espressos bought (to drink in seminars — I’d had enough mochas and cappuccinos for a lifetime)
1 (1) Tuna baguettes bought from Eat
1 (1) Chicken baguettes bought from Eat
6 (6) Ham and cheese baguettes bought from Eat**
c10 (c30) Pre-dawn starts (less than the first term only because it’s been getting lighter earlier)

* I think there is an under-reporting error here. It certainly felt like I read an awful lot more than that this term.

** I tried the other varieties but settled on the ham-and-cheese, Wittgenstein-style. Arriving at a country house for the first time, his hostess asked what he would like for dinner, Wittgenstein replied: ‘I don’t mind what I have to eat as long as it’s the same as yesterday. Always.’