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, one

Around the time I was doing my exams, a friend invited me to her final show for her art degree. Like me, she was a mature student and presumably making up for something she’d missed out on first time round. Or, rather, felt she had.

It was at Goldsmiths — which is where I took my first degree all those years ago. I’d driven past the building many times. It was on the way to my parents’ house. I’d even walked past it once, with a friend who was set on showing me the bright lights of New Cross. (We didn’t find them. Even the pub in which they filmed Shaun of the Dead was closed, shuttered, boarded, beerless.) But I hadn’t entered Goldsmiths since the day of my last exam.

I knew the art school had a spanking new building, designed by Will Alsop. I’d even got a look at it when I was taken in search of hip New Cross. So I assumed that the show would be in there.

It wasn’t. It was at the back of the back field — which meant I had to go through the front entrance. The way I’d first entered the building when I went there for an interview. The way I’d entered it every time I turned up for a lecture or seminar — which wasn’t that often. The way I’d entered it the day of my final final exam.

How was it? Odd. What was odd about it? That it wasn’t odd. It didn’t feel strange. It didn’t bring back memories. There was a new lighting system but that aside, it looked pretty much the way it did the last time I saw it. We turned right at the front door, then left and down the corridor which led to the side entrance to the main hall in which I had sat down and written my exam. The corridor I’d walked across as I left the exam for the student union bar.

What did I feel? Surprisingly little. I didn’t feel like a stranger or a prodigal son. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t exciting or comforting or even evocative. It was just . . . the way it was. It was somewhere that I once was and now wasn’t. As a part of my past, it seemed to have no connection with my present. That was then, this was now. Done, dusted. Resolved perhaps.

And the final show itself? That was not that different from way back when either. Lots of conceptual work. Goldsmiths was not big on painting then and it’s even less big on it now. The only major change was the amount of video work. Virtually every ‘piece’ had a video showing itself back to its viewers (and itself). Reflections of the way it used to be — even if only a microsecond earlier

Next up A close encounter at a north London barbecue

Testing, four . . .

So this year's exams? How did it go?

Well, it was different, in several ways. One, I'd done three-quarters of the exams last year so I only had three questions to answer. Two, to be honest, I'd done a lot less reading this year. Three, I was caught up in finishing my book.

So it was a kind of exams-lite. The revision wasn't so much revision as learning the stuff for the first time. I did my spreadsheet of past questions but it took so little time it didn't feel like it was making the contribution it did last year.

I can't remember exactly how much revision I did. It certainly wasn't as much as I did the previous year and I certainly didn't feel that anxious about the exams. I didn't exactly swan up to them but I did aspire to - maybe even pretend to. I definitely worked hard at concealing any furious below-water paddling there might have been.

Next up Two close encounters, one with my younger self

Testing, three . . .

So . . . if the first time I finished my university exams, I went straight to the bar, got drunk and vowed never to do an exam again, what did I do second time around?

Well, I didn't go straight to the bar and I didn't vow never to do an exam again. I went home and had a cup of tea. Then I took the tube back to Tottenham Court Road and joined my fellow students for a couple of drinks. I didn't get drunk, though, and I didn't vow never to exam again.

I was, to be honest, fairly tired by this point. I was writing a book. I was running the usual life of someone with a living to earn, three children and a small dog. I also had another long-term project which I was about half-way through. Right through the revision, I'd had a touch of back ache which I kept at bay by doing yoga stretched every hour or so.

So what happened next? My back went, of course. I spent weeks in which the smallest journey - across the room, say - was a real struggle. Like everyone else in that position, I suffered through the reality of what some people spend their life having to deal with - and got an unpleasant foretaste, perhaps, of the inevitable difficulties of old age.

I learned, too, that you can keep working through. In fact, I found myself feeling really fortunate that I could keep working through. A lumberjack, say, or a hospital cleaner, would not be so blessed. Me, though, I could sit at a desk or table tapping out words and working hard not to feel sorry for myself.

It was a strangely restricted life. Work. Get fed - itself something of a novelty for me, as I'm usually the one doing the feeding. Sleep. Get up. Work. Get fed. Sleep. I didn't see the local shops for almost a month. I still remember the day I managed to walk to a restaurant for lunch - 200 metres or so. When I got there, I had to sit on the steps for a minute or so to recover.

All of which adds to the reasons I didn't write much about the exams before now and why my blog was so episodic for a while.

So how did I do this year, in my second set of exams?

Next up The answer to that question.

Testing, two . . .

So, fifteen months or so later, I found myself in a room high above Tottenham Court Rd. I'd already taken exams at the end of the first year's study. I'd done well enough in that first set of exams. I had, though, been pretty stressed in the lead-up to them. Why? Because . . .

1. Since learning to touch-type some thirty years ago, I'd barely written more than a short note for someone else to read. My handwriting has always been terrible (worse, actually) and three decades of not writing for other people had done nothing to improve it.

2. I was quite out of practice at studying for exams. I had no real way of knowing what was expected. There were no sample answers to look at. I wondered if criteria had changed since I took my first degree. I did ask a tutor and was, again, told not to worry. But still . . .

3. I did want to do well. I didn't want to shine. Or rather, that would of course be nice but I wouldn't be downcast if I didn't manage it. Getting a really low mark, though, that would be humiliating.

4. There had only been one previous piece of submitted work for the course. Although I'd done well in that, it was far from being a general test of my understanding and knowledge.

5. Somehow, I'd managed to do more units in the first year than I intended. My idea was to do around two-thirds of the course in the first year. But units were moved around and I didn't adjust my schedule accordingly. So I ended up doing three-quarters of it. And so I could do nine out of the necessary twelve exam questions. Which I did. (Despite also facing a looming delivery deadline for my book, Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009.)

So, stressed, I revised. With no guidance, I developed my own strategy. I made a spreadsheet of previous years' questions and did a rough frequency count to predict what would come up in each unit. I wrote a list of concepts, with notes on each. I focused on a few potential questions and wrote draft answers in note form and introductory sections in full. I read and re-read them.

All of which worked, more or less. I reckon I only fell down badly on two papers. One was a new unit for which no one could have predicted the questions. I wrote some fractious rubbish.

The other unit I'm sure I screwed up was the French stuff: Lacan and Andre Green. Despite there only being one seminar on Green to seven or so on Lacan, the exam had always featured a question on each. Further, the Green one was always the same. It was about his big thing, the dead mother complex. (You were supposed to glide over the fact that this was something that was expressed in his own personal history. Mere gossip, in the words of psychoanalysts' favourite brittle, defensive put-down.)

I couldn't, though, bring myself to answer or even revise the Green question. An evening at a lecture by him at the Institute of Psychoanalysis exemplified for me everything I had always hated about the game. It was pompous, endless, petty and spiteful, self-congratulatory and expressed in a language which bore no relation to any I'd learned. It certainly wasn't in either English or French - or even the Cairene Arabic or Ladino of Green's childhood. As I wrote at the time, as evenings go, it was the longest month I've ever endured.

So: no Green. It had to be Lacan then. My calculations pointed to the Lacan question being about the French guru-analyst's deeply silly and wrong notion that the unconscious is structured like a language. I'd not been there for that lecture so I actually had to read some of his quite awful writing.

(That judgment of his prose is not opinion but fact. Even our Lacanian tutor - an amusing and engaging London-based French psychiatrist who dresses like a Balkan gangster - opened his seminars by pointing out what a terrible, terrible writer Lacan was.)

So I tried to read Lacan. And failed. I'd either get angry and argue with every word on the page or I'd drift into some kind of trance state. I'd like to liken it to analysts' aimed-for state of free-floating attention but I can't. Free-floating disattention, more like it. I'd look at a page for what felt like hours - useless hours, at that. Then I'd look at my watch. Hours really had passed. So I gave up on Lacan.

What then did I do when my predicted question came up in the exam? I blagged it, of course. Just as I'd always done in exams I hadn't revised for. I dragged in as much outside knowledge I had - from linguistics, in this case - and slapped it on to the page, filling out what little I knew. And I pointed out that thinking of the unconscious as structured like a language was silly, wrong and - biggest no-no in the psychoanalytic world - in direct contradiction of Freud's thoughts on it.
It's not really a surprise if I got a bad mark for that one, is it?

Next up The aftermath of last year's exams

Testing, one . . .

Just over 35 years ago, I walked out of an exam room, having finished the final paper of my psychology degree finals. I’d been sitting exams once or twice a year since the age of nine or so. Twelve years: maybe twenty sets of exams. Mostly, I was good at them. But I’d had enough.

I walked into the bar, I announced that I would never take another exam. Then I got drunk.

I don’t know if I meant my decision to last a lifetime but I certainly stuck to it for long enough. Apart from taking my driving test (and maybe the odd personality test in a magazine), I sat no exams for 35 years. Nor did I miss them.

It’s not that I don’t think exams are a good thing — now and or back then. I think they’re a good way of assessing capability. They’re not perfect, of course, but they are a pretty good measure of knowledge, understanding and ability to work smart and fast in a stressful and unpredictable situation. All incredibly useful skills in life and work’s not uncommon tight spots.

Renouncing exams was a purely personal thing. Enough was, just, enough. I felt I’d had my lifetime’s fill of them.

So, when I decided I wanted to do a masters in psychoanalysis, I was put off by the fact that the UCL course had exams. It was clearly the best and toughest course — closest to my house, too. But exams . . . I really, really couldn’t be having with them.

I mentioned this to a university lecturer friend, Elizabeth. She was her usual direct self. ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said. ‘You of all people shouldn’t worry. You’ve spent a lifetime writing to deadline under pressure. You’ll be fine.’

Next up So was I? Fine, that is.