Posts
The narcissism of small differences
From A Child’s Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis
The other evening, I took the younger princess to the football, Arsenal vs Newcastle. She can be a bit girlie about the game. She still doesn’t grasp the difference between a cup match and a league match — this was a league match.
But she’s always loved the spectacle and drama of a full football stadium — particularly the view as you emerge from the vomitorium on a floodlit night. She’s come to the occasional game with me since she was old enough to insist I put in place an equal opportunities policy vis-à-vis her older brother. Her enthusiasm even survived an attack on us by a baseball-bat wielding, coke-dealing (I guess), parking-spot-raged, Range Rover-driving ‘fan’.
Her grasp of the subtleties of football culture is, accordingly, finely calibrated. So on the way to the match, discussing possible outfits with me, she told me she’d thought of wearing an ironic comment on north-eastern evening dress. ‘A very short mini-skirt, bare legs and a Northern Rock t-shirt’ I told her there wouldn’t have been time to put the weight on.
So she’d settled for a different kind of irony. She was wearing a sheepskin coat, presumably a considered comment on what was more or less a uniform for a generation of football managers and commentators. Only hers wasn’t so much a car coat as a steppes warrior’s one.
As we approached the ground, she developed her thoughts, composing a chant, a new variation on the traditional metropolitan slur directed at northern football fans, to the tune of Guantanamera:
‘One cashmere jumper
You’ve only got one cashmere jumper
[repeat]
And I bet it’s from M&S.’
As she sang, very quietly, we spotted a young woman in her traditional north-eastern evening dress. And, at our feet, we saw a rabbit . . .
[see blog below]
Monday, 4 February 2008
Thursday, 31 January 2008
The transitional object (as roadkill)
From A Child’s Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis
Winnicott famously said there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother and a baby. He developed the idea of the transitional object — not just the teddy etc itself but the way the teddy etc stands for something beyond its physical self, not so much the physical mother as the relationship with the mother. I saw this in the gutter at the junction of Annette Rd and Lowman Rd, N7, right opposite El Commandante. I thought: there is no such thing as a transitional object, only a transitional object and an infant. When the transitional object is lost, it’s really the infant that is lost.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Les conneries de Jacques Lacan
I was worried. I really was. But I needn’t have been.
The worry was this: I’m old enough to have only caught the first waves of the French invasion of British academia. I was there for Albert the compulsive philanderer and Louis the wife-killer. But the deconstructionists and post-modernists didn’t cross La Manche till after I’d left university. The author may have died in Paris (and Aspen) in 1967 but his obituary hadn’t made it to south-east London by mid-1974.
I knew little or nothing about the next wave of French thinkers: Jackie le pied noir, Paul the anti-semitic collaborationist, Henri VI (number of wives), Michel the AIDS victim or Roland the laundry van victim.
So when I started thinking about a masters in psychoanalytic stuff, I hopped and skipped right past the MA in Psychoanalysis at Middlesex when I read that it was ‘largely Lacanian’. I wasn’t sure I could face two years of Jacques-Marie-Émile the bent cigar smoker. I tell a lie. I was sure I couldn’t.
So I worried about the unit on him — Jacques Lacan, that is, the French psychoanalyst who might or might not have had really profound things to say. It’s really hard to tell, particularly when you read him — or rather try to read him. As he himself agreed, admitting that his Ecrits — which are his only substantial writings — were not meant to be understood as such. They were, he said, meant to be comprehended, or at least absorbed, in some kind of non-cognitive, mystical way. So, so far, I had him marked down as the Kahlil Gibran of psychoanalysis.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The first Lacan seminar began with a joke. A good one, too, if martini dry. The lecturer arrived 15 minutes late, with no explanation or justification. Usually, I guess, this would be a result of heavy traffic, signalling problems at Edgware Road or a family row — something like that anyway.
This, though, was something else. Quite obviously, this was a gag — a witty associative link to Lacan’s ‘controversial indeterminate-length sessions’, for which he both charged a full fee and sometimes took the opportunity to have his hair cut.
Having opened with this gag, the lecturer (who’d clearly already had his hair cut) went straight into explaining and didn’t let up till the clock called time. It was everything I didn’t expect — clear and straightforward, with more gags, sideswipes at Lacan’s terrible, French sense of adventurous dressing and the fact he was always an editor or two short of being able to write French. There was even a pointed reference to the expensive Cubanity of his cigars — though no explanation of their peculiar shape, as curlicued as a pig’s penis.
All that was missing was anything about how to pronounce his name. The lecturer, being a Lacanian — French, too — had no problem with it, naturally. But it does cause problems in the anglophone world.
This is how it should be pronounced. The first syllable is pure Scouse, as in ‘alright, la.’ The second is pure criminality, as in ‘con trick’. Just nasalize the final consonant and you’re there.
English speakers — or at least those who’ve never sat through a Lacan seminar — don’t generally pronounce it that way. If they know no French, they tend to rhyme him with, say, Suzi Quatro’s 1973 chart-topper, Can The Can — a hit when he himself was in his fullest pomposity.
If, however, they think they know French, they often have the amusing — at least to my infantile mind — habit of trying to make his name at least sound French. So they rhyme him with Simon Le Bon. As someone who’s writing a book about swearing, I am only too aware that this turns him into a French word that can be translated both directly and indirectly into English, neither of them complimentary.
This pronunciation makes him either a fool (as in the comedy flick Le Diner Des Cons) or a charlie or a berk (as in the body part euphemised in both those pieces of truncated rhyming slang). I’ve never seen a French person impolite enough to point this out to someone who insists on talking about Jacques le con.
Of course, if natural gender rules were in operation, this most feminine of things would be la con — ie as the great analyst’s surname is actually pronounced. But they’re not, it’s a masculine noun. As it is in Spanish. It’s just one more thing the Romans did for us: stupid cunni (second declension masculine nominative).
And yet, and yet . . .there were those who thought that pronunciation was a fair pronouncement on Lacan. I was told this by someone with close links to the camp of that other French philosophe, Henri Lefebvre — who died at the age of ninety, in the arms of his sixth wife.
‘Lefebvre felt Lacan’s analytic treatment had really harmed a friend of his,’ said my informant. ‘So he told Lacan he was un con. In response, Lacan told Lefebvre he was une clune. A clown.’
Ah, the heights and wonders of French philosophy. Still, it could have been worse. Lefebvre could have called Lacan une con — ie used the feminised version. But he wouldn’t have done that. That implies homosexuality. One French thinker would never do that to another French thinker. He’d sooner call him an Anglo-American empiricist — much the same thing in French intellectual eyes.
I was worried. I really was. But I needn’t have been.
The worry was this: I’m old enough to have only caught the first waves of the French invasion of British academia. I was there for Albert the compulsive philanderer and Louis the wife-killer. But the deconstructionists and post-modernists didn’t cross La Manche till after I’d left university. The author may have died in Paris (and Aspen) in 1967 but his obituary hadn’t made it to south-east London by mid-1974.
I knew little or nothing about the next wave of French thinkers: Jackie le pied noir, Paul the anti-semitic collaborationist, Henri VI (number of wives), Michel the AIDS victim or Roland the laundry van victim.
So when I started thinking about a masters in psychoanalytic stuff, I hopped and skipped right past the MA in Psychoanalysis at Middlesex when I read that it was ‘largely Lacanian’. I wasn’t sure I could face two years of Jacques-Marie-Émile the bent cigar smoker. I tell a lie. I was sure I couldn’t.
So I worried about the unit on him — Jacques Lacan, that is, the French psychoanalyst who might or might not have had really profound things to say. It’s really hard to tell, particularly when you read him — or rather try to read him. As he himself agreed, admitting that his Ecrits — which are his only substantial writings — were not meant to be understood as such. They were, he said, meant to be comprehended, or at least absorbed, in some kind of non-cognitive, mystical way. So, so far, I had him marked down as the Kahlil Gibran of psychoanalysis.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The first Lacan seminar began with a joke. A good one, too, if martini dry. The lecturer arrived 15 minutes late, with no explanation or justification. Usually, I guess, this would be a result of heavy traffic, signalling problems at Edgware Road or a family row — something like that anyway.
This, though, was something else. Quite obviously, this was a gag — a witty associative link to Lacan’s ‘controversial indeterminate-length sessions’, for which he both charged a full fee and sometimes took the opportunity to have his hair cut.
Having opened with this gag, the lecturer (who’d clearly already had his hair cut) went straight into explaining and didn’t let up till the clock called time. It was everything I didn’t expect — clear and straightforward, with more gags, sideswipes at Lacan’s terrible, French sense of adventurous dressing and the fact he was always an editor or two short of being able to write French. There was even a pointed reference to the expensive Cubanity of his cigars — though no explanation of their peculiar shape, as curlicued as a pig’s penis.
All that was missing was anything about how to pronounce his name. The lecturer, being a Lacanian — French, too — had no problem with it, naturally. But it does cause problems in the anglophone world.
This is how it should be pronounced. The first syllable is pure Scouse, as in ‘alright, la.’ The second is pure criminality, as in ‘con trick’. Just nasalize the final consonant and you’re there.
English speakers — or at least those who’ve never sat through a Lacan seminar — don’t generally pronounce it that way. If they know no French, they tend to rhyme him with, say, Suzi Quatro’s 1973 chart-topper, Can The Can — a hit when he himself was in his fullest pomposity.
If, however, they think they know French, they often have the amusing — at least to my infantile mind — habit of trying to make his name at least sound French. So they rhyme him with Simon Le Bon. As someone who’s writing a book about swearing, I am only too aware that this turns him into a French word that can be translated both directly and indirectly into English, neither of them complimentary.
This pronunciation makes him either a fool (as in the comedy flick Le Diner Des Cons) or a charlie or a berk (as in the body part euphemised in both those pieces of truncated rhyming slang). I’ve never seen a French person impolite enough to point this out to someone who insists on talking about Jacques le con.
Of course, if natural gender rules were in operation, this most feminine of things would be la con — ie as the great analyst’s surname is actually pronounced. But they’re not, it’s a masculine noun. As it is in Spanish. It’s just one more thing the Romans did for us: stupid cunni (second declension masculine nominative).
And yet, and yet . . .there were those who thought that pronunciation was a fair pronouncement on Lacan. I was told this by someone with close links to the camp of that other French philosophe, Henri Lefebvre — who died at the age of ninety, in the arms of his sixth wife.
‘Lefebvre felt Lacan’s analytic treatment had really harmed a friend of his,’ said my informant. ‘So he told Lacan he was un con. In response, Lacan told Lefebvre he was une clune. A clown.’
Ah, the heights and wonders of French philosophy. Still, it could have been worse. Lefebvre could have called Lacan une con — ie used the feminised version. But he wouldn’t have done that. That implies homosexuality. One French thinker would never do that to another French thinker. He’d sooner call him an Anglo-American empiricist — much the same thing in French intellectual eyes.
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
A postscript to ‘Psychoanalysis by numbers’
It was Friday evening. A family chicken was roasting. I was in the kitchen. My wife and my daughter were there, too.
‘I’ve posted a new blog,’ I said.
‘Mmmm,’ said my wife. ‘You always show me first.’
‘Mmmm,’ I replied, truthfully, if evasively. ‘It’s about what I’ve done so far on the course. How many seminars, how many books and papers read etc etc. I’ve done it in numbers.’
‘Autistic,’ said my daughter.
‘Autistic,’ said my wife.
‘Mmmm,’ I thought, and said.
Then I remembered that afternoon’s seminar — for which I’d done the reading before posting the blog. It was about the Rat Man, one of Freud’s most famous patients. The Rat Man — perhaps disappointingly — is not someone blessed/cursed with a super(ego)hero alter (super)ego and extraordinary rodentish powers. Instead, he’s a young lawyer plagued by a story about a terrifying (though, I should imagine, imaginary) far eastern torture involving rats and bare buttocks. A wish reconstituted as a fear, Freud suggests.
That’s not what my wife and daughter’s comment got me thinking about — though I did have passing thoughts about the imagination and unconscious of the straight men who’d tell me again and again and again about Richard Gere’s supposed taste for sex with hamsters.
Rather, I found myself thinking about the title of Freud’s paper ‘Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis’. About the Rat Man’s obsessions — how he had to count up to forty (or fifty) between thunderclaps. And about the way that Freud himself got caught up in the Rat Man’s story about a pair of pince nez, a post office, an army manoeuvre and an unpaid debt. It’s a tortuous story, torturing even — so much so that you can start finding yourself wondering if the rat and buttocks thing might not be less of a drain on the human spirit. But Freud gets so involved in it that he actually draws and publishes a map of the various train and carriage journeys that Rat Man took — or rather, says he took — in his — probably imaginary — attempt to repay his debt.
I thought of myself breaking a course down into/up into a set of numbers. I thought, too, about the headline for one of my (many) unwritten stories: Why are there no female trainspotters? What’s wrong with men’s brains? (And, left to themselves, would women ever have come up with the periodic table?)
Even further thoughts
I showed this blog to my wife before I posted it. She had two questions:
1. Who are these men so interested in Richard Gere’s sex life? And what if they recognise themselves?
2. That last sentence about women’s inability to create the periodic table, couldn’t that be construed as sexist?
I gave her two answers:
1. **** and *********. Not to mention ******, ******* and ****, too. As to recognising themselves, ***** will think it’s about ****. And vice versa.
2. I hope so. Then perhaps they’ll read back two sentences and face the potential sexism there, too.
In return, she gave me two final words:
1. Mmmm
2. Mmmm
It was Friday evening. A family chicken was roasting. I was in the kitchen. My wife and my daughter were there, too.
‘I’ve posted a new blog,’ I said.
‘Mmmm,’ said my wife. ‘You always show me first.’
‘Mmmm,’ I replied, truthfully, if evasively. ‘It’s about what I’ve done so far on the course. How many seminars, how many books and papers read etc etc. I’ve done it in numbers.’
‘Autistic,’ said my daughter.
‘Autistic,’ said my wife.
‘Mmmm,’ I thought, and said.
Then I remembered that afternoon’s seminar — for which I’d done the reading before posting the blog. It was about the Rat Man, one of Freud’s most famous patients. The Rat Man — perhaps disappointingly — is not someone blessed/cursed with a super(ego)hero alter (super)ego and extraordinary rodentish powers. Instead, he’s a young lawyer plagued by a story about a terrifying (though, I should imagine, imaginary) far eastern torture involving rats and bare buttocks. A wish reconstituted as a fear, Freud suggests.
That’s not what my wife and daughter’s comment got me thinking about — though I did have passing thoughts about the imagination and unconscious of the straight men who’d tell me again and again and again about Richard Gere’s supposed taste for sex with hamsters.
Rather, I found myself thinking about the title of Freud’s paper ‘Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis’. About the Rat Man’s obsessions — how he had to count up to forty (or fifty) between thunderclaps. And about the way that Freud himself got caught up in the Rat Man’s story about a pair of pince nez, a post office, an army manoeuvre and an unpaid debt. It’s a tortuous story, torturing even — so much so that you can start finding yourself wondering if the rat and buttocks thing might not be less of a drain on the human spirit. But Freud gets so involved in it that he actually draws and publishes a map of the various train and carriage journeys that Rat Man took — or rather, says he took — in his — probably imaginary — attempt to repay his debt.
I thought of myself breaking a course down into/up into a set of numbers. I thought, too, about the headline for one of my (many) unwritten stories: Why are there no female trainspotters? What’s wrong with men’s brains? (And, left to themselves, would women ever have come up with the periodic table?)
Even further thoughts
I showed this blog to my wife before I posted it. She had two questions:
1. Who are these men so interested in Richard Gere’s sex life? And what if they recognise themselves?
2. That last sentence about women’s inability to create the periodic table, couldn’t that be construed as sexist?
I gave her two answers:
1. **** and *********. Not to mention ******, ******* and ****, too. As to recognising themselves, ***** will think it’s about ****. And vice versa.
2. I hope so. Then perhaps they’ll read back two sentences and face the potential sexism there, too.
In return, she gave me two final words:
1. Mmmm
2. Mmmm
Friday, 11 January 2008
Psychoanalysis by numbers
And so back to school. After nearly a month’s break, the new year of study starts with five seminars and one film screening over three days. Time to take stock, draw up some accounts.
My first degree in psychology left me feeling I’d learned little about the human mind — let alone my own — but it did instil in me a deep respect for the power of numbers. Even if you did as little work as I did, you couldn’t help but come away with a decent grasp of statistics and what they can tell you.
As far as I’m concerned, correlational studies are one of the great scientific advances of the past 150 years, from John Snow figuring out how cholera worked to Richard Doll linking smoking and lung cancer. They’re why I take statins for my high cholesterol and why I argued so hard to get a friend of mine who had breast cancer to take tamoxifen rather than rely on homeopathy and aromatherapy. (She’s taking it. Thank God. Or rather, a patriarchal projection of our infantile selves.)
So here, in numbers, is the story so far.
37 Seminars attended
0 Seminars missed
2/3 Seminars late for
0 Essays written (none due yet)
77 Books, papers etc read (includes preliminary reading)
51 Books, papers etc finished
2 Parties invited to
1 Parties attended
6 Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
1 Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
19 Caffe nero mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
c20 Pre-dawn starts
2 Post-midnight finishes (I’m old)
Music to crunch by
And so back to school. After nearly a month’s break, the new year of study starts with five seminars and one film screening over three days. Time to take stock, draw up some accounts.
My first degree in psychology left me feeling I’d learned little about the human mind — let alone my own — but it did instil in me a deep respect for the power of numbers. Even if you did as little work as I did, you couldn’t help but come away with a decent grasp of statistics and what they can tell you.
As far as I’m concerned, correlational studies are one of the great scientific advances of the past 150 years, from John Snow figuring out how cholera worked to Richard Doll linking smoking and lung cancer. They’re why I take statins for my high cholesterol and why I argued so hard to get a friend of mine who had breast cancer to take tamoxifen rather than rely on homeopathy and aromatherapy. (She’s taking it. Thank God. Or rather, a patriarchal projection of our infantile selves.)
So here, in numbers, is the story so far.
37 Seminars attended
0 Seminars missed
2/3 Seminars late for
0 Essays written (none due yet)
77 Books, papers etc read (includes preliminary reading)
51 Books, papers etc finished
2 Parties invited to
1 Parties attended
6 Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
1 Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
19 Caffe nero mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
c20 Pre-dawn starts
2 Post-midnight finishes (I’m old)
Music to crunch by
Monday, 7 January 2008
So what is theoretical psychoanalytic studies anyway? (Part two)
The short — and clever dick — response to that question is, of course: if I knew the answer, there’d be no point in doing a course on it. Also, that even if I knew (or rather, thought that I knew) the answer, I should imagine (or rather, hope) that I’ll have a quite different idea by the end of the course. If I don’t, I’ll have rather wasted my time.
So, no, I can’t really say exactly what theoretical psychoanalytic studies is. But I can pass on two or three things I’ve learned studying it.
1. Sandor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst whose Polish father’s original surname was the same as my wife’s maiden name. Maybe we’re related. I’ve also uncovered a similar and less tentative link to one of Freud’s best friends. More about that when I introduce you to my 21st century parlour game, Six Degrees Of Separation Anxiety.
2. Psychoanalysis has nothing to say about death because it has no concept of a negative. As a theory, it can only conceive of things that are, not things that are not. Therefore it has — and can have — nothing to say about death. Thus death does not exist in psychoanalysis. There is, accordingly, no such thing as death.
3. Maybe I dreamed that last sentence.
I’ve also learned a couple of more general things about psychoanalysis, both of which I actually already knew, kind of. Only now I feel I know them well enough to consider them beliefs rather than mere prejudices — though it’s always nice to have one’s prejudices confirmed, especially by people whose brains one would like to be able to borrow whenever you needed to do some thinking.
So, essentially, it’s confirmed and deepened my two core beliefs about psychoanalysis:
1. It’s a really, really interesting and productive way of interrogating the world, of asking awkward, interesting questions. And of allowing — encouraging, even — the world to interrogate you back.
2. It could also quite easily all be total bollocks. Analysts, I know, worry that they are complete frauds — which at least is profoundly different to homeopaths etc who are complete frauds but don’t seem to worry about it at all. Then I think doubt is good — or at least I think I do. Or maybe I just think I think I do.
Still, there are bits of psychoanalytic theory you read and think: hang on a minute, which leg are you pulling today, sunshine? Everyone, I’m sure, has different bits they think have LaLaLand passports. Myself, I have no problem with the Oedipus Complex. If there weren’t something like that going on in us all, the playground taunt ‘your mum’ would not have the life-threatening power it does. But maybe you disagree with me. And if you do, you’ll surely agree with my doubt about the idea that the suckling infant’s mind can conceive of the breast as a penis.
And yet . . .
I was having dinner in Bury St Edmunds recently and I got naughty, really naughty. The woman next to me, having berated Tesco — for being everywhere — fell to attacking Rupert Murdoch — also for being everywhere, essentially. God save my soul but I couldn’t stop myself, I just couldn’t.
I know that both Tesco and Rupert Murdoch are big boys and really don’t need my help. But I rushed to their defence anyway. I rounded up the usual arguments — democracy, free speech, free thinking, free minds, free choice, how no one ever put a gun to anyone’s head to shop at Tesco/buy The Sun etc etc. I meant it, every word. Well, sort of.
Only, I didn’t only mean it, I meant other stuff, too; stuff that, disingenuously, I chose not to mention; stuff that the woman next to me couldn’t imagine I might also think. In the end, I had to stop. It was either that or tears and the dinner-giver would never have forgiven me. (How things change. My younger self would have kept on till the tears flowed. Blood, too, possibly.)
The next morning, I found myself wondering: what is it about Tesco and Rupert Murdoch? It’s not just that people dislike them or even that they hate them. They looooaaathe them, with an intensity that seems quite out of proportion. No, not quite out of proportion but completely and incomprehensibly out of proportion.
I’ve tried, again and again, to get a comprehensible answer from them to the question ‘What has Rupert Murdoch/Tesco ever done to you?’. But I’ve never got one. It just seems to be the same kind of fury that some people had about Tony Blair, the ones who’d tell you he was the worst prime minister ever. Generally, they were the same ones who’d said the same before, about John Major, Margaret Thatcher and, quite probably, Bonar Law.
So what is going on here? Obviously, it’s an anger in search of a target but what anger and why these particular targets? I tried putting my psychoanalytic thinking cap on. It didn’t take me very far. But it did take me this far: Tesco: food: mother. And this far: Murdoch: power: control: father. And a little further: mother: breast. And further still: the giant, attacking breasts in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex. And, even father down the road: the regularly expressed fear of my dinner companion etc that Tesco and Murdoch are out to screw them. Maybe the idea of the breast as a threatening penis does have its merits after all.
I made myself a cup of tea.
(Yes, I know I spelt a word wrong in the penultimate paragraph. Not a Freudian slip but a Freudian deliberate.)
The short — and clever dick — response to that question is, of course: if I knew the answer, there’d be no point in doing a course on it. Also, that even if I knew (or rather, thought that I knew) the answer, I should imagine (or rather, hope) that I’ll have a quite different idea by the end of the course. If I don’t, I’ll have rather wasted my time.
So, no, I can’t really say exactly what theoretical psychoanalytic studies is. But I can pass on two or three things I’ve learned studying it.
1. Sandor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst whose Polish father’s original surname was the same as my wife’s maiden name. Maybe we’re related. I’ve also uncovered a similar and less tentative link to one of Freud’s best friends. More about that when I introduce you to my 21st century parlour game, Six Degrees Of Separation Anxiety.
2. Psychoanalysis has nothing to say about death because it has no concept of a negative. As a theory, it can only conceive of things that are, not things that are not. Therefore it has — and can have — nothing to say about death. Thus death does not exist in psychoanalysis. There is, accordingly, no such thing as death.
3. Maybe I dreamed that last sentence.
I’ve also learned a couple of more general things about psychoanalysis, both of which I actually already knew, kind of. Only now I feel I know them well enough to consider them beliefs rather than mere prejudices — though it’s always nice to have one’s prejudices confirmed, especially by people whose brains one would like to be able to borrow whenever you needed to do some thinking.
So, essentially, it’s confirmed and deepened my two core beliefs about psychoanalysis:
1. It’s a really, really interesting and productive way of interrogating the world, of asking awkward, interesting questions. And of allowing — encouraging, even — the world to interrogate you back.
2. It could also quite easily all be total bollocks. Analysts, I know, worry that they are complete frauds — which at least is profoundly different to homeopaths etc who are complete frauds but don’t seem to worry about it at all. Then I think doubt is good — or at least I think I do. Or maybe I just think I think I do.
Still, there are bits of psychoanalytic theory you read and think: hang on a minute, which leg are you pulling today, sunshine? Everyone, I’m sure, has different bits they think have LaLaLand passports. Myself, I have no problem with the Oedipus Complex. If there weren’t something like that going on in us all, the playground taunt ‘your mum’ would not have the life-threatening power it does. But maybe you disagree with me. And if you do, you’ll surely agree with my doubt about the idea that the suckling infant’s mind can conceive of the breast as a penis.
And yet . . .
I was having dinner in Bury St Edmunds recently and I got naughty, really naughty. The woman next to me, having berated Tesco — for being everywhere — fell to attacking Rupert Murdoch — also for being everywhere, essentially. God save my soul but I couldn’t stop myself, I just couldn’t.
I know that both Tesco and Rupert Murdoch are big boys and really don’t need my help. But I rushed to their defence anyway. I rounded up the usual arguments — democracy, free speech, free thinking, free minds, free choice, how no one ever put a gun to anyone’s head to shop at Tesco/buy The Sun etc etc. I meant it, every word. Well, sort of.
Only, I didn’t only mean it, I meant other stuff, too; stuff that, disingenuously, I chose not to mention; stuff that the woman next to me couldn’t imagine I might also think. In the end, I had to stop. It was either that or tears and the dinner-giver would never have forgiven me. (How things change. My younger self would have kept on till the tears flowed. Blood, too, possibly.)
The next morning, I found myself wondering: what is it about Tesco and Rupert Murdoch? It’s not just that people dislike them or even that they hate them. They looooaaathe them, with an intensity that seems quite out of proportion. No, not quite out of proportion but completely and incomprehensibly out of proportion.
I’ve tried, again and again, to get a comprehensible answer from them to the question ‘What has Rupert Murdoch/Tesco ever done to you?’. But I’ve never got one. It just seems to be the same kind of fury that some people had about Tony Blair, the ones who’d tell you he was the worst prime minister ever. Generally, they were the same ones who’d said the same before, about John Major, Margaret Thatcher and, quite probably, Bonar Law.
So what is going on here? Obviously, it’s an anger in search of a target but what anger and why these particular targets? I tried putting my psychoanalytic thinking cap on. It didn’t take me very far. But it did take me this far: Tesco: food: mother. And this far: Murdoch: power: control: father. And a little further: mother: breast. And further still: the giant, attacking breasts in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex. And, even father down the road: the regularly expressed fear of my dinner companion etc that Tesco and Murdoch are out to screw them. Maybe the idea of the breast as a threatening penis does have its merits after all.
I made myself a cup of tea.
(Yes, I know I spelt a word wrong in the penultimate paragraph. Not a Freudian slip but a Freudian deliberate.)
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Seasonality
One of you advised me to knock off the studying for the holidays and start acting like a real student for a change. Well, I haven't got drunk, fallen asleep on the tube and woken up in Morden (via Edgware). I haven't sulked about having to spend time with my family. I didn't buy all my gifts at an all-night petrol station.
But I did go to the course Christmas party, for which I managed to be an hour late — my house locked me out. (Read meaning into that, if you will.) It was in a bar called Jerusalem — again, search out the significance. (When we were canvassed for possible venues, I suggested — as it's just down the road — Spearmint Rhino. But my idea didn't find favour, even when I added that I reckon they give psychoanalysts trade discount.)
And I did put together a Christmas collection (following the usual rules, the same as for a bridal gown: the old, the new, the borrowed, the blue) . . .
1 Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Darlene Love (1963) 2 Just Like Christmas Low (2000) 3 Winter Wonderland Johnny Mercer, the Pied Pipers & The Paul Weston Orchestra (1946) 4 Sleigh Ride Lloyd Glenn (1954) 5 Merry Christmas Baby Charles Brown (1947) 6 Christmas Man Blues Bertha ‘Chippie’ Hill (1928?) 7 Silver Bells Doris Day (1950) 8 Santa Baby Eartha Kitt (1953) 9 Santa Claus Got Stuck In My Chimney Ella Fitzgerald (1960) 10 Trim Your Tree Jimmy Butler (1954) 11 Papa Ain’t No Santa Claus (Mama Ain’t No Christmas Tree) Butterbeans & Susie (1930) 12 Christ Was Born On Christmas Morn Frankie ‘Half-Pint’ Jaxon (1929?)
13 The Twelve Days Of Christmas Bob & Ron Copper (1955) 14 Lonesome Christmas Pt 1 Lowell Fulson (1950) 15 Blue Christmas Elvis Presley (1968) 16 Let It Be Me/The Christmas Song Laura Nyro (1990) 17 Silent Night Huey 'Piano' Smith & The Clowns (1962) 18 The Twelve Days of Christmas Field Music, Kathryn Williams, The Futureheads, The Golden Virgins & The Joseph and Mary Chain (2006) 19 Santa Claus Is Coming to Town Bill Evans (1963) 20 Winter Wonderland Aretha Franklin (1964) 21 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Aimee Mann (2006) 22 Christmas Wrapping The Waitresses (1981) 23 Christmas Boogie Sugar Chile Robinson (1950) 24 Who Took The Merry Out Of Christmas? The Staple Singers (1970) 25 My Boyfriend’s Coming Home For Christmas Toni Wine (1963) 26 There Won’t Be Any Snow (Christmas In The Jungle) Derrick Roberts (1965)
27 Seasonal Greetings Krusty The Clown (1999)
It lasts about seventy minutes and fits on a CD. Soon, I'll also be adding some notes about the tracks.
Bonus track
Merry Christmas Doctor Elaine May & Mike Nichols
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