Wild Analysis 
by Sigmund Freud, edited by Adam Phillips, translated by Alan Bance.
Penguin, 222 pp., £8.99, November 2002, 0 14 118242 3
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You should say everything that comes into your head.

Freud, ‘On Initiating Treatment’ (1913)

There are things it’s better not to dwell on, things it’s normal to forget. The people who are starving or being tortured, the animals that live a life of hell to feed us, the unimaginable extension of the universe, or universes, the impersonality of the statistical laws to which our personal behaviour conforms, oblivion. On the edge of infinite nothingness we go about our trivial business: book holidays, see to the new tax disc for the car, shop for the weekend at Sainsbury’s. This is reality, normality, health. Forgetting makes us robust. A whiff of anaesthetic before we start the day does us a world of good. Those who can’t forget we call madmen or artists.

One of the many scandalous realities we choose to ignore because we cannot assimilate it is the fact of unexpressed thought. Consider it. Next time you are sitting at dinner with friends or people you don’t yet know, stop for a moment and listen out for the inaudible murmur of concealed thoughts: the things going through your head that you are not speaking, the things going through the heads of the others. On the bus, in a Tube carriage filled with silent strangers, at the breakfast table with your loved ones, in the office or the pub: remember how the secret thoughts are swarming, seething; chattering like millions of bats in an underground cave, rustling beneath the surface of the day like cockroaches.

Now and again, unintentionally or by chance, the secret thoughts slip out. You have guests staying: nice, kind, ingenuous and well-meaning people, who are also rather boring. They have left the room and without thinking you blurt out too loudly to your partner: ‘God, what bores they are!’ Then you see that the window is open and you realise that they are in the room above you and will have their window open too because it’s summer and they will almost certainly have heard you, and they are staying for another three days. Or you phone an old friend and get the answering machine: it’s the simpering voice of your friend’s unbearable wife telling you to leave a message, and out loud you curse her, calling her an arrogant bitch, but the beep is much more sudden than you expect and you realise you’ve been recorded. Such moments are small catastrophes, and the only way we have of dealing with them is to behave as though they had never happened or persuade ourselves that their impact is less dreadful than it really is.

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Vol. 26 No. 2 · 22 January 2004

Nicholas Spice’s reinvention of the justifications for psychoanalysis is delightful (LRB, 8 January), but he lets his poetry run away with him when he says that psychoanalysis is a conversation on the edge of the abyss. People in psychoanalysis almost never talk about any of the things Spice says we must forget in order to live: the size of the universe, the mass murder of innocents, the impersonality of statistical laws. Instead we do the opposite. We blow up the most trivial events of our lives until they are huge with meaning. This may be very useful for getting a hold of one’s life when it’s out of whack. But it’s not the abyss.

Michael Pollak
New York

I appreciated Nicholas Spice’s thoughtful piece on the psychoanalytic relationship, and recognised much of it, but I thought some unreality crept in. Spice speaks of the ‘refusal of the analytic conversation to accommodate present realities’, explaining this in terms of the analyst’s insistence on interpreting all contingencies as transference communications, when in fact they are not. In fact it would be mad to approve of such interpretations: the aim of interpretation is truthfulness, not some mutual game. Of course it is often hard to be certain when what is at stake is unconscious. More generally, Spice’s picture of the patient’s predicament is one in which new convictions about his or her moves of the mind seem to be lacking. No wonder this hypothetical patient feels so much at sea, and the conversation so unanchored. Over time, trust deepens through the insights that come from careful listening and courageous interpretation, and the capacity to receive them. To give a short answer to one of Spice’s questions: it is shared insight that in the end contains the strangeness of the analytic relationship.

Second, Spice is keen to emphasise the peculiarity of the analytic relationship. It is worth mentioning that disengaging, listening and interpreting are not unknown in ordinary life. In fact, romantic love becomes real love just when such recognition of the other’s otherness becomes an acceptable, if difficult, part of the relationship. The major difference is that in everyday life we give no one the implicit licence and contract to be our regular interpreter.

Finally, I agree that the patient is often in the dark about the analyst’s feelings towards him, and that this is inevitably frustrating (as is the abstinence for the analyst). Again, however, I think Spice overstates the case. Though it may well be bad technique to reassure the patient, and though there is bound to be, as a result of projection and transference, suspicion in the patient as to the analyst’s motives, it is sometimes possible for the patient to sense that the analyst knows from the inside the kinds of thing he interprets (that he too has an arsehole); that the analyst is not superior or aloof. The patient can come to believe that the analyst is genuinely interested in him, and on the side of a fuller, truer living of his life. The work of the analyst (listening, reflecting, interpreting, avoiding pulls into projected enactments with the patient, patience, perseverance) is real, and can sometimes be recognised as such, with gratitude, by the patient.

Michael Brearley
London NW3

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