I.e the London Review of Book's "Conference on the Literary Essay", held at Queen Mary's. I had tickets for both days this weekend, but sheer exhaustion prevented me from returning on the Sunday - Friday I was up at 6 to collect our ten week old kitten, and I had to be up again at 6 on Saturday to get to East London for the conference. Two friends from Ireland came to stay on Saturday night, so I couldn't catch up on sleep in the evening. My boyfriend also suffered a massive sleep deficit, due to work deadlines left till the last minute. He stayed up all night Friday working and keeping the kitten company, and was functioning better than I was the next day, despite my fears. He has manic depression, and though he has been stable now for a good eighteen months I am on constant alert for signs that he's getting ill again. One of these is sleeplessness. Sleep deprivation is one of several factors that have precipitated episodes in the past.
Had I been more awake, I would have got more out of the conference on Saturday I think. I was alert enough to pay attention to the three speakers I had most wanted to hear: Hermione Lee ("Dreams and Clouds: Lamb, Woolf and the Essay"), Adam Phillips ("The psychoanalyst and the essay") and Andrew O'Hagan ("The Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson"). Of the three, Adam Phillips' speech was the worst delivered but the most entertaining. His discussion was based around why psychoanalysts seem to avoid the essay form, and why, when it is used it seems somewhat rebellious. He posited that psychoanalysts write very much for other psychoanalysts and are anxious about communicating beyond their own circles, partly because they are insecure about approaching domains usually reserved for other fields and partly because their is something about the essay that is inimical to the "science" of psychoanalysis. Although an essay drives towards definitiveness, it is by definition an attempt, something uncertain that does not reach completion. For writers of fiction or critical literature, this impossibility of completion creates the freedom of exploratory space. But for psychoanalysts, this can feel threatening. As Phillips said, Freud insists that we are ambivalent creatures - and yet no psychoanalyst will admit to being ambivalent about psychoanalysis!
Phillips went on to discuss Freud's own use of the essay form, which he suggests Freud used to investigate our desire for an ending, as well as to indulge his own literary tendencies . The abundance of footnotes, particularly in his three essays "On Sexuality" reveal the author's search for the "something missing" in the theory he felt compelled to revise time and again. The essay form may seem appropriate for such a search: Phillips notes that like psychoanalysis, the essay encourages digression whilst there is still a point to be made. Indeed, Freud never seems to lose faith that there is a point worth making, but significantly, at the end of "On Sexuality" he admits the impossibility of finding an all-encompassing, satisfactory explanation for the mystery he set out to uncover .
I am unsure what conclusion to draw from this, or if there is a conclusion to draw at all. It may be relevant that at the time of writing, though Freud was of course jealous of his reputation, psychoanalysis as a profession was in its infancy and there was far less competition between different "talking cures" to prove the most effective than there is today. In our time, psychoanalysis though not perhaps universally threatened, does in the UK at least seem to have to work a lot harder to fight its corner against quicker, more "cost-effective" treatments. In this climate, perhaps it is no wonder that most psychoanalysts prefer to steer clear of what can seem a potentially subversive form, and one that undermines the scientific credentials of the profession.
I have my own meeting with a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist in York coming up in July. This is the meeting requested by the CMHT psychiatrist after I persuaded him to at least consider supporting my case for the Tavistock therapy to continue. If I can be equally persuasive on the 21st, the doctor may advise the mental health commissioner that the therapy should continue, and that instigating another sort of treatment for me in York would be inappropriate to my needs. It is a lot to hope for, I know. But at the very least I may have won myself some more time.
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