A Talk on Ladies of Leisure, Mental/Creative Process and the Notion of “Cure”
By Cynthia Sailers
presented Saturday, May 20, at Brandon Brown and Alli Warren’s
There is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself —Thoreau
They suffer mainly from reminiscences —Freud
In preparing this talk for today, I thought of several useful connections that could be explored between Psychoanalysis and Poetics, which is what, I think I had deduced I was supposed to do today. On thing that does strike me after consideration is that there is a parallel between mental process and creative process, and in some cases these processes are indistinguishable. One person whose work I thought of was Henry Darger’s 15,000 page “novel,” In the Realms of the Unknown, which explores the psychotic landscape of the Vivian girls who seem destined to play out a repetitive battle with authority figures, and whose identity confusion is encapsulated in the children’s hermaphroditic genitalia. This point seems particularly compelling in relation to Darger’s identity which remains essentially unknown (1) — a perverse structure is here regardless, and I think his perversity, of collapsing differences and boundaries also seems to signify in these girls that innocence is a blemish from the instant they are born. What is so fascinating about Darger’s work is that the phenomena of psychosis and creativity are blurred in a landscape that mirror’s Darger’s own traumatic childhood in foster care system that failed him, gave him no parental nurturance, abused him, exploited him in child labor camps, and confined him to institutional walls; thus, it seems he internalized persecutory figures and scenes which he replayed ad nauseum through a kind of sadomasochistic dynamic with no cathartic release, one would assume by the sheer numbers of pages produced found after his death. This example does, however, bring up the question of what would constitute a neurotic landscape? A borderline one? And how useful these distinctions might be, although personally I’m thinking there is a semblance between the nature of a borderline organization and the post-modern concept of the “instability of the ‘I’”…
All this said, I’ve decided to deliver a talk today with no distinguishing topic. Instead, with the goal to build a kind of landscape of my own creative process, in a sense, out of distinct sources which have influenced my thinking and thus my poems. However, I am not going to focus on my own level of mental process per se, but the kind of outside sources, images, and thought that have surfaced in my work. (Another topic for a talk might include contemporary writers working directly with source materials, with one example being Norma Cole’s Collective Memory—an entire text made out of source texts). I should say right away that I started a manuscript co-currently with a graduate program in psychology, wit some vague idea that I wanted to write about Ladies of Leisure because it evoked my interests in 19thc writing by women and psychoanalysis, but it also seemed to be a compelling fantasy to my own economic, academic and employment demands which imposed on my creative process. For example, I found myself having to create formal writing procedures to accommodate notions of my time. (This being a very oppositional idea to Randall Jarell’s sentiment, “the soul has no assignments, neither cooks nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.”)
Isn’t “wasting one’s time” an essential requirement to relaxation, fantasy, and play? In the 19thc the Lady of Leisure emerged with the concept of leisure time and the shortening of the work week due to the advent of machines. She was perhaps someone who might exist solely for others, but who technically had the time for leisure activities, and symbolic of a kind of privilege and luxury. Now the term, ironically, if googled, turns up a bunch of housewife blogs under the bold heading, “Lady of Leisure. Mrs. Hendrickson…”, now translated to mean something like One like a lot of stuff, or One is proud to admit they like to bathe in Kiehls bath foam and finds that bath a good place to think. I suppose this might interest us only if we consider how an obsessive culture (of routine) might make the simple act of taking a bath hedonistic, or furthermore, perceive idle activities as chaotic. One could even envision a bumper stick here: reclaim our right to be idle. And I can’t disown the fact that at the point of starting my project I was thinking about how I needed more time for my writing, and more time for things like swimming and tennis. But if we ponder how such notable women writers, as Jane Austen, could be referred to, ironically as a Lady of Leisure, then the phrase takes on a different meaning, as she believed as Aristotle did that, “Fiction is more philosophical and more serious than history.” Perhaps it is more appropriate to leave the phrase, safely, attributed to her satires of late 18th and 19th century female characters whose biggest fears could be considered to be ennui.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, I think, by asking how is being diagnosed with “ennui” any different from Proust being diagnosed for laziness (by his father) with Abulia, except that Abulia is a neurological condition that refers to a lack of will or initiative. But having this in mind, one can read Swann’s Way, especially parts of it when the narrator’s parents censor books given to him by his grandmother, as perhaps the attempt to prevent some bad ideas from setting in. It is noteworthy that Marcel’s cure is not supported by the young man staying inside while the “cure” given to women, e.g. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “rest cure” was the opposite, prohibiting her from venturing outside and to do little more than absolutely nothing.
I’m on a path here that has come much further than the scope of any project I’ve done, but exists solely in my association to Ladies of Leisure, especially in reference to Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper, which in my view, gives us the cure to cultural, female imprisonment, in the form of a full blown manic (psychotic) episode. A story, I find, perversely delicious in the end, because craziness connotes some liberation finally, and the necessary respite from a continuously bleak form of submission. However, in Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, a film with strong allusions to The Yellow Wall-paper, we are reminded not to take this ending as hopeful, because what is waiting on the other side are those pesky men with syringes, a horrifying phallic helicopter which comes to transport the young woman to an institution to contain this overwhelming defiant woman (the final sign of her insanity being the seduction of her younger brother). Moreover, in Bergman’s film the removal of this woman to a mental institution for electromagnetic shock therapies is drastically different than the implications stemming from Gilman’s psychosis—that it serves to relieve her from her maternal and wifely duties. Unfortunately, psychosis gets her further and further away from her writing, a more meaningful form for expressing one’s subjectivity or the way to escape the confines of a room, i.e. writing as cure.
In many ways Freud’s Dora is the perfect Lady of Leisure. She comes from a typical upper-middle-class family, composed of a father and mother, a son and daughter, the classical configuration of the bourgeois family. The father is a dominating figure in the family, and the mother suffers from what is referred to as “housewife psychosis,” obsessed with the cleanliness of the household sphere. When Dora comes to Freud she is 18-years-old with one of her prevalent symptoms being aphonia, or loss of a voice. She’s a classic conversion hysteric, converting her sexual desire for her father into ailments of the throat, including loss of a voice and hysterical choking, Freud believed that her symptoms symbolized the imagined oral sex between her father and Frau K, from with Dora thought they derived their sexual satisfaction. What is troubling about Dora’s case is that when Dora confronts Herr K, the man who repeatedly make sexual advanced toward her, he [Herr K] asserts that Dora merely imagined it. Dora’s father sides with Herr K and also asserts Dora has imagined these sexual advanced. Thus, transforming a real perpetrator into on in the imagination. The implication here being that not only are her symptoms the result of intrapsychic conflict in a traditional Freudian sense, but the manifestations of conflicts with internalized objects.
Yet still, I have to admit, I’m fascinated with hysterical illnesses. Hysterics, or people who sexualize others, show excessive emotions, and who unlike the obsessive lacks the capacity to think. I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line, “time for you and time for me/ and time yet for a hundred indecisions.” Because the hysteric has difficulty thinking, one common intervention in psychotherapy is to help him/her to think. (While with the obsessive one wants to help them to feel). Hysterics are typically amusing, flamboyant and attention-seeking individuals who artists, such as Bergman, write into many of his character driven “chamber plays.” For example, in Autumn Sonata, there is a sister in the attic, Helena, who is the spastic child whose physical malady is a result of an inner conflict around being abandoned by her mother. In Cries and Whispers, one of the prudish sisters of a dying woman takes a broken piece of glass and shoves it up her cunt to bleed herself in substitution for sexual intercourse with her husband. This film is one of my favorites, played out entirely in 19thc boudoirs and dining rooms, with a homoerotic love affair between a hysterical dying woman and her chambermaid, that is to say, it feels like there are a lot of flailing bodies and a messy imminent death which seizes over the austere cleanliness of an ordered Victorian household. Additionally, in Passion of Anna a semi-delusional woman imagines her husband really loved her, ignoring the letter she carries around with her stating otherwise.
In light of Freud’s comment “They suffer mainly from reminiscences,” hysterics are riveting characters with less concrete mental structures than those with obsessional defenses. (In Ecrits Lacan describes obsessive dream imagery as being hard fortress like structures—like a metaphorical “fortress of solitude,” to manage anxieties about lack of control). Hysterical defences are intriguing, if only for the asthetic quality of the symptoms. For example, the malady La Belle Indifference, or an apparent lack of concern patients have toward their symptoms, mostly found in hysterics with conversion disorders. (2) This kind of mental life is captivating considering in and of itself the allusion to a “beautiful indifference.” Or the glove paralysis seen in 19th c women whose hand was paralyzed in order to ward off anxieties about sexuality and masturbation. But symptoms, as with identities, are culturally constructed, and we no longer see glove paralysis, or as Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote about paraphilias in 19th c Vienna, describing men who were sexually obsessed with handkerchiefs. Instead we see hysterical neurosis such as in “amputee wannabes.”
Amputee wannabes , for example, are often thought of to be a disorder of identity, like a gender identity disorder, but are also assigned to the category of paraphilias (when there is a displaced sexual desire. The disorder is called acrotomophilia when “devotees” need an amputee to receive orgasm). Although, many wannabees are attracted to the idea of themselves as amputees, some are attracted to other amputees. A subject, I might point out is witnessed in the documentary Whole as one man looks at the picture of a boy amputee and says, “I could even get turned on by that.” This I find to be a riveting perversion, a perversion in the sense that it hopes to obliterate the generational differences between man and boy. So one might ask, now that this topic has aired on 60 Minutes, what is it abut our own time and place that has helped us to create an obsession with amputees? My crude association has something to do with war—psychologically, wannabees have the desire to match an idealized image they have to themselves I which less is more often occurring after seeing an amputee during preadolescence. And I wonder to what extent growing up in the last hundred years hasn’t placed a lot of children in contact with people returning from war, seeing the “war hero,” faced with the horror of modern weaponry’s destruction of limbs mixed with modern science’s capacity to keep those victims alive. A kind of beautiful life and death paradox. And a kind of tumult of the psyche into the other, desiring the other’s difference, thinking the other holds something to possess in their lack of a body. As it’s difficult to fully comprehend such phenomena, I shift to Roland Barthes’s use of the amputated limb as a metaphor for the missing other, “sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.”
As I’ve dipped into several sources without providing much in terms of context, sources that have lent themselves to, as Barthes proposes, a kind of image-repertoire for my work. This image repertoire of subjects and objects, patients and their illnesses, or in Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, a suffering lover and an other. I’d like to resist the temptation to link sources with poems, and rather think about Barthes’s use of the unresponsive other to hear the orations of the suffering lover. I think that actually, Barthes’s provides a language for the scope of the entire project in terms of a dialectical relationship between self and other [“Agony”]:
1. Tonight I came back from the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here, like a poison already prepared (jeolosy, abandonment, restlessness); they merely wait for a little time to pass in order to be able to declare themselves with some propriety. I pick up a book and take a sleeping pill, “calmly.” The silence of this huge hotel is echoing, in different idiotic (faint murmur of draining bathtubs); the furniture and the lamps are stupid; nothing friendly that might warm (I’m cold, let’s go back to Paris”). Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress, like Socrates chatting (as I am reading) and feeling the cold of the hemlock rising in his body; I hear it identity itself moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here.
(And if, so that something might happen, I were to make a vow?)2. The psychotic lines in the terror of breakdown (against which the various psychoses are merely defenses. But “the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced (primitive agony)…and there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred.” Similarly, it seems, for the lover’s anxiety; it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first “ravished.” Someone would have to be able to tell me: “Don’t be anxious any more—you’ve already lost him/her.”
In the second half of this passage Barthes makes reference to the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s ideas about psychotic defenses. But I would need more time than this talk allows to think about the passage, but what it evokes is the solipsistic act of a writer in dialog with an other; the leisure/rigor of writing; the anxiety of being a figure against a backdrop of things that are here; and how experiencing loss is always a loss that’s already occurred, lending to a more depressive sense of creation. What I admire are the many poets whose work I haven’t yet mentioned here but who are able to delve into psychic states of being a self, such as in John Keene’s line, “name us anonymous”; in Cedar Sigo’s line, “the kind of shadow I was made to cut”; or in Stacy Szymaszek’s line, “where are you going when you go home?” about Paolo Pasolini.
Mostly my assumption is that one’s image repertoire is vital to what gets created on the page. If one can associate to these images one is being generative, spontaneous and playful. Free association is an impossible feat, in fact. Yet that is what I attempted to do; I wrote many of the long poems in two weeks, taking most of the time to write them and only a day or two to edit them, with the privilege/constraint of only taking things out, meaning that I attempted to generate material as associatively as possible, and to erase as little as possible.
The admittance of the difficulty in free associating might be liberating if we think about how truly difficult freeing up one’s mind truly is. As most writers know when they pick up their materials and feel like they have nothing to say or they cannot say anything “new,” or they have censored themselves (it is, I’ve found even more difficult when laying on an analytic couch, staring at a blank wall, and feeling, personally, like creativity and self-disclosure are paradoxical by nature. Winnicott proposes a defense such as “organized nonsense” or “organized chaos which is a defense against chaos.” Some how these descriptions seem to be appropriate to the act of writing as well.) According to Winnicott the ideal state is when the individual can come together “and exist as a unit, not as a defence against anxiety but as an expression of I AM, I am alive, I am myself. From this point everything is creative.” More than the personal comfort we might get in our own therapy, there is also the obvious, but poignant fact of the rigor and intellectual capacity needed to do a kind of work, that to many looks futile. One could say the same thing of poetry.
Where I enter my work, very much has to do with economics of time, energy, and resources. And if we think that in a sense writing is like a kind of leisure activity, one needs the space and time to think, but also the rigor Freud employed in his own self-analysis. Or is one thinks about the lack of reverie in one’s life…I cannot, obviously, get into that here, but in terms of psychoanalytic thinking and poetry is that free association and play are vital and essential activities to creativity. The important point being play is not a waste of time as James Hymes writes, “play for young children is not a recreation activity,…it is not a leisure-activity nor escape activity…play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time…”
Notes:
1. In the documentary In the Realms of the Unknown, many neighbors give testimony to his isolated existence. It seems the way we “know” Darger is through the volumes of pages, collages, and long scrolls (many about ten feet long) of his artwork.
2. Each of these phenomena surfaces in the poems of my manuscript. To read the poem on amputee wannabes: http://www.fascicle.com/issue02/main/issue02_frameset.htm
May 30, 2006 * 2:53 pm