Chalk Talk

Here’s a paragraph in Bruce Fink’s book on psychoanalytic technique that I read on the plane yesterday. In his chapter on interpreting, Fink recounts an episode from his practice — an episode with which some of us in the blog world are familiar as recounted by the analysand.

One of my analysands told me that he had noticed he was no longer putting so much pressure on his chalk when writing on the blackboard that it would break, which he had been wont to do for some time when standing in front of his class (much to his embarrassment). This change apparently occurred after I had rearranged a few of his words, saying something like “pressure at the board” (referring to pressure he had felt as a child when called on by teachers to perform at the blackboard, and to pressure he was putting on himself to fail for a whole variety of reasons). He had not given my phrase any thought at the time but realized a couple of weeks later that he was no longer breaking chalk, even though he was not making any special effort to ease up and did not know why he had stopped. Although this is just a micro-symptom, it points to the fact that the analysand need not even become conscious of what had been unconscious for a symptom to disappear, as long as enough of it is verbalized by the analyst, the analysand, or the two together building on each other’s words. It also points to the fact that the analyst need not know that what she has said has had an effect — I would not have known if the analysand himself had not told me a few weeks later.

The analyst’s implicit interpretation — that the analysand was feeling too much pressure, putting too much pressure on himself — seems pretty straightforward. As I recall, though I’d have to check the original source to be sure, the analysand’s self-interpretation was much more convoluted than this. Presumably he arrived at his own understanding only after his behavior had already changed and he’d stopped breaking chalk.

Against Empathy

The psychoanalyst’s first task is to listen and to listen carefully. Although this has been emphasized by many authors, there are surprisingly few good listeners in the psychotherapeutic world. Why is that? …When someone tells us a story, we think of similar stories (or more extreme stories) we ourselves could tell in turn. We start thinking about things that have happened to us that allow us to “relate to” the other person’s experience, to “know” what it must have been like, or at least to imagine how we ourselves would have felt had we been in the other person’s shoes.

In other words, our usual way of listening is centered to a great degree on ourselves — our own similar life experiences, our own similar feelings, our own perspectives. When we can locate experiences, feelings, and perspectives of our own that resemble the other person’s, we believe that we “relate to” that person. We say things like “I know what you mean,” Yeah,” “I hear you,” “I feel for you,” or “I feel your pain” (perhaps less often “I feel your joy”). As such moments, we feel sympathy, empathy, or pity for this other who seems like us; “That must have been painful (or wonderful) for you,” we say, imagining the pain (or joy) we ourselves would have experienced in such a situation.

When we are unable to locate experiences, feelings, or perspectives that resemble the other person’s, we have the sense that we do not understand that person — indeed, we may find the person strange, if not obtuse or irrational. When someone does not operate in the same way that we do or does not react to situations as we do, we are often baffled, incredulous, or even dumbfounded. We are inclined, in the latter situation, to try to correct the other’s perspectives, to persuade him to see things the way we see them and to feel what we ourselves would feel were we in such a predicament. In more extreme cases, we simply become judgmental. How could anyone, we ask ourselves, believe such a thing or act or feel that way?

Most simply stated, our usual way of listening overlooks or rejects the otherness of the other. We rarely listen to what makes a story as told by another person unique, specific to that person alone; we quickly assimilate it to other stories that we have heard others tell about themselves, or that we could tell about ourselves, overlooking the differences between the story being told and the ones with which we are already familiar. We rush to gloss over the differences and make the stories similar if not identical. In our haste to identify with the other, to have something in common with him, we forcibly equate stories that are often incommensurate, reducing what we are hearing to what we already know. What we find most difficult to hear is what is utterly new and different: thoughts, experiences, and emotions that are quite foreign to our own and even to any we have thus far learned about.

It is often believed that we human beings share many of the same feelings and reactions to the world, which is what allows us to more or less understand each other and constitutes the foundation of our shared humanity… I would propose that the more closely we consider any two people’s thoughts and feelings in a particular situation, the more we are forced to realize that there are greater differences than similarities between them — we are far more different than we tend to think!…

In effect, we can understand precious little of someone’s experience by relating it or assimilating it to our own experience. We may be inclined to think that we can overcome this problem by acquiring much more extensive experience of life… We ourselves may fall into the trap of thinking that we simply need to broaden our horizons, travel far and wide, and learn about other peoples, languages, religions, classes, and cultures in order to better understand a wider variety of analysands. However, if acquiring a fuller knowledge of the world is in fact helpful, it is probably not so much because we have come to understand “how the other half lives” or how other people truly operate, but because we have stopped comparing everyone with ourselves to the same degree…

If our attempts to “understand” ineluctably lead us to reduce what another person is saying to what we think we already know (indeed, that could serve as a pretty fair definition of understanding in general), one of the first steps we must take is to stop trying to understand so quickly.

– Bruce Fink, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (2007), pages 1-4

Standard of the Breed by Steppling, 1988

JACK:  I haven’t been feeling well, I can’t sleep.

REESE stands, says nothing.

You want to see the dogs?

JACK stands…

They’re exceptional, a beautiful litter, just beautiful.

They stare at each other.

They’re very big, noble — these are the best pups I’ve produced, the best, these pups stand up against anyone, anywhere. I love this litter, I love them.

JACK stops, a little short of breath — not feeling well.

When I was in Long Beach I was living in this apartment and Margaret was supporting the both of us. Do you know what happened to Margaret? [pause] Margaret left one day for New Orleans, she went to her sister’s house in fucking New Orleans. She took the car, which was my car, and she drove. And I called her sister, I called every day — but she never talked to me, so I don’t know… [long pause] I don’t recall much of L.A., I don’t recall a whole lot about that period of my life, I don’t care about it — I’m not interested at all, I’m not concerned, it doesn’t matter to me, it’s part of the past, someone else, somewhere else. I never think about it, about the person I was — I never give it a moment’s thought.

JACK is wheezing a little and sits down.

REESE:  Who is this girl inside, Jack?

JACK stares at the ground. Silence.

Cassie? Who is this girl, this Cassie?

JACK:  She just left her husband, left him asleep at the Sands. I don’t know him, never met him. She left him though, asleep in bed — left him there — dreaming — Huh? Dreaming in room 418, the Sands, Las Vegas.

Lights fade out.

*  *  *

John Steppling has a blog here.

Partners My Ass

If we take on the idea of mimesis as world-creating alongside its meaning as world-reflecting, our idea of what we do as readers and audience members can change. In this case, we don’t just respond to fiction (as might be implied by the idea of reader response), or receive it (as might be implied by reception studies), or appreciate it (as in art appreciation), or seek its correct interpretation (as seems sometimes to be suggested by the New Critics). We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dreams, our own enactment. We run a simulation on our own minds. As partners with the writer, we create a version based on our own experience of how the world appears on the surface and of how we might understand its deeper properties.

– Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (2011), p. 18

See, this is what happens when you get too caught up in one particular psychological construct.

When I look around me, I’m looking at a 3-D simulation of the room generated by my brain. But it’s still a simulation of the room itself. That’s what the brain’s simulation-making perceptual apparatus is for: to generate a reliably accurate visual representation of what’s out there in the world.

When I try to understand someone else’s motivations in a particular circumstance, I might run a simulation of the other person so as to understand how I might respond if I were in his shoes, how I might feel, what I might think, what I might have in mind to do next, and so on. But my simulation of the other person is not the same as that person, nor do I become the other person by running a simulation of him. The simulation is a tool to help me understand the other person.

When I read a novel I run simulations. I can create a mental and emotional simulation of the fictional world in which the fictional characters are acting. But my simulation of that fictional world isn’t the same thing as the world as depicted in the novel; it’s a tool to help me understand that fictional world. In simulating the characters in the story, walking in their fictional shoes, I do it not in order to become the characters, but to understand them.

We create our own version of the piece of fiction… as partners with the writer

Don’t flatter yourself. If you read fiction, then be satisfied with understanding, responding, receiving, interpreting, and simulating it. If you want to create fiction, then write something.

Two Dreams

Last night I dreamed that I could read without seeing the words. I could just look at something and the words inherent in that thing would appear in my mind. I was concerned that I could never verify the words I read by referring to the corresponding words on a page or on a computer screen. I woke up in an agitated state, thinking that in order to read in this way I must be blind, or else dead. I had to get up and read for an hour and a half in order to reassure myself.

After I went back to bed I dreamed that Anne and I were in a train wreck somewhere in Germany. Neither of us was hurt, nor were the other passengers in our train car. When we got off the train we could see another string of railroad cars that had been in the same accident, positioned somehow on a higher track than the one our car was on. We were certain that the people in those cars were gravely injured, but we were wrong: they were fine too. I had to go somewhere to get help, so I began to walk. Through a series of Kafkaesque misadventures in a railway station I find myself riding on a different train with a group of Germans who have promised to help me. I have no access to a telephone; I wonder what Anne, back at the scene of the train wreck, thinks has become of me. We are riding too long on this train, I’m thinking; the Germans tell me that we are approaching Belgium. Belgium? I wake up, but in my waking state I continue this train ride. The train stops; we get off; I lose track of the Germans; I fall back asleep. Dreaming again, I’m riding a different train, without the Germans. The train is riding on tracks that span a vast expanse of water. Later, a fellow passenger tells me that we’re approaching Greenland. Looking out the window I see a massive gray mountain and I know that it is Greenland.

Another One Bites the Dust

Or maybe I’ve always been in the desert, waiting.

That didn’t take long. Twelve days ago I finished writing/editing a new novel. In my self-congratulatory post I said that I expected to move straight on to the next book, which meant revisiting a text that I’d written ten years ago. That earlier book had originally been written in five parts, alternating between present and past, between France and America. Two years ago I split this book up. I took the two American parts, shuffled them around, and added a lot of new material in order to come up with what I envisioned as the first book in a series. Now for the fifth installment in the series I’ve gone back to the three French parts of the old manuscript. In reading it through I was pleased to discover that the French story holds together nicely even after excising the American “back story.” I did some minor editing and cleaned up the sutures where I’d performed my radical removal surgeries on the old text. That left me with 72K words — a bit short, but 12K longer than the novel I just finished writing. Yesterday I added a very short final chapter linking this old/new book with the one to follow. This morning I had second thoughts about the new ending, so I wrote a second, even shorter one. Then I wrote a third, shorter still. The fourth and the fifth alternative endings are each only one sentence long. I’ve decided to leave all the endings in place for now, awaiting further developments in the as-yet unwritten book to follow. The quote at the top of this post is the fifth ending, which is also the last sentence in the book.

So that’s the fifth book down, and the seventh one is already written. The one in between, the sixth book, will require more thought and the cultivation of a higher level of intensity. I’m not quite sure what I need to do to get ready for it. To tell the truth, it scares me a little.

Temps Perdu

[Rereading what I wrote ten years ago in Nice, I remember.]

Bent permanently forward from the waist at impossible angles, their lank gray hair hanging across their faces, the two old women looked older than anyone could possibly be and still live. They held themselves up on three canes between the two of them, their contorted hands clasped together over the central cane. If one of the women fell – which seemed imminent – the other would topple over too. Together, the two functioned like a single extremely ancient and fragile creature, the last of a fabulous and archaic and maladept species that had somehow survived into another era.

“Shouldn’t we help them?” Mrs. Dervain asked; we were walking on the other side of the street.

“I’ve offered before. They always act like they don’t see me.”

“But it’s raining.”

I looked across at the Two Old Ones, who were struggling in slow motion to climb the curb onto the sidewalk. Their awkward mode of locomotion prevented them from carrying an umbrella, yet somehow they looked completely dry. I shrugged and walked on. Mrs. Dervain kept pace: I knew she thought a little less of me.

Salut à Moi!

Today I finished the second edit of my latest novel, working title “The Courier,” which means that it’s pretty much a completed project. Sometimes it seems like my writing just drags along forever, but looking back I see that I’ve written 3 novels in the past 2 years.

This latest wave of fiction-writing began as an experiment. I wanted to reorganize, expand, and supplement what I had already written into a loosely organized series. I’d say that the experiment has been successful. I now have finished 5 parts in this series, plus half of a sixth. There will be seven altogether, comprising maybe 500K words. If I maintain my recent pace I might be finished with all seven by the end of 2013.

Given that the experiment is working, maybe it’s time to see if I can get these things published. Truth be told though, I find looking for an agent or a publisher so distracting that I can’t write. Since momentum is with me and I pretty much know how to finish off the series, I’ll probably just keep writing.