Treasures of the Well

Marilyn CHARLES

Memory is a funny thing. It flows in waves that reverberate in their own small universes of echo. And echo is the stuff of which mind and meaning, Lacan’s Imaginary, are built. Along with the hall of mirrors, we have the realm of echo, the aesthetic residue of embodied, sensory, affective prosodies through which unconscious threads travel and link, forming patterns that call us forward to uncover their mysteries.

My earliest memory is of sitting outside my attic bedroom – which my grandmother had co-opted – anxiously waiting for her to be released from behind the door she could not open. At around the same age, 5, I remember being shamed by my mother for having picked the neighbor’s flowers to present to her when she arrived home after the birth of my younger sister. I remember thinking that this sister was extraneous and expendable but then bonding with her, adopting her in a way that sustained us both for many decades.

I had recurrent dreams as a child, dreams of labyrinths and spaces narrowing and becoming impassable even as I tried to traverse them. In retrospect, I see how they marked aspects of my life story I had no way of consciously knowing at the time. Some dreams mark my mother and older sister as points of danger, opposing my family role of intruder breaking into the symbiotic entanglement of parents with their first child.

In one dream, I was being chased by the big bad wolf. I ran into our shared bedroom, hiding under the vanity table at my older sister’s urging. When the wolf came to the door, my sister opened it and silently pointed to my hiding place. My unconscious mind recognized a treachery that lurked within the sister I so longed to be close to but who seemed repelled by me, whose own childhood dreams were of killing me and of watching my mother disappear.

Looking back at the ways my unconscious mind was always working at the enigmas life had left me, it is hardly surprising that psychoanalysis called to me. Where else can we find such a receptive recognition of truths that otherwise emerge only as symptoms to be managed or eradicated?

I also had recurrent stomach aches as a child, symptoms that seemed quite real at the time and often kept me home from school, a relieving respite from the demands of daily living. When I went to summer camp, my sense of time faltered. No longer marked by the daily routine of the school day, I was faced with the enormity of time stretching out before me with its unfamiliar demands, and presented myself at the nurse’s station several times a day. It was only later that I could see myself through the nurse’s eyes, this pattern repeating itself when I was sent away to boarding school at age 13 and desperately needed to return home. The symptoms were never sufficient to invite the type of attention I yearned for. Instead, I incurred my parents’ frustration and rage, attenuated only by the earnest, loving voice of my younger sister.

Psychoanalytic folklore suggests we marry our parents but, however lost I was in my conscious mind, I had the intuitive sense to marry someone like my sister; the only person in my family whose love shot true and unwaveringly loyal, who loved me for all the right reasons. My relationship with my older sister was much more entangled. It was years before we could navigate past the impasse structured by the conditions of our births. In adulthood, it was my older sister I emulated as I found my way into the realm of scholarship through which I learned to translate the aesthetics of experience into forms that could be communicated to others and played with. I felt, bizarrely, as though I were channeling my sister in order to meet these challenges, much as her creative efforts were inhibited by the sense that she was trespassing into territory that had been vouchsafed as mine.

When I left home for college, I sought assistance for the somatic maladies that plagued me. Being sent repeatedly to psychologists for somatic complaints was disturbing. Looking backward, I see how these individuals align with the nurse from summer camp but, at the time, all I could register was the refrain from childhood, saying accusingly: ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Everyone seemed to already have answers that were not mine and, afraid of disappearing even further under the weight of others’ indictments, I steered clear until the psychologist my mother was seeing—in her attempt to emotionally distance from her very trying daughter—asked to meet me. This man (who I later discovered was blind) seemed to really see me, saying only: ‘You seem to be here and trying to get there.’ Finding someone seemingly interested in tracking me in relation to my own desires, without the accusing glare that too often accompanied such interactions, was both refreshing and relieving. I still find it traumatic when I encounter that look from frustrated parents towards my patients. I try to help the accused recognize that it is suffering that drives the assault, not the denigrating hatred that seems to obscure the love underneath. Recognizing the hatred, of course, carries its own truth. Psychic reality has to be contended with.

Lacan talks about the move from the symptom to the sinthome, that creative—I would say reparative—shift from being subjugated by the experiences borne by our historical self to being able to liberate ourselves from the oppression and more freely be. For me, that position is the stuff of Kundera’s incredible lightness of being—when we snatch our soul back from the dark dungeons of despair towards the possibility of being. In this shift, it matters who is reading the signs. Those who read my symptoms as signs of a deeper disturbance in me seemed dangerous and, I think, they were. I needed space to figure out who I was, in my own terms, a project that, paradoxically, was fed when my own analysis blew apart. My analyst seemed unable to contain my distress, leaving me feeling alone and in pieces. Left to pick up the shards and fragments, I learned to put them together in my own way and, in the process, learned to trust myself rather than deferring to some external authority who must know better. A really good analyst might have helped me with that project, but no one presented themselves at the time, which likely saved me the work of disentangling my own sensibilities from theirs. We are all too ready to take on the mantle ordained by external authority rather than discovering our own.

I have a patient who lives in that dark well I know so intimately, the view Murakami describes in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The view from the well erases the moments of respite, when we are above ground and our eyes meet and there is light and life. These are the moments I am then obliged to track alone, to be cast back into the well and yet have in mind memories of the brilliance of her face when infused with the inner light that finds its reciprocal in mine. One day, though, she brings in the light. She had been happy for a moment and, in this moment, can be reminded to remind herself that there is also light despite the eternal darkness of the well. Perhaps, then, she might more fully mine those moments spent inside the well and discover their treasures.

The next day, however, the light is gone and there is only the relentlessness of destructive despair, a destruction, I discover, that is fed by the dashing of hope by her mother. I have seen, in family meetings, the adamant insistence on love through a visage of relentless hate. The first time I saw it, I was traumatized. The assault reverberated terribly for me, but my patient was impassive. It was all too familiar to her. How to build a life dependent on parents who espouse their support while undermining her at every turn? Learn what you did not learn in childhood, I tell her. Mourn your failure to fly past whatever stood in your way and respect the failure that is grounded in your need for real support in relation to your own projects. Where is there truth that can be counted on in this universe? Where is there care that is not devouring and soul-crushing?

Sitting with my patient, I am reminded of how it feels to be adrift in a universe in which you cannot register in any way that has both value and substance, where anything good you might find stands as though it must be illusory and there is no ground that does not shift and quake.

Her parents are able to appear empathic by lamenting what they term her psychosis.

Their position brings to mind Lacan’s (2016) admonition to beware of words that lie, highlighting how we can invite misrecognition with great earnestness. There is a terrible lie at the core of the parents’ story that marks the daughter as crazy, with no story, in this way denying the story that tells of her being driven crazy, pushed into the terrible moment where all that was left was a scream marked as delusion. But that latter narrative becomes my story, one that threatens to drive an impossible wedge between her and her parents if she cannot also find their love. ‘My mother hates you,’ she tells me. Better me than her, I recognize, but standing apart from her story leaves her in the abyss of darkness at the bottom of the well and, torn between her mother and me, there is no ground to stand on. ‘You say that the moment of seeing your mother’s raw emotion did not affect you,’ I say, ‘that you already knew it. But I think you knew it with your head but not your heart. In that moment of recognition,’ I said, ‘I think something in you died.’

Now, in our work, it remains to us to repair the damage, so that she can see her mother’s pain that drives the messages so visible in her face, so that we can recognize the anguish and find the truth in mother and daughter’s pain—and the love that feeds the anguish—without turning away or going back down the well.

I spent a good deal of my life at the bottom of that well, reading my way through a labyrinth of living I could not comprehend, that both eluded and leered at me. The working—through of this dilemma leaves me appreciative of—and grateful for—Lacan’s (2016) move from symptom to sinthome, from the oppressive subjugation invoked by imposed understandings/ readings of one’s being, towards a self-recognition that can embrace all of one’s particularities and create a life from them.

We learn to be ashamed of whatever seems unwanted, devalued or different in the context of a family that provides those messages. Designated the unwelcome intruder, I lived out that destiny until I was finally able—far into adulthood—to be interested in the persons and contexts that deemed me unwelcome. Shame turns our eyes downwards and we can’t look back at our accuser. In such moments, we are defeated again. Lifting up our eyes and looking back turns the tables. Standing strong within our being as it is, and looking back to see who is accusing us, and of what, is profoundly, intrinsically liberating, if we can muster the courage to finally see through our own eyes, recognizing the veils imposed by time and history.

Look back, I tell my patients. Be interested in the characters of those oppressing you.

But, as Lacan (1977) reminds us, we each need to find our own way. There is no truth, no magical cure anyone can offer us. There is only the space within which to dream and dare and discover our own. Psychoanalysis helps create a space within which to imagine, to touch the depths and the heights, to inhabit this well not entirely alone and, as Bion (1990) puts it, to deepen the darkness sufficiently that we can begin to discriminate the illuminations present within it.

I began writing very early, as a way of registering my thoughts and feelings in the absence of any apparent interest from those around me. When I was in analytic training, I began writing from a similar place. No one seemed interested in discussing the questions that were driving me. My first published paper was a way of trying to fathom the breaking apart of my analysis. I tried to puzzle through, from the inside, how such an event might occur. Apparently, this topic was timely enough that it was published without my even being asked for edits. That ease left me ill-prepared for the obstacles encountered in most publishing attempts. I recall sitting across from Jim Grotstein and showing him a rejection letter. ‘They don’t understand what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘But I’m just a candidate,’ I replied. ‘There’s so much I don’t know.’ ‘That’s your inferiority complex talking,’ he said. I channel that moment in my encounters with young people who need to believe in themselves sufficiently to travel their own paths, so I might support them in making the contributions that are uniquely theirs, that no one else could possibly make in quite the same way.

A similar moment happened in graduate school when I was taking a TAT class with Bert Karon, who introduced me to his colleagues at a local psychoanalytic meeting as the student who offered ‘such extraordinary readings of TAT stories.’ Such are the moments that fuel us through the lonely moments of despair and uncertainty that are constant companions in this work.

Knowing we are not alone in it and that others see value in us makes all the difference. Even now, finding a reciprocal light in someone’s eyes when I present a paper or an offthe-cuff remark feeds my soul, in much the same way my patients and students look for that light of recognition in my eyes.

The underbelly of experience is often where the truth lies. Funny phrase, isn’t it. I will let it stand, for now. As I was becoming myself within the frame of psychoanalytic thought and practice, there were enigmatic meanings that called to me, as I began to integrate left-brained theory with rightbrained, embodied truths.

Born into a family with greater respect for facts than feelings, I yearned for external validation for the facts I discovered through my feelings. On that journey, I found in Bion a father who, like my own, came from that far remote other side of the brain in which categories and ‘reason’ prevail. Bion (1977), however, helped combat my father’s indictment of me, as a ‘messy kid whose intelligence was wasted’ on her, by desperately trying to get to the place where I live, that land of primary, embodied experience that I now think of as the aesthetic realm.

I found in Bion the father I yearned for, someone similarly other-brained like my own father, but one who seemed to be able to orient towards and value my truths. This father did not ordain his own truth but rather warned against accepting the received knowledge that can obstruct our ability to learn from our own experience. Bion’s wisdom helped me continue to learn in the only way I know how, and to value it, leaning on his authority for the endorsement I could not provide myself.

Years later, I see Lacan standing in a similar position in his advocacy for self- endorsement as a psychoanalyst. Although we can, of course, fool ourselves, we can also find truth within ourselves, Bion’s truth instinct, the light I try to steer by. Psychoanalysis helps us find the internal signposts along the pathways between truth and lies. At that level, it seems to have a great deal in common with Zen, as a practice moving towards insight and the absorption that is at the heart of any creative engagement.

Freer now than ever before, there is more pleasure in absorbing myself in all the activities that call to me: art, gardening, music, literature; friends, family, patients; writing, teaching, and theory. There is an aesthetic pleasure to finely-tuned theory, to those extraordinary metaphors that cut to the heart of human be-ing and mark the places that need our attention. And there is an enigma to the human experience that calls us ever deeper, into the well, to locate ourselves beyond the rush of daily life or the noise of well-intentioned encouragements, ‘knowledge’, and other offerings. At best, as psychoanalysts, we invite our patients and students into that project, encouraging the excitement that is the other side of terror, as we enter into the aesthetic realm of the sublime.

Increasingly, I am caught by the universality of rhythm, of primary rhythms that begin to catalyze in the third trimester before birth, synching us to our mothers—and fathers—through the rhythms of their voices and presence. And then, in the caesura of birth, as Aulagnier (2001) highlights, there is another imprinting as we find a new womb-in-the-world through which is imprinted, not only warmth and safety but also the infusion of affective loadings addressed to us by the parent. This welcome—or unwelcome —becomes the template on which all later relationships are patterned, the underbelly of experiences that become enigmatic to the extent that we cannot find the thread.

For me, psychoanalysis, at its best, takes a stand for the legitimacy of the human being, rather than becoming lost in ideas of normalcy or ‘health.’ This stance is inherent in Lacan’s (2016) move from the symptom that marks a pathologized subjugation, towards the synthetic coming together afforded by the sinthome, marking how the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic are uniquely configured for the individual.

Recognition of the preciousness and complexity of this uniqueness is, I think, lodged in the aesthetic dimension, from which place we can appreciate the person at their most essential: the rhythms, histories, affinities, and organizational structures a person embodies. In the story more fully told from this perspective, I think, we find the soul.

For someone so absorbed in playing with language, Lacan (1977) also marked these rhythms in the clinical work, using scansion, a mode of punctuation through rhythm. For Lacan, we come seeking misrecognition rather than to discover some greater truth. Psychoanalysis, then, pushes back against this desire by recognizing the falsity as it emerges. Scansion marks the gaps or empty speech needing further inquiry. In this way, it accentuates by means of a cut that refuses the partial truth being pasted over the possibilities, revealing our false or empty speech so we might discover what lies behind or underneath it.

People come to us having been invited into a world in which they are not wanted. To further a developmental process that has been foreclosed, we must be a willing reciprocator in a journey that invites the unknown, the unsaid, and the unsayable, requiring a confrontation with our own subjugation to a projected all-powerful Other who can never be addressed directly. In this way, we push towards the deidealization and reckoning with our own truth versus that of others that should have taken place in childhood and young adulthood, Winnicott’s (1971) recognition that in order to become a subject in our own right, the beast must be slain and still left standing, an eternal truth held by myths and fairy tales.

When I was 30, my mother told me that she had not wanted me, that I had disrupted the family she and my father had been making with my older sister. My older sister was horrified at this recounting, but I was grateful. It was the thread I needed to piece together the story of this shining, eager baby face that turned inward and darkened as time went by. I hadn’t, as the story had been told, merely been congenitally unhappy. There were reasons for my distress. The greatest gift a mother can give, I learned, is truth, where it is needed. I try to be up to that challenge in my dealings with those I care about. Having been invited to share some reminiscences by my dear friend, Bill Fried, I offer you these truths as best I can get to them, and hope they invite you to further discover your own.

I see that what is missing from these pages is my current family, the people in whose arms I rest and who have taught me to be a better person, more fully myself. There are my friends, and I treasure those who love me, as I often say, for the right reasons. But then there are those particular people: Bruce, whose love gave me a life worth living, and then my daughter Devon, who brought me into the realm of persons—her bright, beaming smile and shining eyes insisting I engage in real relationships rather than remain buried in books, becoming the extraordinary young woman who thought I was a mother worth emulating in spite of all my own exclusion criteria. My son Justin, in his brief time here, taught me to treasure the moments and not let them lie squandered and spent without living them. Justin invited me back into the well in ways that rediscovered the artist in me. My youngest son, Jonathan, whose deep sense of truth invites its own reckoning, reminds me that life can be very hard for us sensitive souls, and that the victory comes in the living of it. He has also taught me about the importance of courage, to stand up for what I believe in and not leave others to carry their struggles alone.

Finally, my grandchildren, Grant and Carson, have taught me that the joys of grandparenthood come, not from the fact that we are not responsible for them, but from the fact that we are doubly blessed in loving them for themselves and for the love invested in them by their parents, as we watch them all struggle and grow and thrive. We come to know them in their separate beings but also see how we are implicated in their becomings by what we have managed to offer from our own beings and histories. From this perspective, whether in relation to our families, our friends, our patients, our students, we are all implicated in the circle of life that replenishes itself and does so, at its best, when we allow the light of truth, as clearly as we can discern it, illuminated by our heart and our soul, to be our shining star.

References

Aulagnier, P. (2001). The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement. East Sussex, UK: Brunner-Routledge Bion, W. R. (1990). Brazilian Lectures. London & New York: Karnac. Bion, W. R. (1977). Seven Servants. London: Heinemann.

Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2016). The Sinthome. Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Basic Books.

Contributor

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, is a staff psychologist, team leader, supervisor, and member of the therapy staff at the Austen Riggs Center. During her predoctoral internship, she was part of the Multi-Ethnic Counseling Center Alliance (MECCA) and has continued to promote dialogues across difference in her roles as (former) president of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, (current) co-chair of APCS and international coordinator of the Psychoanalytic Track at UDEM. Her writing, teaching, supervision, and consultations have focused on encouraging the development of future generations of clinicians and on promoting higher standards of practice in the field. A poet and artist herself, Dr. Charles has worked extensively with artists, writers, and musicians. She has a special interest in the creative process and is continues to investigate factors that facilitate and inhibit creativity. She also has a particular interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and its relationship to psychosis. She is actively engaged in mentoring, creating professional opportunities, creating opportunities for dialogue, and promoting community involvement for those in the helping professions, including her consultation work with Gunawirra in Sydney, Australia, and with counseling centers and residential treatment centers in this country.