(Source: the little bird and curiosity)
?The Little Bird Literature?
From an excerpt of a newly published book’s trial reading chapter, selected by the Little Bird Literature editorial team from recent publications. Enjoy your reading.
(Loving toil) It’s easy to read; even if you’ve never heard of psychoanalysis, you’ll still be drawn in by the stories: a woman who can’t bring herself to send a wedding invitation, yet insists that her husband—who claims she’s cheating—has taken her by the hand; a young female clerk who steals cash from the company without having to give a penny… The author, Stephen Gross, has been likened to a fusion of “Sachs and Chekhov”—and it really is fitting. His storytelling is full of scenes, expressions, and actions, vivid as any novel; and then, he leads you into the realm of psychoanalysis, showing his working methods and thought process beyond mere explanation. You often come across a case that took place 10 years—or even more—earlier. Gross’s narration is calm, patient, and meticulous. He doesn’t deliberately turn people’s experiences into drama; instead, he does his best to let the mystery inside gradually dissipate.
Glasser says that psychoanalysis is “a particular form of ignorance. Both parties are together in ignorance—thinking together, searching together for meaning… My work is to find a way down from the patient’s words, memories and dreams: only by going down into darkness can one see the light.”
Most psychoanalytic publications have quite a high professional threshold, yet nonetheless they are becoming known in China to more and more people. Discussing one’s inner life and the bodily effects—making it a public topic—seems increasingly common on social media. On the other hand, psychological terms have almost reached the point of inflation; people like to turn them into identity cards, even social currency, to form some kind of self-definition.
In Dr. Glasser’s book, there aren’t many such terms. He seems to prefer presenting a way of thinking about everyday life, just as he says in his preface:
At that time, there was so much I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that everyone has to take responsibility for their own happiness. I didn’t understand that if I didn’t treat myself gently, it was less likely that others would do so. Back then, I didn’t understand pain. I thought that all the pains you have to bear when you love someone—longing, anxiety, grief—were feelings that needed to be avoided, symptoms to be eliminated. I didn’t understand that pain is the most sensitive instrument we have for detecting our own desire. As for love—love who, love what, and why you love—we often fool ourselves. But we also have the capacity to break through our self-deception. The work of love is what we have to do in order to see clearly what work we and the person we love must put in—and our efforts to bring ourselves into the real world. As Iris Murdoch wrote: “Love is a perception of the individual. Love is very hard work in the awareness that one has to make: that ‘the other’—who is outside the self—is real.” She continues: “Love is the discovery of reality.”
With permission from the publisher, The Idealist (Ideal-Establishment), we’ve selected an excerpt from one of the stories to share with readers.
Chapter Three
Hopeless desire
1
Two years after gaining my qualification as a psychoanalyst, I joined the Portman Clinic, a forensic psychotherapy institution in Hampstead. Occasionally I saw the wives, husbands, or children of offenders, but most patients were the offenders themselves. Some patients had a history of violence. One of them had even attacked the therapist who had worked with him previously—another story altogether.
The director of the Portman Clinic was Dr. Mervin Glasser, and he was also my supervisor. Dr. Glasser had written numerous papers on inappropriate behaviour—specifically about sexual offences, incest, and paedophilia—and he was internationally well known. His most famous view was that everyone has what he calls a “core complex.” This complex consists of two opposing anxieties: anxiety about being swallowed up and anxiety about being abandoned. According to his view, from the moment we are born we deeply long to form intense intimate relationships with others—and it is this longing that may make us fear losing ourselves permanently. Conversely, our longing for independence and self-sufficiency also makes us fear being forgotten. These two anxieties affect how we love other people at the same time. Our loved ones are inevitably unable to fulfil our changing expectations of distance—either they call too often, or they don’t pick up fast enough.
When I first started working at the clinic, Dr. Glasser had already been the director of the Portman Clinic for nearly 20 years and was about to retire. He was 62 then, and I was 37. He was reserved, giving off a sense of distance, and he approached my career development with a formal, almost solemn concern. My first batch of cases included: the wife of a High Court judge, who stole loaves of bread from Harrods; a 16-year-old boy from Hackney, who set fire to a school; a convicted exhibitionist; a male nurse who committed terrifying acts of violence out of the blue; and a 29-year-old barrister who referred herself to the clinic—she took the Underground in high heels and, deliberately, stepped harder on a man’s foot so it hurt him more.
One day, after the staff meeting, Dr. Glasser pulled me aside and asked me to do a favour. He wanted me to take over a case: a 21-year-old woman who’d just been released from prison. She had been sentenced to 15 months for stealing nearly £30,000 from her place of work. “I don’t have time—if I did, I’d take it myself,” he said. “She’s been through the darkest hour.” There was urgency in his voice. “She needs help. Shall I put her file in your document basket?”
Kate F’s file was unusually thick: it contained police and medical reports going back to when she was 15, a social worker’s statement, statements from various witnesses, a psychological assessment for court, and all kinds of legal folders mixed with letters from her solicitor to the clinic, some correspondence between the clinic coordinator and her probation supervisor, and a set of cuttings. Pages in the file were sometimes stuck with yellow sticky notes, several of which had “URGENT” written on them.
The newest document in the file—at the very top of this pile of papers—was a copy of a recent letter from a solicitor handling Kate’s affairs in Scotland. The letter warned Kate not to contact someone called Alasdair F:
Given your past with Mr. F, your letters and phone calls have upset and pained him; he does not welcome them.
He doesn’t want you to write to him or call him. He doesn’t want to see you or talk with you. In short, he doesn’t want any contact with you in any form.
As his legal representative, we request that you no longer contact him.
Who wrote this letter? What happened?
If you go further down the file, I found Dr. Glasser’s court report. When Kate was 17, she got a job as an assistant bookkeeper. After a year, she began taking about £100 every day. She didn’t spend the money; she hid it in her bedroom. After she was arrested, she returned the stolen £30,000 to her employer. In the report, Dr. Glasser asks why Kate stole money but didn’t spend it.
In his conclusion, Dr. Glasser wrote that we should understand Kate’s stealing as her response to emotional deprivation; she was trying to soothe her psychological loss. She was steeped in pain. She committed the offence not to obtain external material realities, but to satisfy the needs of her inner psychological reality. In the unconscious, she was seeking justice. Imprisonment was not only useless; it would actually harm her as a victim. Dr. Glasser’s conclusion was that a prison sentence was entirely inappropriate.
He usually wrote a paragraph like this after presenting his argument against the case for imprisonment, and this time was no exception:
Please allow me to point out that if the court accepts our recommendation—that is, not to imprison Mrs. F—we request that psychotherapy not be made a condition of sparing Mrs. F from imprisonment. For psychotherapy to be effective, it must be entered into voluntarily. We believe Mrs. F needs psychotherapy and can benefit from it. Whenever she asks for our help, we will do everything in our power to provide her with treatment.
In the empty staff room, I poured myself a cup of coffee, found a comfortable chair by the window, and began reading her file.
In the earlier documents, there was a letter written by Kate’s GP, introducing Kate’s family history. When Kate was eight months old, a exhausted Mr. F brought her and his wife to that GP for help: “This child’s easy to look after; it’s my wife who cries at the drop of a hat.”
The GP thought Mrs. F was suffering from post-natal depression, and referred her to a psychiatrist; Mrs. F refused the referral and the antidepressant medication prescribed by the GP. Years later, Mr. F came to discuss the deterioration in their relationship with the GP, and the GP then recommended that they attend couples counselling. Mrs. F refused that referral as well. Otherwise, Kate’s life before she was 13—so far as this GP knew—had been “normal”.
Based on interviews with Kate and her mother, a social worker described things in her report as follows: Kate’s mother worked in a beauty salon, and Saturdays were her busiest day, so Kate would spend the day with her father. Usually, Kate and her father would go to a restaurant at lunchtime—both eating fish and chips—then walk along the Thames to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea play football.
One Saturday, a few months before Kate turned 14, her mother began arguing with her father as she was about to leave for work. Kate could hear her mother crying and shouting at her father from her bedroom (“You think you’re so clever,” “You’re always so full of yourself,” “I wish you’d go”). Then she heard the front door slam. After a while, Kate went downstairs and found her father curled on the floor—having a heart attack. She called an ambulance emergency number, 999. While waiting for the ambulance, the call handler guided her over the phone in how to do CPR. But by the time the emergency personnel arrived, Kate’s father was already dead.
In the following September, Kate’s uncle—her father’s youngest brother—came to London to go to university, studying computer science. It was the first time he’d left home. He moved in with Kate and her mother as a paying lodger, thinking that this would help them financially and also enable him to tutor Kate’s studies. Over the next year, the three of them got on well. According to Kate’s headteacher, Kate’s grades improved, especially in maths.
As she spoke, Kate’s uncle, Alasdair—her father’s youngest brother—had just about been living with Kate’s family for a year. On a day in June, Kate’s mother went home early from work because her stomach was upset. When she saw Kate’s school bag in the hall, she went upstairs without taking off her coat. Halfway up on the landing, she saw Alasdair coming out of Kate’s room. She later told the social worker that she didn’t understand why he was barefoot. Alasdair began talking nonsense to her; she pushed him away, opened Kate’s bedroom door, and leaned in to look. The room was dim; the air was thick with the sticky-sweet smell of apple-scented candles. Kate’s mother stood still, letting her eyes adjust. Kate was standing beside the bed, which hadn’t been made; she was fastening the buttons of her school shirt. Among the mess of things at her feet, her mother finally saw Alasdair’s socks.
“We didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Kate said.
Kate’s mother went downstairs and called the police.
Kate told the police that after Alasdair moved in for a month or two, whenever she was frightened late at night and couldn’t sleep, she would slip quietly into his room. “When I was little, whenever I wanted to get into my parents’ bed, my mum would get angry—she said I would toss and turn and keep her awake. Dad would take me back to my room, help tuck me in, then sit on the floor beside the bed until I fell asleep. She didn’t like me going into her bedroom. But I could get into Alasdair’s bed without waking him.”
Her testimony—recorded by the female detective constable who questioned her—continued:
Q: Where did he touch you?
A: For a long time, we did nothing. We just held each other.
Q: Then did he touch you?
A: Yes.
Q: Where did he touch you?
A: All over her body.
Q: Specifically where?
A: Here (pointing to her own breasts and vagina).
Q: Do you remember the date when he started touching your vagina?
A: I can’t remember. Not at the beginning like that. For a long time
where we hold each other.
Q: For a long time?
A: Six months. No, longer. More than six months.
Q: Did he insert his penis into your body?
A: There has been.
Q: When did it happen?
A: After my birthday. I remember it was like that.
Q: After your 15th birthday?
A: Yes.
Q: At that time, was your uncle already over 19?
A: I don’t know—yes, that’s it.
Q: Did your uncle ever threaten you?
A: No, never.
Q: When he inserted his penis into your body, were you afraid?
A: Not afraid. I’m not afraid of him. I’m afraid of him? (No.)
Q: And what was it?
A: I’m afraid we’ll get caught.
The next document in the file is a witness statement provided by Alasdair to the same female police officer. He talked about his own feelings of injury and betrayal—“How could they treat me like that?” At the same time, he also blamed Kate (“She often climbs into my bed”), and rationalised their relationship (“She’s older than the Juliet in (Romeo and Juliet)”). His statement in the police officer’s record continues:
Q: Can you tell me about your previous sexual relationship with him?
A: We were both doing it for the first time.
Q: Has Kate ever objected to you inserting your penis into her vagina?
A: Most of the time, we just held each other.
Q: Has Kate ever objected to you inserting your penis into her vagina?
A: We didn’t do it like that until much later—most of the time, we just held each other.
Q: I’ll ask you again—has Kate ever objected to you inserting your penis into her vagina?
A: No. We both wanted to—if she hadn’t wanted to, I wouldn’t have. I would never hurt her. I love her.
Months later, Alasdair was sent to prison and listed as a sex offender. He wanted to keep in touch with Kate, but the court forbade it.
When Kate was 17, she left school. A colleague of her mother heard that she was very good at maths and helped her get a job as an assistant bookkeeper at a fashion company in the Soho area. Not long after she started, Kate began a sexual relationship with her boss, who was in his early forties and married. Their affair was discovered by the boss’s wife, and the boss left the company. Soon after that, Kate began stealing the company’s money. Apart from her accidentally leaving a handbag on a public bus, containing £100, all the £30,000 she stole was found inside a box hidden deep in her wardrobe and returned to the employer.
I don’t know what happened when Kate was put on trial. From the records in her file, I suspect she may have left the judge with an impression of defiance, even contempt. Whatever the reason, the court ignored Dr. Glasser’s recommendation. Kate was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, at Holloway Prison—the largest women’s prison in Europe.
At that moment, the kettle behind me started to whistle, and the night receptionist came in. I realised I’d been reading her file for two hours already. I wrote Kate a letter, inviting her to an interview.
2
At the very start of our first interview, I told Kate that I knew a great deal about her from all the various reports I’d read, but it would still really help me if she could tell me about her situation in her own words.
She said she’d been having a very bad time and couldn’t find work. Last Saturday night, she went out drinking with a neighbour—a friend of hers— and, as she put it, “I like old men.” That led to an argument with her mother. She wanted to move out and live on her own. She lived with her mother, but she hated it—she didn’t get on with her mother and she didn’t think her mother was like her. And she hated her mother’s boyfriend too. He was always hanging around the kitchen or living room; he drank beer and smoked. Kate hated the smell of smoke. “I can’t stand my mum,” she said.
“She’s strong,” Kate said. “That’s how the whole family is—cold.” During the 15 months Kate was in prison, her mother visited her only four times. “What kind of mother does that?”
“Did you get close to him?” I said.
“She isn’t easy to get close to,” Kate said. “If I spill something by accident, or if I trip or fall, she’ll shout at me. Dad used to say she can’t control herself.”
“You feel closer to your dad,” I said.
She went silent for a long time—leaning back in her chair, looking down at the floor—so long that I thought she might not answer at all.
When she lifted her head again, I saw tears in her eyes. After a while, I asked her, “Can you tell me why you’re crying?”
Kate shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about my dad.”
“Not for anyone?” I asked.
Kate shook her head again to confirm it.
“What about your mum?”
“No, especially not. She’s always snapping at him. We hadn’t even had the funeral, and she’d already sent all his clothes away to a charity shop—every last thing. She didn’t tell me; I was left with nothing.”
“Then you must be really upset,” I said.
Kate didn’t answer. We sat quietly. In the meantime, I heard the door across the corridor open, followed by my colleague’s footsteps in the corridor. After a minute or so, I heard her return to her office, and then the sound of her consulting room door clicking shut.
“Do you have a radio?” Kate said.
“A radio?”
“It’s too quiet in here,” she said.
I was surprised, but not that surprised. Among the patients I’d seen at the Portman Clinic, several had little or almost no experience of being in a consulting room with the lights off and the phone cut off—people waiting only to listen to themselves speak. Kate’s problem made me think that maybe some aspect of the interview process or the environment—my comments, my listening, the quiet and focused atmosphere of the clinic—was simply too heavy for her. If we could listen to something else, she might feel lighter.
I told her my thoughts.
She laughed and said she wasn’t used to talking about her dad. And she didn’t see how it could possibly help. How could just talking help?
I said we would talk and think together—try to understand certain experiences of hers.
“Like why I stole the money?”
“What do you think about that?” I said.
“You know, I didn’t spend a penny.”
“How do you understand it yourself?” I asked.
She said she didn’t know what she was going to do with the money, so she put it in an old box in the wardrobe—the one she used to dress up with when she was little.
“You might not believe me, but after I put the money in the box, I never thought about it again.”
She didn’t know how it started, or why she was doing it—she wasn’t lying. Every day, lots of cash came in, and she thought other people wouldn’t really care. That’s true. Basically every day she would take about £100. Her boss went out twice a day—morning and afternoon—to buy coffee. She would wait until he was out, then “accidentally” knock a stack of bills to the floor. She’d bend down, with her office desk positioned just so between her and the office door, so that if her boss suddenly came back he wouldn’t see her. While picking up the money, she would count out five £20 notes and shove them deep into the top of her boot, or slip them from the waistband of her jeans into her underwear. “I was terrified of getting caught; my heart was pounding.”
The secrecy and physicality of Kate’s stealing made me think of how she moved, silently, toward Alasdair’s room. Kate still hadn’t mentioned Alasdair to me; I’d only read about him in her file. I’d been planning to wait until she brought him up herself. I only told her that I thought the feeling she had when she stole—secret, exciting—might be one way she managed not to feel depressed.
Kate nodded in a hurry. I imagine her agreement, given without thought, was to avoid thinking together with me about this idea. I tried again.
“Having that money wasn’t important to you. Excitement and a sense of being on edge seemed to be the point—the purpose itself, not a means to reach some other end. I’ve been thinking: stealing itself is a kind of antidepressant.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can understand.”
I glanced at my watch. The interview time was almost up. I felt we were finally making some progress. I asked her whether she’d be free next week at the same time. She said she would be. I told her that if she was willing, that would be our fixed weekly session, and we’d meet for fifty minutes each week. She agreed. Then I asked her whether she had any questions. She said she couldn’t think of any. We stood up, said goodbye, and she left.
In the second week, I brought Kate from the waiting room into the consulting room. After a few minutes of silence, I asked her, “Can you tell me what you’re thinking about?”
She didn’t answer for a long time. I began to think that either she hadn’t heard my question, or she had decided not to answer.
“I was thinking, it’s nice here,” she said.
I asked her whether anything from our interview last week had stayed with her, had made an impression.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she answered. Kate shifted in the chair opposite me. She drew her legs up beneath her, tilted her head to one side and let her hair fall forward, covering most of her face.
After we’d sat in silence for a while, I told her that, based on my experience, the best way to get to know her would be for her to say everything that came into her mind, no matter how painful, absurd, or embarrassing it might feel. “Dreams, daydreams, feelings you don’t understand, ideas that make you uncomfortable—I know it’s hard, but if you can do it, it will help me and it will also help you to understand yourself.”
Kate looked up at me. “I don’t dream.” After saying that, she fell silent.
Even though it was midday, the sky was overcast. The consulting room was lit by two floor lamps and an old black anglepoise lamp placed on the grey desk behind my chair. The bottom of each pull-up window was open by a few inches, and outside I could hear the noise of children from a nearby school pouring into the playground, calling out—lunchtime. Realising I’d drifted off, I brought my attention back to the consulting room. I really wanted to ask Kate questions. I had so many things I wanted to know—about her relationships with her parents, and her friends, and about her day-to-day life now—but I held back. I didn’t want to interrogate too closely or disturb her way of thinking.
This interview was different from the last one. Although I didn’t think Kate was deliberately concealing things, I felt she was weighed down with worries. I consoled myself by reminding myself that we were only just starting; given time, she would gradually trust me more and talk more openly about her life.
With about five minutes left in the interview, I asked Kate if she could tell me what she was thinking. For a while she didn’t answer at all. Instead, she used her fingertips to smooth the fringe on her scarf. Finally, she looked at me, shook her head.
In a psychoanalytic interview, silence isn’t unusual. However, as time went on, my sense of helplessness kept growing. I thought Kate was making me experience her feelings—so I said, “I’m thinking that today you’re communicating certain feelings of yours to me by staying silent. You feel like you live in a silent world where you can’t rely on anything.”
She smiled, staring at me without blinking, but she didn’t answer. After about a minute—just before the interview time ended—Kate said, “Do you know what happened between me and Alasdair?”
“I know a bit—about the things in your file,” I said.
“I’m going to write to him. His lawyer doesn’t let me, but I really want to. I’m sure he still loves me.”
“This is important, but we’ve only got one minute left,” I said.
“Do you think I can write to him?”
“This is urgent for you, but we don’t have time to discuss it properly today,”
“So you’re asking me not to write to him?” she asked.
“I just want to understand why you left this until the end of the interview. Maybe you want to talk to me a bit about Alasdair, or write to him—and maybe you also don’t want to.”
“I didn’t mean to leave it to the last minute. I just happened to remember.”
“I agree. I think you’re doing this unconsciously, not on purpose,” I said. “Maybe you brought it up only at the very end of the interview because you wanted to write to him—and you were afraid I’d stop you.”
“You can’t, can you?” she asked.
“I’m not here to stop you from doing anything. I’m here to think with you about the problem.”
I looked at my watch. “I know you’re going to feel like you’ll be waiting a long time—but if you can wait, we can talk again about all of this next week: about Alasdair and about writing to him.”
“We have to stop?” she said.
“Yes, time’s up.”
“Now?” she asked.
I nodded and stood up.
“Just like that?”
I nodded again. “Yes. We’ll carry on next week.”
Kate was still curled up in her chair, apparently absorbed in her thoughts. I guessed she was thinking about the letter—possibly working through the idea of posting it next week.
All of a sudden, she stood up and strode forward two steps—too close to me. She reached out and brushed the fluff off my coat.
“Is it your lunchtime now?” she asked.
I took a step back.
“That’s what I mean,” she said, turning her head to one side as she spoke. “If there’s a restaurant around here, we could have lunch together.”
I said, “You want to keep talking, but not now. We’ll have to wait until next week.”
“I know,” she said. “But you’ve always been good to me. I just wanted to be good to you too.”
I began to get ideas: the tense relationship between her and her mother, her father’s death, her improper involvement with her uncle, her boss’s affair, the stealing—and this sudden temptation. I could see these things were connected. I still didn’t know how to explain to her what I had understood, but I knew I had to say something. “Time’s up,” I said. “We have to stop.”
Kate swayed her body from side to side. “I think…” She trailed off. Still swaying, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. I could feel her gathering herself, ready to cross a boundary. “Can I give you a hug?” she said.
I raised my right hand to indicate she should stop.
“Time’s up,” I said.
Her lips drooped like a child’s, and her eyes locked on mine.
I said gently, “We’ll see each other next Tuesday. Then we can continue our conversation.”
She walked straight towards me, until she was right under my chin.
“No need for that,” she shouted. I could feel her breathing. “No, for fuck’s sake, no need for—”
While she grabbed her things and headed for the door, she kept shouting at me: “You’re so stupid, so stupid. You’re fucking stupid.” Then she slammed the door behind her.
I just stood there, thinking about what had happened, completely losing track of time.
Afterwards, I went to the staff room to make myself a cup of tea, and then returned to my office to write up the interview notes.
After that, I wrote a note to Dr. Glasser describing what had just happened and put it in his document basket. He replied immediately, recommending that we discuss the matter in our next regular supervision session—he said that, too, and he hoped that Kate would come to the next interview.
She didn’t come, and she didn’t phone the clinic to cancel the interview. Following my usual practice, I wrote her a letter:
I’m sorry I couldn’t see you today. I think I understand some of the reasons you didn’t come, but I want to know more. Please come for an interview next Tuesday at the same time.
…
The picture for the title page is from the film (Wendy and Lucy).
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