Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Teaching/Depression"
(page 3 of 6)

To the degree that our memoir writing aspires to be different from this, it might make sense to think of it in relation to the depressive position. Of course it's easy to fear that autobiography merely exposes a bumptious narcissism, reeking with its primordial first person singular. I'm much more struck by something else: the use of these pages, if anything, to aerate, expose, and ideally to disable or "burn out" the potency of certain violent defenses. At least, that ambition is central to the way A Dialogue on Love is constructed. For me, the interest of narrating this psychotherapy lies hardly at all in reconstructing childhood material, as it happens - or even adult motives. In fact, already, when I reread it, the accounts of myself seem dangerously skill-less and unliving. Instead, what I wanted to make palpable - and available - was the quality of a specific listening space, a space that is open to every anxiety but resists propelling onward its fatal itinerary. It fascinated me that my shrink, Shannon, was both a particular kind of a person, "mild and bristling with his soft gray nap,

big-faced, cherubic,
barrel chest, long arms, short legs,
Rumpelstiltskin-like"

- both that particular, grotesque and slightly fatuous middle-aged male figure in a North Carolina landscape; and at the same time, someone whose most economical means - a silence, an impassive face, a willing inclination of the head - evoke a voice that never otherwise comes into being, a voice that's somewhere between talking to oneself and another. "When I'm away from Shannon," I write, "I try to summon it up - the voice that speaks in a quiet double way, the being alone but not being alone.

It is my own soft
voice. But once I can hear it -
I'm back with Shannon."

I think it's clear that a pedagogical desire underlies this narrative - desire both to inhabit but equally to offer this radically, ever newly unpreempted space. I wanted it in the formal choices I made - the interpenetration of prose with chains of haiku, for instance, as in the 17th-century Japanese form called haibun. Also the interspersing of my accounts with passages in small capital type from Shannon's notes - which record sometimes his thoughts but mostly my thoughts and dreams, in a permeable first person that refers sometimes to him and at other times to me. There are times when even I can't tell whose first person it is.

In fact, as I find, it's my pedagogical impulse itself that draws me into this space: not the desire to teach my shrink, though that's one kind of (often intrusive) presence, but the fresh wellspring of my identification with - and my mimicry of - his mysterious skill in non-interference.

"Lying on the couch
it's the silences that are
supposed to spook you
into blurting your
own, feared Gothic projectiles
into the long void.
That never happens!
Instead it's as if I'm
inside Shannon's head

when he unspools the
breathless hypothesis that
each second is of
each silence in our
room - giddily welcoming
speculation of
what words may arise

and at what instant they may,
bubbling, between us."

The strangest thing about this therapy, about the book's ambition, is this: while it's directly about depression and depressiveness - and its narrative encompasses illness, as well, in the period when I discovered that my breast cancer had become metastatic and hence incurable - its tonality, at least in my head, is something much more like comic. I don't mean at all in the sense of gallows humor. It's more like the comedy of underdetermination, of sudden relaxation. May I bring in yet another linguistic framework, on top of Tomkins and Klein? It's about karma. Not karma as a system of reward and punishment, but karma as plain causality: the inexorable Rube Goldberg physics of those uncontrollable chains of projective identification. The ways in which what one is puts its fatal spin on what one says, does, and perceives - and vice versa. For ressentiment, then, read karma - the big messy psychic footprint, the things that make someone difficult to be with or difficult to be. I'm imagining something like this, that the paranoid/schizoid position involves bad karma, lots of it - it emerges from bad karma and, through projective identification, sends more bad karma careening out into the world. And the depressive position involves the endless, heroic but discouraging attempt to turn bad karma into good karma.