The Hole of Ordinary Psychosis

Analysis Beyond Repair

repair: clinical conflict i

I lost my first language at the age of four. Before that age, I spoke and understood, and then, like so much else, the words fell away during my one-way trip over the Atlantic Ocean. Here is a black void that was never bridged. Even after my rapid inculcation into English, I never gained a comfortable relation to language. My parents left me on this side of the Atlantic and remained on the other, reaffirming an already felt distance. Prior to this abandonment and loss of my mother tongue, there was an older oceanic space: a distanced mother and absented father with whom I never established a foundational connection. I was not directly seen, consistently held, or meaningfully addressed, and so I did not come to exist to myself as a self, or in relation to others. This nonrelation was conditioned and shaped structurally by the colonial antiblackness of my upbringing, of my parents’ upbringing, of our positioning outside of care in the world. It takes some care to give a child a self. I experienced instead the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father, that fundamental signifier most often routed through the parental function that knots an individual to the social and symbolic world. Instead of a knot, there was a void, and I was that void—uncaught by the Other, not fixed in any eye or arms. 

I feel acutely my disconnection and distance from the Other when speaking, as language is perhaps its most resolute representation. My fragmented relation to language manifests variously through mispronunciations, aphasias, ellipses, blankness, encirclings, misnomers. I cannot recall language with any acuity or predictability and experience the difficulty of describing precisely from a position marked by imprecision and nonlocation. I have not been given the violent gift of a conflictual home in language, and so words have not found a home in me. Thus, I do not feel strong personal possession or affiliation with the words that I say or the concepts, people, places, or things they represent because I have not been positioned within or through them. I am always speaking at a remove because the “I” from which I am meant to speak is not, has not been, cannot be, securely positioned. Words float around me, conditioning and reflecting my floating. This experience is, unsurprisingly, difficult to describe: a suspended incoherence, a presence marked only by absence, a distanced but sensing nonbeing, an atmospheric hovering or sudden humidity. Not outside of language—lost in it—but not held.

More ideally, or neurotically, my parental severance would feel like a severance or a cut. A specific instance would have occurred that instantiated the loss, and I would make sense of that loss, creating stories or an imaginary relation and, in doing so, find a place in language. The backdrop of this would perhaps be an imagined or felt experience of rich prior connectedness. A plentitude that I tragically lost but feel through its ghosts and how it lives on through links that take me back there, to then. But my experience of self cannot be mapped temporally through interpretable loss in that way. Because of the originary foreclosure of connection, I could not experience my parental abandonment as a rupture, and it was not lodged in my memory as such. Memory cannot take hold without a coherent psyche or body established to register the wound. So mine is a constant presentness, seemingly unattached to a past but irrevocably marked by it. A past that cannot be actively experienced or used as your own is a bewildering and overwhelming one. As I grew older, I began to feel the absence of and desire for a past that could make meaning for me and ground my floating.

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Of course, this took me to analysis, to the talking cure. I went into treatment to figure out what was wrong with me: why I couldn’t connect, couldn’t feel deeply, couldn’t place myself in the world, why I only existed from moment to moment, why I was not fixed or constant. My first analyst gestured me toward her couch, and I lay on it for some years as she assembled some of my past for me meaningfully. I stuttered through attempts to describe my childhood: um, I don’t remember, oh right, I guess, yes, that makes sense. Through this process, I gained some sense of my being in the world as one forged by different modes of childhood emotional neglect and physical abandonment that came together in a fierce alchemy to create my psychic dis/organization. But while my white, German, Kleinian analyst provided some of this understanding, her disregard for the structural underpinnings of my suffering and insistent attempts to map a maternal relation onto the dyad, to interpret transference where there was none—where there couldn’t be—led to the end of that analysis.

I came to understand that the clinic of the neurotic would not hold for me or hold me. I felt edified and interested in my analyst’s attempts to unearth and give form to the machinations of my unconscious but I did not feel implicated in them. An understanding of childhood events was not self-generated in a prior state, by a small me (a me that was understood as a me) and instead floated above and around, as something experienced but never owned. As such, these events’ unearthing and deconstruction could not, in and of themselves, be a transformative experience because I was never cohesively formed by them. My analyst’s interpretations were helpful and interesting, and often emotionally impactful when they brought me face-to-face with myself as void, but they did not, could not, place me. I was still floating, with a better understanding of why but also with a newfound sense of the immensity of the gap between me and the world. I felt the depths of a wounding that I could not register as a wound in the normative sense. What is a wound without a body? What does it mean to be made of a wound?

I had not previously been a focused entity for myself. The closer I got, the more I receded and blurred around the edges. But through my analysis, I had become a problem for thought, and this was something where before there was close to nothing in terms of conscious self-consideration. So, I went into psychoanalytic training to think about myself more. I wanted to analyze, understand, and attempt connection through and with others in a studied and focused way if I could not “naturally” feel it. Of course, going into training was an attempt at a grounding, a semblant for the name-of-the-father, through understanding that which I don’t inhabit.

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The first patient that I saw during my ongoing training also came to me without language for their self. Talia was three years younger than me, white, and Jewish. They told me during our first session that they had a fuzzy sense of their self and body, no clear sense of where they began or ended. They were tearful for the majority of this session and for many afterward because the sphere of therapy itself implied intensive and overwhelming focus on themself. They experienced the treatment as what they later termed a “confrontation” with themself, with an idea of self and subjectivity they were not used to facing directly—a process for which my presence stood. And so, in the beginning of our time together, they were distant and evasive in response to questions regarding their own upbringing and familial history and curious about my person and life. Over time, I learned that their most marked feeling was one of disconnection from themself and others, a broader understanding of which emerged in treatment.

Talia grew up for most of their childhood with their mother and father but never felt close or emotionally connected to either of them. Their father was authoritative and aggressive, and their mother was distant and aloof. After their divorce in Talia’s teenage years, their mother moved across the Atlantic, further instantiating an already felt distance. The household was always tumultuous, loud, and defined most consistently by conflict. There was a lot of yelling between their parents and at Talia and their two younger brothers, and Talia yelled back. Outside of moments of conflict in adolescence, they recall staying in their room and not sharing anything about their personal life with their parents. No one in their family spoke openly about their emotions, they weren’t asked about theirs, they did not feel like their interests were engaged or cultivated, and physical and communicative affection stopped at an early age. It was through Talia that I was able to put a name to the structure of ordinary psychosis that marked us both: an experience of foreclosure of the symbolic and the name-of-the-father that is normatively instilled in the neurotic, conflictually, through foundational relations and attachments to primary caregivers. Formulated by Jacques-Alain Miller as more of an epistemic category than a diagnostic one in any traditional sense, ordinary psychosis is an organization marked by persistent disconnection and subjective externality because of this primary foreclosure.

Because Talia was my first patient, it took some time for me to realize the marked difference between my experience with them and my other neurotically organized patients. We established a quick and comfortable rapport with one another based on a shared, mostly placid, often playful sadness and reflective posture. Early in the treatment, I attempted the approaches I was being taught, the detailed inquiry, childhood probing, and interpretive gestures, which were often returned variously with elliptical silences, short responses, hazy memories, or clear annoyance or frustration. Though I was intimately familiar with their removed thoughtfulness peppered with states of tearful and panicked overwhelm or blankness when faced with acute consideration of themself, I was taught to interpret these as resistances to the treatment or as signs of an underlying repression that was being activated. When this did not seem to be the case early on, I experienced this as a failure on my part. This frustration was also because, in my training at that point, I did not feel (and still often do not feel) that I could draw from personal experience to understand patients’ modes of suffering.

But as the treatment unfolded, I came to understand this more accurately as the failure of language and its mimetic function within the process of psychoanalysis and its purported cure. This was a failure that my personal experience and relation to language illuminated. I approached my work with patients from a position of being outside of, but very interested in, the realm of emotional experience routed through the subjective and best represented and established through language. Over time, I understood that Talia approached their treatment and themself from a similar distance. Constantly aware of the risk of analyst over/identification with analysand, I incorporated into the treatment a sense of connection on the basis of disconnection. I learned to let Talia use me in various ways to find bits of language to help piece their experience together, allowing understanding and moments of stabilization.

Questions animated the treatment of the ordinarily psychotic patient by the ordinarily psychotic analyst: Where do two people come together who do not have a place in language and the world it orders? What is the shape of that space?

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For a long time, we just spoke about their art, the things they were reading, and their difficulty with the idea of having a job for the rest of their life. Talia showed interest in artistic production from a young age, and their art was a link with which they connected to the world. They made use of the ways they felt unhoused in their body, external to it, and translated this externality into a brilliant art practice representing the felt objecthood of their body. Their self-portraits offered a consistency to the body that they did not feel, and at the same time enacted a critique of the symbolic imposition of the signifiers of “man” and “woman” as necessary points of entry into subjectivity. It enabled them to explore the ways they did not feel allegiance to or self-definition through either of these gender categories. I responded inquisitively to their artwork, offered my understandings of it and the way they used it to approach their sense of self in a removed but connected way. Their artmaking was what Lacan termed a sinthome, an organized enjoyment of their creative identification with their symptom. Our discussion of their work spurred Talia’s desire to write an artist statement for the first time—a move toward making more conscious sense of their work and themself. We carefully connected their image making—the process they call selfimaging—to words to give them an (always partial) entry into the symbolic and the grounding that it offers.

This art making was also a potential step away from their nine-to-five work and the capitalist demand of consistency of self-experience that they felt stifled by. Thinking about themself in the future in a long-term sense, and through the consistency of an office job, was an overwhelming and off-putting proposition. Instead, they preferred to spend time in nature, at the beach, hiking, driving out of the city, which all enabled them to feel closer to themself. Through our discussions, it became clear that more expansive space, more atmosphere, and less confinement let them approach their own formlessness and expansiveness. Communing with the sensate but nonhuman Other enabled something akin to what Freud termed “oceanic feeling,” of being one with the external world as a whole. This is a particularly significant feeling for the ordinarily psychotic, and it gave Talia more room within which to try to position themself without a fixed positionality.

After months of speaking with them, often intellectually and with genuine curiosity, about their artwork and what they were reading, and being a flexible respondent to their complaints about work, they were able to carefully confront themself in the treatment and more easily speak about their childhood. We made the connection between their parents’ emotional neglect and what they understood as their parents’ inability to communicate, which then transferred to Talia’s subjective uncertainty. The realization of the immensity and etiology of the gap they felt from others and its explanatory force for them led to a period of marked depression. Their sustained tearfulness and outbursts in this period were often about actual events in their life but were prompted and intensified by their rumination on the void that each event exposed, their distance, their feeling of being disconnected and untethered.

This feeling was both exemplified and augmented in a significant way through the death of Talia’s father about a year into the treatment. They first experienced this loss as a simultaneously intense, distanced, and abstracted one: deep sadness about the pain that he underwent during his sickness, feeling unmoored and upset by the normative expectations of a type of grief they did not feel, and the amplification of the bewildering status of the abstract signifier “father.” In a session, Talia wondered if this loss could result in a new identity for them as someone who has experienced the death of a parent, a potentially stronger sense of self than “daughter,” a signifier they never felt held by. Together, we came to understand this experience as possibly resulting in a gain: an actual loss in the place of an absence, or a meaningful negation of a previously disorienting negation that results in a positive. I supported them through this necessary sadness and confusion, palpating its contours, and assisting in the partial transformation of absence into loss and meaning.

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I still sit with Talia, next to them, in the clinic of the sinthome, aiming perhaps to find the singular place through which they can knot their psychic structure and find their tenuous, ever-flickering social bond with the Other. But I sit with them with the knowledge that they—we—will likely never consistently experience strong attachment to the world and with ourselves. This treatment is not a form of repair or cure in any normative sense. I do not have in my analytic repertoire a strong fiction of a consistent self and instead have many loose, unfixed, and ever-changing fictions that I rely on to survive in the world. This is a useful and important quality to utilize with my neurotic patients as I unloosen and analyze the symbolic and subjective fictions/fixions they have created that cause them suffering. I “have” this fragmented self and a substantial gap. Talia and I inhabit this gap together, though with marked difference between us. My blackness links my felt and experiential disconnection to a larger structural and ontological foreclosure of blackness from the social and symbolic arrangements of our modern world. This foreclosure, instantiated in the modern context with enslavement and colonialism, provides the shape of the symbolic and the name-of-the-father—its laws, its family, its modes of subjectivity—and functions as its constitutive outside, the void providing shape and coherence. As void or black hole, blackness most foundationally evidences the necessary violence that holds up this order, on an experiential and structural level felt differentially by all.

With Talia, this hole stimulates our engagement. Our often scattered and searching sessions come up against coherence or eventual attunement to the ordering of things, an impossibility we feel more acutely than most. The work is not held together by the fictive and cruel optimism of repair to a world shaped by the necessary violence that subjectivity requires but instead lingers imminently and interminably in the void and the flickering connection that shared lack makes possible. The language of repair does not fit the treatment when understood as the re/production of a solidified and well-adjusted subject who takes up a coherent and stabilized space in the world as it is. My experience outside of this possibility—and Talia’s differentially organized experience outside of this possibility—illuminates the cure of psychoanalysis and the cure for psychoanalysis as a problem of/for subjectivity and the current structuring of the world. This moves us away from the language of the self, the body, the wound, and repair. How do you share a hole? Can a hole become an opening or undoing?