After Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis, they say, is the language of the unconscious. I read this wonderful, wonderful TYR essay on the insomniac artist, Joan Mitchell, who led a tumultuous life and was also repeatedly in psychoanalysis. She would paint all night and send out early missives on her night’s accomplishments. She had a complex and passionate relationship with colour. Perhaps, colour was the language of her unconscious?
In August this year, I left psychoanalysis, after a period of five years. I said, angrily to myself at the time, that I need concrete stuff, not this routine violent shoving of a spade into the inner chambers of my darkness. But concrete solutions are not something I am lacking in. I have perfect, functional rhythms in time and space. On the face of it, yes, I am ‘normal’ and ‘doing fine’. Going about my business feverishly. Yet, an inner attachment to that darkness persists and gnaws away. It refuses ‘aboutness’. It is not about anything. It reigns and thrives in its domain, I ignore its wild dance in my jurisdiction.
I am very grateful to my former psychoanalyst for getting me to take that spade in my hands and move violently between restlessness and stillness. Time oscillates between these two polar sensations - motion and stillness. Motion is, simply put, quick change in environment and orientation. Stillness is, by that logic, constancy in environment and orientation. Stillness frightens us. Restlessness gives us pleasure, nervous excitement, and anticipation. Stillness, if we toil through it, may give some version of peace. It makes some gestures vaguely, but no promises. Psychoanalysis gave me an awareness of both these qualities or textures in my inner chambers. I carry through, after psychoanalysis, in the presence of its absence. Perhaps, some of this dialectic is reflected in this rather abstruse (and I hope, fun) essay I wrote on T(t)ime.
