A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  Once, I received an email from a fellow writer whose book I had read. She seemed dissatisfied with me, distressed by my response. I recalled sending her a long enthusiastic note about her novel, which I had loved. And I remembered explicating at some length why I had admired it. She seemed not to have received it. I checked my messages and found the email I had sent to her. I had written: It is a beautiful book. The seamless motion from inside to outside, psyche to place to other. And the exacting prose . . . Bravo. I imagined I had written two full paragraphs. In fact, I had only thought them and felt them. What I had wished had come true, but only in my mind, not on the page.

  In one of my novels, The Summer Without Men, my character Mia says, I will write myself elsewhere. This is the motion of the imagination. I won’t stay here. I’ll move away in my mind, become someone else, enter another story. This is the work of conscious memory, too. I recollect my old self in the past and shape a story for her. I imagine myself in the future and have a story for that projected self, too.

  When I write a novel, I always feel as if I am dredging up old memories, trying to get the story right. But how do I know what story is right? Why one story and not another?

  Sometimes with my analyst I try to remember. I look back at my childhood. I search my mind for a memory, a clue, a something to help, to clarify, to illustrate, to demonstrate, something warm or cold—and there is nothing. Blankness. White, not black. Maybe it’s the white of a page, but there is nothing on it.

  When I am stuck in a book, the feeling is similar. I ask myself what is supposed to happen now. Why is this wrong? Why is what I am writing about this character a lie? How is it possible to lie in fiction? Believe me, it is. When I find the truth I know it. What is that knowing? It is not theoretical. It is emotional.

  The sentence on the page feels right because it answers a feeling in me, and that feeling is a form of remembering.

  Art is always made for someone else. That someone is not a known person. She or he has no face, but art is never made in isolation. When I write, I am always speaking to someone, and the book is made between me and that imaginary other.

  Who is the imaginary other in art?

  I don’t know. Another self?

  Is the analyst an imaginary other in therapy?

  The analyst is partly imagined and partly real, but then, probably every other person is also both real and imagined. The difference is that the imaginary other for whom I am writing my novel cannot talk back.

  Transference takes place in the zone between patient and analyst. Freud’s ideas about transference evolved bit by bit. In Studies on Hysteria, he attributes his patient’s desire to kiss him to “a false connection,” a case of mistaken identity. The patient doesn’t really want to kiss the doctor but an old love object. In Freud’s postscript to the famous Dora case, transference evolves into something more complicated. Transference may involve a “sublimated version” of the old love object, the father or the mother, for example, but it may also borrow some “real” quality from the analyst. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” the reader is told that transference “represents an artificial illness.” The phrase “artificial illness” is lifted from Jean-Martin Charcot, who described his hypnotized hysterical patients in the Salpêtrière as being in an “artificial” state of their illness. Suggestion haunts the word “artificial.” Transference begins to look like an uninduced form of hypnotism. And yet, Freud stresses that the strong feelings that move between patient and analyst are “a piece of real experience.”

  Transference partakes of the fictional and the real. When we fall in love with our analysts, we may be in the throes of an old love affair with a parent, but the high emotion we feel is not false. I think the best understanding of transference love is through emotional reality. We can have real feelings while participating in the events of fictional worlds.

  In “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud links playing, phantasy, and making fiction: “The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.”

  And yet, scientists play and daydream too, and they invest their work with large amounts of emotion.

  In the essay “Aesthetic Ambiguity” he wrote in collaboration with Abraham Kaplan, Ernst Kris writes, “The contrast between scientist and artist as ‘man of thought’ and ‘man of feeling’ has no more merit than the parent dualism between ‘reason’ and ‘emotion.’ Ratiocinative processes are embedded in a manifold of feeling of various degrees of intensity. Emotions, as they are embodied in esthetic activity, are not blind, but incorporated in structures of a complex patterning which result only from taking thought.”

  Emotions cannot be fictive. If I am afraid or joyous when I dream or when I read a book or when I am inventing people and their stories in my novels, the love and fear I feel is real even though the characters are not. This is the truth of fiction.

  Sometimes my analyst talks back to me, and I cannot hear her. And then one day, she tells me what she has told me before, and I am able to hear her. No, this is not quite right. I have heard the words before, but they did not mean then what they mean now. Now they resonate inside me like a tuning fork. I feel them. They hum. They are alive, and something is different. It is as if the words have attached themselves to my nerves and skin and muscles, even to my bones. It is as if they are now anchored, not floating away into the air of the room.

  Martin Buber believed that the foundation for human existence is relational. People can create between-zones of resonant meaning. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, he wrote, “Dialog in my sense implies the necessity of the unforeseen, and its basic element is surprise, the surprising mutuality.” Isn’t this what happens when I hear the words spoken to me in the room as alive, not dead. Isn’t it always a surprise?

  This is the zone of transference and countertransference. The between must be felt. The words arrive as an embodied surprise.

  In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud famously wrote, “The ego is first and foremost a body ego.” And the ego, he argued, has conscious and unconscious parts. It is through this body ego that we distinguish between ourselves and others. The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty also believed in a body ego. For him the “I” was always embodied. We are body subjects in a relation to other body subjects. Merleau-Ponty understood that the mystery of the other is echoed by the mystery of the self. These two are not identical; I feel myself in ways that I cannot feel you, but neither one of us is transparent. Strangeness exists in you and in me.

  The world of me and you, the between, begins before conscious memory. An infant engages in a musical, gestural, tactile back-and-forth with her mother. The baby has proto-conversations, a prereflective, preconceptual, embodied relationship to another person that is not yet reflectively self-conscious. These early interactions are crucial to brain development, to the neocortex, which changes after birth, but also to the emotional systems that are primed by these interactions. As infants, we begin to link feelings to experience, to what Freud called the pain-pleasure series. And through repetition those links between feelings and experiences create our understandings of the world. A melody is created between parent and child, and after that, each one learns to recognize the beat and the tune. Before we speak, we are creatures of relational music.

  I am not aware of how it shaped me, and I will never be able to articulate how that story unfolded, but I can begin to see the patterns of repetition in my own life every day and in the here and now of analytic time and space, sealed off from ordinary temporality and the ordinary rooms in which I live.

  Lewis Aron explains that the analyst’s response to an analysand “must reflect the analyst’s accommodation to the needs and perspective of the patient as well as to the various accommodations, rhythms, previously established between them.”

  Buber’s surpri
se of mutuality is welcome in analysis. It arrives as a musical variation. It is not the shock of a siren or a scream in the middle of the night.

  When I write, I am always feeling the rhythm of the sentences in my body—a relation between my fingers on the keys and the words on the page. I know when a rhythm is right and when it is wrong. Where does that come from? It is a form of bodily memory, of kinetic music that has emotional resonance.

  Most of writing is unconscious. I do not know where the sentences come from. When it is going well, I know less than when it is going badly. A world grows and a solution presents itself.

  The end is different in mathematics, but not the means. Creativity is the same. The great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré wrote about a discovery, “One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come out from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.”

  What are those crowds and collisions? Ideas and solutions rise from interactions and dialogues. The outside moves inside, so the inside can move outside.

  D. W. Winnicott explored the back-and-forth relation between infant and mother. He writes, “When I look, I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see.”

  When I look at you, I see something like myself. Your face supplants mine while we are talking. I cannot see my own face.

  The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas points out that our faces are naked. He calls it “a decent nudity.” He is right that we do not clothe our faces the way we cover other parts of our bodies. Face-to-face, we are exposed to each other.

  When I am in an analytic session, I find myself in and through the analyst. By working through endless neurotic repetitions, the unnoticed patterns of experience and feeling that have been in me seemingly forever, I have slowly revised my view of me. How has it happened? And what does it have to do with making art?

  Are characters in novels “sublimated versions” of old love objects? Is making fiction another form of transference?

  Surely Freud is right that transference cannot be confined to analysis. We are continually in the grip of various kinds of transferences and countertransferences out in the world. I may experience a person as intimidating or repugnant or attractive because there is some quality in me, derived from my memories, which has become part of how I personally interpret the world.

  Sublimation is a murky concept. It always involves psychic mobility, desire, and its objects. In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud writes that the relation of an instinct or drive to its object is open to alteration. “A certain kind of modification of the aim and change of the object, in which our social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation.’ ” Human beings sublimate. Rats and bats don’t. The idea is one of transformation. Primal drives are redirected into creative work of all kinds, intellectual and artistic. But is making art a defense? Is it pathological? Freud wobbled on this. Hans Loewald turned sublimation in another direction—toward symbolic formations. Sublimation or internalization “leads to higher organization and an enriched psychic life.” This seems more accurate to me. Writing fiction is something like dreaming while awake, but what is missing is that the internalization is also externalization. The work of art is made to travel into the world.

  Why do some people live in worlds of their own making? Why are some people driven to populate the pages of books with imaginary beings?

  Those for whom the world is not enough, wrote Joseph Joubert, philosophers, poets, and all readers of books.

  Creativity is never simply a matter of cognitive manipulations or mental exercises. It comes from deep within the self/psyche/body. It is directed by memory, by subliminal knowledge and emotional realities. Writing is hard, but I want to do it. Sometimes it is harder to do than at other times. I have never been entirely blocked for very long, but I have been slow, very slow. Slowness, in my case, is always about fear. It is always about an inability to face the material that must be written.

  Hilda Doolittle was an American Imagist poet who came to be known by the name H.D. In 1933, when she first began her analysis with Freud, she was forty-six years old and had suffered many losses. Two infant sisters, her mother, her brother, and her father had died, and she had miscarried a daughter. The horrors of the First World War had traumatized her. And she couldn’t write. H.D. was completely blocked.

  Their first meeting interests me.

  Freud’s chow, Yofi, is in the room with the two of them. When H.D. moves toward the dog, Freud says, “Do not touch her—she snaps—she is very difficult with strangers.” But H.D. does not back away, and the dog snuggles her nose in the poet’s hand. “My intuition,” she writes, “challenges the professor, though not in words . . . she snaps, does she? You call me a stranger, do you?”

  H.D. did not want to be a stranger, not even at the beginning of her analysis. She wanted to be known and recognized. She wanted to see herself in the professor. This is what I imagine she thought: I may not be able to articulate this challenge to you, but I am someone with special gifts. The dog and I have an underground ability to communicate that you, the great professor, were unable to sense, and so I am correcting you.

  H.D. loved the professor. Together they created a change inside her, which she took away from the analysis, and that is why she wrote her Tribute to Freud and why she was able to write much more after her time with Freud than before. Still, her text is oblique, and the twists and turns of the analytic work are not obvious. There is no way to reduce it to a coherent narrative, to a technique or theory. There is a refrain that runs through her text. It makes me smile: “The professor was not always right.”

  Resistance? Yes, of course.

  Resistance is something I recognize. I resist when I am afraid. I am deaf, blind, and dumb, and I cannot remember anything except a blank white page.

  All the words that emerge from my mouth are dry—dry letters. Intellectualizations—my defense.

  When something is wrong with a book, it is similar. What is supposed to happen now? Who is this person? My mind is empty. I am trying to remember what really happened, but I can’t. I try to remember. There are no inscriptions. The sentence that arrives is bad. I strike it out and begin again.

  No one is always right. The analyst is not a god, except when the patient makes him or her into one, and this is usually temporary. The analyst is never an objective third person who looks down on the proceedings from the heavens. What came to be called “neutrality” in psychoanalysis is a direct importation from the natural sciences, born of a fear that subjectivity and suggestion might muddy the transactions between the two people in the room, but that is exactly where the magic lies.

  H.D. arrived in Vienna grieving, but she also came with a stubborn self-assurance. H.D. was a mystic. In Corfu, she had had a hallucinatory experience. She saw writing on a wall—enchanted hieroglyphs of deep meaning. In Tribute, she makes it clear that what Freud regarded as a “symptom,” she regards as “inspiration.”

  Agreement on Weltanschauung—a shared worldview—is not a condition for analysis.

  H.D. remained a mystic throughout her analysis, and she was one long after it had ended. But are symptom and inspiration at odds? Over and over again, my “symptoms” of one kind or another have become inspirations. Migraine auras, auditory hallucinations, seizures, and far more obscure pains and symptoms are written into books, reinvented in stories, embodied in my characters in one way or another. The symptom and the inspiration are one and the same.

  But some symptoms block creativity.

  Some symptoms are strangling. They terrify. They impede a person’s life and work.

  Writing blocks are symptoms. Why have I shut out the truth?

  H.D. hated writer’s block, b
ut she loved her vision. She clung to it as I have clung to some of my symptoms—my hallucinations and auras and tingles and lifting feelings. These are finally benign symptoms because they become integrated into a creative narrative of the self.

  Peter Wolson wrote a paper called “The Vital Role of Adaptive Grandiosity in Artistic Creativity.” With the exceptions of Otto Rank and Heinz Kohut, Wolson writes, most psychoanalysts have argued that grandiosity is infantile and interferes with creativity, but he disputes this truism. Adaptive grandiosity is “the artist’s exhilarating conviction of his potential for greatness, the extremely high value he places on the uniqueness of his own feelings, perceptions, sensations, memories, thoughts and experiences.” It is there in H.D. from the very beginning. She never let go of her “grandiose” conviction.

  My daughter is a singer, musician, and composer. Not long ago, she said to me on the phone, “Of course, Mom, I couldn’t do this if I didn’t believe in myself, didn’t believe that the work was good and that I can contribute something to music.” I said, “No artist can live without that belief.”

  Every artist needs adaptive grandiosity to face rejection, criticism, misunderstanding, and the many forms of unhappiness a life of making art brings. And for girls and women, a strong dose of grandiosity is needed to face the endless sexism—which arrives as patronage, condescension, fear, and prejudice. But most important, this inflated sense of self creates urgency, a need to work hard—to do what has to be done—and the perverse belief that it will be worth it.

  Emily Dickinson wrote poems alone, radical, brilliant verses that burn my consciousness every time I read them. She sent some of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an important literary critic of the day. He was not unsympathetic to her work, but he did not understand he was reading the work of someone who had reinvented the English language. He could not recognize her new music. His impulse was to correct her, smooth out the wrinkles. He told her she was not ready to publish.