Dangerous Journey: Memories of Containment in Cuba

Nearing the end of my ten-year, personal training analysis, I booked a two-week holiday to Cuba, to depart the day after my last session. My analyst and I had agreed a date to end over a year before, yet I booked my holiday on impulse. A Google Photos memory, from early on in my training, had popped up on my phone: a picture of a friend from my training cohort and I smoking imitation Cuban cigars on holiday. And, after Googling ‘Cuba’, I'd read an online instruction to ‘go before it changes’ — seemingly referring to a presumed, impending North Americanisation of Cuba in the current post-Castro era.

I think I told myself as I rushed to book my holiday flights that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ (att. Freud), i.e., that my holiday booking was just a much-needed holiday. (I discovered whilst writing this essay that nothing in Freud's significant writing oeuvre indicates he ever actually said this.) Although, really, behind my mimicry of Freud's penchant for cigar smoking, lay the inherent emotional struggles that I was experiencing on my training, with its significant upheavals. I imagine I sought some respite/flight from these things on that trip, at a point on my training journey where there was still a long way to go, much to learn.

Furthermore, and perhaps counter to the values of psychic development and improved psychic functioning associated with analysis but hidden within the ‘go before it changes’ instruction, lay, I think, the ‘no change’ situation of the repetition cycle (Birksted-Breen 2016: 235). With its eternal attempts to undo progress, to psychically freeze time, I view this as an, at times, inevitable retreat from the dangers of PS and D (Klein 1946) but one that, problematically, seeks to ‘instil interminability’ (Birksted-Breen 2016: 232).

Later, I recalled how I had taken flight to Colombia some twenty years earlier, at another painful juncture in my life; intermitting my undergraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music,