‘Our Boys Go In’–The Sun carried a headline as the war in the Falklands finally began. I was a teenage boy at the time living in former Yugoslavia and of so many things that I remember about that time one stands out–I was a real Anglophile within a regime that despised the old empires. So, in the conversations about world events I was on the side of Britain–Thatcher's Britain that is. An uncle of mine found this a challenge and we argued for a bit–he put forward all the familiar arguments that you have heard against that old British war and I argued in favour of it. Then again, I was only a kid.
Well, the reason I told you all of this even though my task is to review Kirsty's new book is just good old free association. The first time I read the book I felt like shouting, ‘Yes, yes. Our Boys Go In.‘, meaning that after a ghastly proliferation of countertransference-driven drivel that is being published in the fields of counselling / psychotherapy / psychoanalysis it is refreshing to read something that does not shy away from thought. Something educated. Something not so Lacanian that you cannot follow the argument unless you really enjoy it. A good introduction to the debates between the different schools.
Then I took a closer look at The Stuff of Dreams: Fantasy, Anxiety and Psychoanalysis and started having problems with it. There are many and I have to limit myself to one or two and hope that the metonymic slippage works for the reader too in engaging with this. So let's see: the word “hall” which Kirsty herself uses to clarify how distinctions in meaning come to constitute a language. It also happens to be Kirsty's surname and distinguishes her from other people. (p.41-42) My link is All, Hall, Whole, Hole. To some of us our specificity matters and it is naïve to claim, as Hall does, that when a structure has been put in place you can supplement words without affecting the meaning. The imaginary scenarios in italics at the beginning of each chapter are another case in point. The singularity of each person is constitutive unless you really believe that they are all the same when you turn off the lights, that is once they have been diagnosed or ‘recognised’ as hysterics, obsessionals, perverts and psychotics. Few people are that promiscuous. It is even more naïve to assume that the presence of ‘meaning’ is of prime importance to the enterprise of psychotherapy. I dare say it is even dangerous as Baudillard might put it.
Now: Let's look at the old fashioned argument on the same page. Kirsty is trying to argue here that differentiation starts in the womb. How does she support her argument? She cites a parent (a father!) who simply says that he is convinced but cannot prove his belief that the twins ‘know’ (my emphasis) they are separate. On closing the quote Kirsty pipes up with a ‘Thus’ to try and support her view. Is this meant to be Logic à la Lacan? It does not follow, you see. Is it Rhetoric? OK, but then how can you claim that this anecdote presents an evidence. Yes the word ‘evidence’ is used by Kirsty as if she were an NHS bureaucrat. Disappointing.
In general, the book appears to value clarity (the absence of footnotes comes with a high price) but delivers chaos. As Derrida once noted about deconstruction, ‘Chaos is at once a risk and a chance’; so there could be potential in this approach. But the risk outweighs the potential in my view. On the same page (p.41) Kirsty cites no less than six sources to support her view about the aforementioned differentiation in the womb. You may think that I have a thing about this but similar fallacious reasoning applies to the book's arguments about other hobbyhorses of contemporary psychoanalysis such as whether psychosis
is a fixed structure or a point on a continuum, the definition of hysteria, the deliverance of perversion into the analytic chair, Melanie Klein's binarism and Lacan's triumph over her and so on. There is everybody in this motley stew: Lacan, Winnicott, Freud and the less famous commentators such as Benton and Craib. And then there is Piontelli's research on pre-natal twin behaviour in 1992. The state of the art view of child development on this topic is inconclusive (it took me a year of doing a psychology degree long after 1992 to get this and present it in my essays well enough to get a high mark for my scientifically-minded tutors). In other words, the book's flirtation with science or scientificity, to be precise, is both incorrect and unseductive. Its use of diverse psychoanalytic sources is undisciplined.
Having said all of this, I think we should engage with this work and read the book. For one, I have added it to my reading list for a course I am teaching for the third time at WPF on ‘Schools of Thought in Psychoanalysis’. And I look forward to some informed debate with my students about its content, its style and its many failings that like good interpretations are quite provocative; their value may lie in that alone.