A Cat's-Eye View of Dire Mastery

NOTE: Although quotations and details are given from individual patients, I have avoided going into more detail about anyone patient to avoid difficulties around consent and confidentiality.

In Dire Mastery, Roustang exposes what he regards as an inherent contradiction in the discipline of psychoanalysis and its institutions. While the analytic space uniquely works to disturb, disrupt and dissolve the patient's transferences, psychoanalysis organises itself into bodies of theories and societies towards which the analyst's transference is often unquestioned, and indeed instituted in their very training to become an analyst. Uncritical transference of analysts towards a named leader or body of theory such as Lacan or Kleinian can bring psychoanalytic discourse dangerously close to religious discourse, as Roustang draws attention to in his sub-title ‘Discipleship from Freud to Lacan’. One theory is held to provide all the answers and the named theorist is held up as truly the one who knows. Roustang argues that to avoid this contradiction between clinic and theorising, the task of the analyst lies in dissolving his or her transference to these theorists, and resisting the temptation of religious-style discipleship. This involves the analyst working towards what Roustang calls ‘a theory of the one’, ‘to speak in his own name’. The risk, however, is that this is delirium, the position of the madman. Foucault cites the derivation of the word delirium from lira, a furrow, so that delirium means to move out of the furrow, away from the proper path— a very solitary position (Foucault 2001: 94). Roustang ends the book with a chapter on psychosis to demonstrate how the psychotic, on the other hand, may be able to use psychoanalysis to move in the opposite direction, from the isolation of her delirium of the one, to a shared theorising of him or herself to another—the analyst.

In this paper I shall be relating Roustang's ideas to some of my work with patients who struggle to speak of and theorise themselves, and showing the importance of attending to the language that they do find. This involves resisting the imposition of a psychoanalytic narrative onto their words, involving as that would imply, a retranslation of their precarious language structure into something more certain and more fixed. Such a translation risks being both alienating and demanding of a leap of faith of a kind that religion demands of its disciples. The shared theorising that Roustang suggests as desirable for the work with a psychotic patient is not a replica quasi-religious structure, but an idiosyncratic theory, yet one which can be shared with at least one other: in other words, one that can be put in other words. Thus the work takes place at the intersection between my work as an analyst breaking down the citadels of dogmatic psychoanalytic theorising and moving towards speaking in my own name, and the patient finding a way through the work to construct a theory for her singular world.

However, the act of speaking to a therapist at all requires a leap of faith, a belief in language and the use of language with another person as a means of bringing about change, and reducing suffering. This act of faith is required both by the patient and the analyst, but the patient, particularly one who has barely any sense of herself as a speaking being, is taking the bigger risk. This is perhaps a danger that prevents the shared theorising that Roustang wants to encourage—daring to use language for oneself, in a world where one is persecuted and used by others' language.

For one patient with whom I work, her persecutory language is that of religion. It can seem to provide some sense of structure in her terrifying world, whilst also reflecting the terror of that world with its emphasis on the devil and ever-lasting punishment. A belief in an omniscient and omnipresent Being is one way of making sense of experiences such as pop music lyrics speaking directly to her, the television transmitting messages to her and every room that she enters being bugged, every conversation overheard. The universal theory of religion is here appropriated to provide a language pertinent to a world where the patient feels both utterly powerless and yet hugely significant—there is little space available to others beyond fantastical figures who have complete power over her—a horned devil, an angel. It is a

language which is universally available, but used by her to reflect the singularity of her world, rather than a collective shared experience. Any speaking to me, any belief in speaking to me carries tremendous risks when all conversations are overheard and critical voices are drowning out any thinking and rubbishing any other voices, any other words such as mine, by claiming that they are the work of the devil. For us to use any other words other than the ones of religion, to try to find a shared yet idiosyncratic theory, would involve dismantling, or at least disturbing the one theory that she has.

For another patient, there are unanswerable questions about the strangeness of the world—questions about how mobile phones work, how aeroplanes stay up in the sky—without the authority of religion to offer an answer, just a paralysing anxiety about being watched and spied on, the object of an unnamed gaze. Speaking is also difficult. She does not use much from the language of religion. She has tried it, including attending a spiritualist church, but feels too sceptical of it to fully engage with it. Instead there is a void, empty of words. However, this lack of any certainty has perhaps left room for an engagement with an other, with me. Therapy is something that she is trying, with a degree of wariness. The first patient left after a fragmented few months of meeting—we never found a safe enough way of speaking, to enable that leap of faith for her to believe that speaking to me would be worth the risks; but the second patient has continued with the struggle to find a way to speak with me.

What we found was that she could talk to me about her cat. She had let me know many times and in different ways about the significance of this cat to her—for example through her outrage at a new mental health worker forgetting and thinking that she had a dog. She was delighted to let me know how much her cat hates people and only occasionally shows affection to her. I noticed that she would often break the silence of the offered space of the consulting room with an observation about her cat. Recently she let me know about a change in the cat's behaviour, ‘my cat has been much more affectionate recently, cuddling up on my shoulder, pawing at me, nudging me with her head and purring in my ear; and she is eating more’. On this occasion I remarked that some people say that pets are like their owners and wondered if she felt that she is feeling more relaxed at present. She agreed that she

was, that she has felt better recently, no ‘bad thoughts’ and offered the detail that she had been cooking more for herself.

The cat provided a language, through a description of its behaviour and an interpretation of that as affection, for the patient to say something about herself. In this exchange we brought together her theorising about the cat, reading its behaviour as affection, and my reflection about the similarities between animals and humans. Together these enabled a way of putting words to her experience of herself, an ability to speak from the position of ‘I’. She used the language of behaviour— ‘I am cooking more’—to share something about herself, connecting this with my suggestion that she may be feeling more relaxed. Thus we moved between behaviour and feelings in the cat and in her, making links. As she is someone who self-harms viciously, the language of behaviour is much more familiar to her than words as representative of psychic states—the connection between them is part of what remains mostly unspoken, experienced perhaps as unspeakable.

Speaking about the cat suggested a tentative affirmation of the value of speaking whilst keeping a certain distance from her own experience, from herself as subject. In the light of certain paranoid ideas about being watched and listened to, this may also offer a safer way to theorise herself. My first patient, who believes that she is being constantly observed and spoken to, could sometimes draw when she could not speak, as if somehow the voices that were forbidding talking to me could be by-passed temporarily by using this different medium. For the second patient, the cat, as distinct from religion, was more available as a medium through which she could begin to speak about herself. There was a little more room for movement.

As an aside, cats have been associated with religion, notably in Ancient Egypt. Perhaps a significant difference from the Christian religion referenced by my first patient is that in Egyptian religion there is not one God and one Satan, fixed in their polarities, but a multiplicity of Gods, one of whom was Bastet, the cat. This would seem to leave more room for interpretation, more flexibility.

Using the cat as a way to begin this process of theorising raises interesting questions about what the particular characteristics of the cat may be that make it accessible in this way. I had already started to notice how several of my patients, and especially those for whom language

and speaking about themselves was a struggle, owned cats and could talk readily about them. The cat, despite centuries of domestication, is remarkably little altered by its appropriation into the human world. It barely responds to our language or our demands. As Stephen Budiansky writes in his book, The Character of Cats, cats always keep one foot in the jungle (Budiansky 2002: 4). It communicates through its behaviour; it lives by instinct. One patient has described how she can ‘read’ cats easily, and has a strong affinity with them. She can describe the behaviour of the cat and theorise it in a way that is not available to her when talking about herself or other people.

It was particularly significant to notice that on the occasion described, what my patient failed to have a language for, was feeling good and getting on with life. She had already spoken about the notion of a demon for that part of her that wishes to commit suicide and damage her body, and this is experienced as very other to her, separate to a small part of herself ‘deep down’ that she has identified as wishing to stay safe and to live. The cat is also on the side of life; in particular she says that she stays alive and out of hospital for the cat. And it is through the cat that she was able to communicate something of herself, and something that was not just on the side of death and destruction.

My mother, in her typical no-nonsense way, once said that the best thing about having a pet was that it teaches children about death. However, for this patient, like for many patients, death is always close at hand: being long-term users of mental health services they have lost people to suicide, to alcoholism, and have often made suicide attempts. Death is an ever-present presence. The cat may be a reminder of the inevitability of death, yet it has no consciousness of or language for death. It is wholly alive. Just as speaking about the cat represented an act of faith in the act of speaking at all, so having a cat may represent for her an act of faith in living, despite all the forces pulling towards death. Like religion the cat gives a reason and meaning to life, whilst maintaining a constant focus and narrative on death.

A cat may be peculiarly well-suited to this role of medium, of carrying the patient's desire to live and to speak. Standing as it does outside of the dichotomies of reason and unreason, good and evil, neither self-conscious nor deemed mad, each one is a unique character who is nonetheless

one of the many; and most particularly, one of whom it is possible to speak but which is itself outside the complexity of human language, a ‘dumb animal’. The cat unlike the dog is not subject to the demands of the other but remains independent of them, providing perhaps for this patient at least a way of being in the world which offers inspiration, a reflection of her own isolated experience, and a companion. Stephen Budiansky describes cats socialising as like commandos who are all on their own daring solo mission but who just happen to find themselves alongside others on the same mission (Budiansky 2002: 89)—they do not form a pack or any hierarchical structure, unlike dogs. It is perhaps that relationship of being-alongside that my patient experiences as so unthreatening, and may in turn offer a way of thinking about my position as analyst.

Another patient was very wary of talking about herself, and often would not talk at all, but she could talk readily about her cats. It became quickly apparent that I had no permission to insist on speaking of things for which there were, as yet, no words, and before we had established that speaking at all had value. I imagined myself in the work as being with a stray cat, in some way damaged although just how was and perhaps would always be unknown, not subject to putting into words. My task was to be very still, metaphorical hand outstretched, offering without demand, waiting as she circled warily around, tentatively coming towards me, sometimes quickly darting away if I demanded too much. To suggest that what she said about her cats could be translated straightforwardly into something about her would have felt crude and heavy-handed, and probably would have scared her away. It was not a way of theorising herself, but a way in, a vehicle for speaking at all: less what she said, rather that she managed to speak and engage in a dialogic relationship. Both of us had some faith that this process was important—and it required that leap of faith since neither of us could know how it would develop. Again, the cats were the medium.

Although there are similarities in the way that the cat functions in the work with these two patients, it is imperative to resist in this theorising the temptation to impose a psychoanalytic reading of ‘the cat’ that can be ascribed to others. This is to head back in the direction of the monolithic Unity of a religious-style discourse, and away from listening for the particularities and peculiarities of that which has never been

said or heard before. Instead, following Roustang, the analyst, ‘[I]mposes nothing, because he thinks for himself, not in order to apprehend and to comprehend, but in order to produce. He theorizes, argues with himself, because he doubts himself; he does not adopt any discourse he may have heard elsewhere, even though he may use words and expressions he has heard in order to start his thinking’ (Roustang 1982: 153). Thus I have been careful in my writing of this phenomenon of the cat to avoid concepts such as projection—the cat as a projection of the patient's inner world; or the cat as an example of a transitional phenomenon, or perhaps the cat as sounding like ‘cut’ and signifying castration. To use such language is to invoke a whole chain of associations attached to such words, at the end of which is the full stop of Klein, Winnicott or Lacan. My desire was to stay as close to the phenomenon of the cat in the particularity of the patient's experience without imposing a particular and potentially reductive psychoanalytic narrative: to avoid taking the field of play onto the terrain of the analyst but instead to keep things open; to continue to be able to ask questions about the cat and its significance to the patient, and not to close down my thinking about how the cat may be being used; to remain alive to the possibility of it being deployed differently at different times. To invoke Deleuze and Guattari, there is not one cat but a multiplicity of cats. As T.S. Eliot recognised in his poem, ‘The Naming of Cats’, each cat has a singularity that cannot and should not be reduced to the unity of the word cat:

The danger in adopting any particular psychoanalytic discourse is that it becomes inscribed, the language of the theory dominating the thinking of the analyst, and the words of the patient becoming translated into the language of the theory—the missed session as a punishment for the analyst's break, the criticism of the work as an envious attack on the goodness of what is offered, language as revelatory of a certain diagnostic structure. These may not be offered directly as interpretations, but nonetheless they are an act of what Roustang terms ‘expropriation’, a moving of the patient's words onto the terrain of the analyst. Roustang argues that for the psychotic this is to do again what maddened him or her in the first place, to confirm her as the stage on which others perform, one who is lived in by the ideas of others. If psychoanalysis is not to merely offer an alternative religious discourse, the analyst needs to enter into the language of the other, including that of the psychotic, and be open and available to hearing what has never been heard before. For the psychotic, Roustang argues, this can begin the process of speaking her theory about herself so that she can become the author of her thoughts.

One patient nearly left at the beginning of our work together, following the first two sessions during which, as standard practice, I had asked her about her history and family background. Ostensibly this desire to leave was a concern with going over that painful ground, but in Roustang's terms it could perhaps also be seen as a sense of her words and experience being expropriated into a particular model of thinking that I had pre-prepared, an assumed relationship between past and present. Subsequently I took care to listen more and assume less, to attend to her words and to her difficulties with words. She has begun to speak more; she initiates sessions sometimes, and attends even when she feels suicidal and desperate to harm herself. Her speaking to me also seems to have allowed for a greater speaking to others involved in supporting her, reflecting an emerging confidence in her as author. Her risky behaviour has reduced, although to engage with that risk directly and as the aim of the work would have been to impose another, albeit different discourse on the work—the discourse of risk being one familiar to any patient in the mental health system.

However, avoiding using a particular discourse invites the accusation of not taking up a position, to the point of fetishising the not-knowing

and openness. This is the danger of Roustang's theory of the one—it is not shared or shareable with another, it struggles to be expressible in language, and can sound wishy-washy, mad or inarticulate. There is a sense of safety in being in a shared lira or furrow, stating one's position as a Kleinian or Lacanian. The price to be paid for this, however, is that it may involve keeping a secret behind the privacy of the consulting room door: that often what is said there does not follow theoretical orthodoxy, that a single theory does not always provide much illumination in the darkness when faced with the suffering of patients. Religious followers are familiar with living with such heresies — as the widespread use of condoms by Romans Catholics testifies to. For psychoanalysis to be true to its aim of dissolving transference in order to allow for other possibilities, it must keep tripping over itself. To avoid the pitfalls of providing a religious-style discourse it must keep shifting away from the comfort of an all-encompassing theory, named after a suitably venerated analyst, and shared with a community of like-minded analysts; towards critiquing and dismantling those theories.

This was what my first patient was unable to do; she was unable to risk finding other words to speak herself, and so she stayed with the relative safety of the language that she had been given, the language of God and the Devil. Religion pulls towards a monolithic Unity, a theory of everything with nothing missing, nothing left unexplained. The requirement of psychoanalysis is to remain light-footed, resisting the temptation to subsume everything heard into a pre-ordained structure; to engage in a process of becoming rather than Being. For the analyst this risks the critical gaze of their particular analytic community, and precludes the sanctuary of that omniscient authority. She in her turn faces unanswerable questions about the strangeness of the patient's world, and about how to navigate her way through, with all the attendant anxieties. To become an analyst is to stand in an odd position towards the authority of psychoanalysis itself, both its institutions and its theories, if the temptation to adopt it as a secular religion is to be avoided. For there can be not one theory, but a multiplicity of theories, not one God but a multiplicity of gods and not one cat but a multiplicity of cats.