In this paper I want to open up some trails of enquiry in my own thinking about psychoanalysis and rural living. By way of introduction I have three framing quotations:
…pure idyllic landscapes devoid of rowdy teenagers, homosexuals, the homeless, or women working the land, in favour of landscapes exhibiting rurality as order, purity, middle class prosperity, family and masculinity.' (Dupuis 2006: 127)
Who on earth will need therapy living so close to those beautiful beaches? (A friend on hearing I was moving to Cornwall.)
West Country towns and villages are winning the fight to keep their communities alive by thinking local… and volunteering to run their own ‘life line’ community shops. The number of villages launching community shops staffed almost entirely by local volunteers has increased dramatically. (Western Morning News, November 14th 2009)
These three quotations all speak to a dominant conceptualisation of rurality—the pastoral idyll, still insistently operative in the 21st century. Structured through a set of exclusionary oppositions, it works to both simplify and stabilise the complex cultures of the countryside. When I decided to move to Cornwall five years ago I was immediately confronted with versions of this idyll in people's relationship to my departure from urban dwelling. There was the sense that the countryside is a place of leisure, not work, so in moving to the country, I must be preparing to retire. There was a perception of the rural as offering a ‘problem
free' life style, where just being in the countryside would install contentment, so who would ever need psychoanalysis? There was the idea that I would be part of a small close knit community, whose ties of belonging are robust and supportive. Conversely, I was also challenged by a more dystopian view of rural living. There was a much expressed concern that a metropolitan ‘city girl’ like me would struggle with the absence of ‘culture’ and the lack of diversity in a rural setting like Cornwall. Some friends felt I would be alienated by ‘wholesome’ rural families providing ‘swans and amazons’ childhoods. Colleagues at the Site wondered how I would work as a psychoanalyst in a rural setting where there is no culture of psychoanalysis.
This paper will be an attempt to map the complex field of the rural in terms of my work here both as a psychotherapist and as a trainer of psychoanalysis. Whilst there is a growing and significant body of work on the rural in a range of academic disciplines—geography, sociology, anthropology—there is very little on psychoanalysis within a rural setting, an absence that immediately suggests some cultural sense of the irreconcilability of the two terms. What follows are my initial explorations on thinking rurality and psychoanalysis together. The paper is organised into three sections: Psychoanalysis and the rural idyll; psychoanalysis and the other of the countryside and practising psychoanalysis in the rural. I hope to address the following questions:
Who are the subjects for psychoanalysis in the cultures of the countryside?
What role can psychoanalysis play within a culture where countryside is constructed as therapy/therapeutic?
Can psychoanalysis be a space of recognition/resistance for those ‘countryside others’ who have been displaced/ made marginal by the dominant understandings of rural living?
Nature becomes entangled in the dreams of modernity, a repository of everything civilization is not: pure, uninhabited, unconscious, non-rational, free of inhibitions and intent. (Dupuis 2006: 125)
The above quotation neatly captures the way that nature was re-imagined and re-worked in relation to nineteenth century industralised capitalism, an opposition that still informs our sense of rural living today. It is an opposition which figures the city as a rampant and ruthlessly volatile environment, the corrupt and dangerous heart of capitalist economy. In contrast, the countryside is constructed as a stable and immutable space, where communities preserve their traditions in a simple and unchanging world. In this section, I will be exploring how this urban-rural opposition continues to inform countryside cultures today, drawing specifically upon my own lived experience of Cornwall. I will then move onto consider how far psychoanalysis, in its various traditions, confirms or contests the contemporary idealizations of rural living.
It is impossible to conceptualise the countryside outside of its deeply embedded construction as a particular form of English idyll. This long-documented history (see for example, Williams 1973, Mingay 1989, Bunce 1994, Burchardt 2002) has explored the pastoral idyll as both a symptom of urbanisation and a ‘bourgeois imaginary’ (Bell 2006: 150-3), a way of anchoring middle-class identities to a vision of England as a nation of Arcadian landscapes and unchanging social values (Short 2006: 143). The idyll works to purify and to exclude any rural other that disrupts the achievement of this singular and homogenous picture.
The hegemonic position, which this version of the rural idyll holds, has been somewhat under scrutiny in the last decade. Geographers (for example Valentine 1997) have explored how more marginal groups have produced their own particular versions of the rural idyll. Whilst these alternate visions have emerged in opposition to the ‘heteropatriarchal’ and white middle class understandings of rurality (Valentine 1997: 109), they are still constituted through an idealized view of the countryside. It would seem that ‘the rural’ sustains itself as a stable form of both nostalgia and idealization across diverse social groups and through profound historic and cultural change.
During the last few decades the pastoral idyll has continued to inform contemporary views of rural living within considerable transformations to countryside cultures. The decline in agriculture has shifted rural economies from landscapes of production to landscapes
of consumption. In Cornwall this transformation is marked. The demise of the fishing and mining industries has made tourism and leisure the dominant form of employment. This shift has converged with the emergence of a newly imperative counter-urbanisation, where largely middleclass families move out of urban centres to the countryside, seeking an updated twenty-first century form of the rural idyll in a time of looming ecological crises. Within the context of new environmental concerns, the rural is enjoying a new elevation as a superior space for ecological living, with the city figured as a key factor in global warming and the energy crisis. Rurality is increasingly represented with an environmentalist, rather than producivist focus (Dupuis 2006: 217), situating farmers as a problematic presence within a discourse that privileges the ‘right’ ecological way to live and work the land.
Counter-urbanization, of course, has brought the urban into the rural, as individuals and families bring their urbanized selves into rural communities, complicating the traditional oppositional status of the two terms. Indeed, with new technologies now reaching into even wilderness spaces, we all live much more inter-connected and hybridized lives. Commentators have cited this collapsing of the distinction between the rural and the urban as the emergence of the ‘post rural’.
We might now regard rurality in terms of a post rurality, in which consumers of the rural realize that rurality represents an inauthentic pastiche of meanings and symbols … the rural has become deterritoralised. (Cloke 2006: 22)
Padstow, on the north Cornwall coast, is an exemplary instance of what Cloke is describing above. Padstow is a pretty fishing village, with narrow streets and colour-washed fishing cottages, completely transformed in the last two decades into a culture of idyllic consumption. Cappuccino bars, gourmet restaurants and designer shops robustly signify the middleclass urban consumer whilst the fishing boats and the Cornish dialects sustain that consumer in a myth of the pastoral idyll. Clearly, in this scene, the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ have become detached from their traditional referents, complicating how we might now both define and experience the Cornish fishing village. Furthermore, the original indigenous occupants of those fishing cottages have been priced
out of the Padstow housing market and have moved above the village to large estates of new builds, which they refer to as ‘the reservation’. This twenty-first century idyll depends on a form of colonialisation whereby the Cornish community have their culture appropriated and their lives displaced.
In the contemporary era of globalised capitalism, rurality has been commodified, its forms of ‘nature’ packaged, sold and exported. Indeed, the urban has been subject to a rural make over in recent years, where ‘greening’ the city, guerrilla gardening and the idea of the urban village, have all emerged to collapse what was once a more dualistically represented difference between the city and the countryside.
However, whilst we live in a time where the geographical distinction between the rural and the urban is beginning to break down, the imagined distinction is very much still operative (Halfacree 1993, Cloke 2006) and continuing to inform contemporary versions of the rural idyll.
The idea of a rural world untouched by modern capitalism remains a compelling fantasy, and informs the continuing idyllic status of the countryside. Whilst Cornwall is now in many respects a landscape of consumption, consumer practices are unevenly developed within the county. To make a very mundane point, you really can't shop much in Cornwall because there are simply not the retail outlets: where they do exist, they close at 5.30pm! The work culture is less organized around the profit margin as is well illustrated by attitudes towards employment. There is a local expression that suggests a work ethos not constructed within capitalist terms—‘directly’. It means that the person employed will get around to the job in their own time and in their own way. It is commonly said that if you want something done quickly, then don't employ someone Cornish! Urry's study of tourism (1990) corroborates this picture of a Cornish work culture somewhat astray of entrenched capitalist moorings. He reports (1990: 53) that the county has very ‘weak traditions’ of indigenous entrepreneurship in all sectors of the economy, including tourism, with successful businesses more commonly operated by outside entrepreneurs.
This work ethos is a radical resistance to the capitalist mode of work and production, but is problematically situated within contemporary rural culture. On the one hand, it is valorized as signifying a more
‘ideal’ way of living where profit, material accumulation and consumerism are not dominant. Yet on the other hand, it symbolises Cornwall's failure to get on in the twenty-first century world, a culture ruinously adrift of the globalised economy. In a recent Guardian article on rural and coastal unemployment, this latter position is well articulated. The principal of a secondary school in Plymouth is reported as saying:
The Dragon's Den is not and will never be, around the corner, nor is British Aerospace, not Dell, nor any other multi-national able to trot down the road to inspire students to think they too can aspire to work in those environments. (Guardian 24th September 2011)
Here the lack of easy access to the globalised economy is lamented and linked to an absence of aspiration, where aspiration is rooted in late capitalist forms of ambition and material wealth. Success is clearly correlated with capitalist urban centres and failure with the non-aspirational rural.
This uneasy interface between rurality and urban capitalism is a good moment to turn to psychoanalysis. Many commentators have problematically situated psychoanalysis as a support and incitement for capitalism and consumerism. In a recent paper on class for this journal, Jeffrey Weeks makes this point well:
Psychoanalysis, through accepting the familial framework, is trapped within capitalist concepts of sexuality, concepts which distort the production of desire. Since it concentrates on an Oedipal triangulation of parents and child, it… is complicit with how capitalism has constructed the social order. (Weeks 2009: 22)
Weeks, after Foucault, is suggesting that the family as a site for sexual and social reproduction needed psychoanalysis as an aid and support in its regulation. Psychoanalysis emerged amidst late nineteenth century capitalism, making urban life and psychoanalysis co-joined and complicit practices. Most of its accounts describe a divided and alienated subjectivity, a split subject driven by an unconscious life of repressed
desires and prohibitions. These alienated subjects of urban living produce the necessity for therapy, with the anonymity of the city an ideal environment for both seeking and sustaining it. But what if the social order is rural, not urban and has practices that produce a very different kind of subject? I have discussed elsewhere (Sales 2010) how working class communities still preserve a more communal way of both managing and living, in distinction to the middle classes whose lives are more individualized and psychologised. Clearly, as discussed above, there are practices in rural cultures that operate in opposition to the individualism that is endemic to western power relations. This opposition not only makes the rural an imagined idyllic space, but also makes it profoundly ‘other’ to the urban. If urban dysfunction and alienation are the raw material of psychoanalysis, what role could it possibly play in the ideal countryside setting? It is to this question I will now turn.
At the heart of its more Kleinian and object relations cultures, psychoanalysis has a lurking heteronormativity that sits well with a certain culture of middleclassness in the countryside. This form of clinical psychoanalysis has been aimed at the normalising achievement of middleclass individualism, rooted in post war theorisations of the mother-infant relationship. Certainly this form of family life is reflected in the rural idyll, whereby the countryside—a ‘natural’ and uncorrupted space—is understood as a support and an aid in the accomplishment of a securely adjusted heterosexual identity. Jo Little's study on gender relations and rurality (2002: 83-91) confirms this view of the centrality of traditional motherhood to rural living across various geographically distinct areas. Single women, working women and child-free women were generally regarded as ‘odd’ and ‘out of place’ within rural communities centred around heteronormative family life. There is a certain kind of rural culture in which a particular form of psychoanalysis would be entirely at home. However, isn't there something about living the dream of the country idyll that would be disturbed by the ‘need’ or the wish for psychoanalysis? If the country is the ideal answer to the difficulties of urban living, why would anyone need therapy? I have encountered this view many times since my move here. This idea of the countryside as ‘therapy’ is a persistently stable feature of the idealized rural life.
Indeed, psychoanalysis is well placed to be a refuge for those who
encounter disappointment and depression when the idyll does not deliver all that it might have promised. In most of its theorizations, psychoanalysis has an emphasis on those psychic phenomena—aggressivity, greed, envy, disappointment—that are foreclosed in the ideal rural life. In my own practice I have a number of people whose move to Cornwall has been far from ideal and who have struggled to negotiate the enormous gap between the realities of life here compared to the idealized investments which they made. Whilst one might argue that this kind of idealisation and disappointment is just as much a feature of urban living as it is of rural life, there is one key difference: unlike the so-called ‘rural idyll’ urban life is not constructed and fantasised in monolithic terms. It is harder for rural subjects to find a space for psychoanalysis. I will return to this point in more detail later.
Clearly, middleclass refugees from the city will not be unduly alienated by a psychoanalytic encounter, given their formation in an urban setting. However, it needs to be emphasised that psychoanalysis is paradoxically situated within versions of the rural idyll that radically contest contemporary individualism and its consumer practices. Psychoanalytic accounts of the desiring subject and its forms of enjoyment are usually framed by an urban culture saturated with practices which support its performance. The rural idyll is, in part, always constituted through a critique of globalised capitalism, and the local communal networks of the world it presents operate in stark opposition to urban life and its practices. This raises the very important question: what kind of role psychoanalysis can have in these radically ‘other’ cultures of the countryside?
This moves my discussion on to a more though going engagement with the ‘others’ of rural life. It is clear from the discussion above that the imagined ideal of countryside living conceals and deflects a number of more complex narratives about rural life. In the next section I want to consider these ‘other’ stories of the countryside and with a turn to Foucault, discuss how a space for psychoanalysis has emerged in relationship to a particular group of ‘rural others’ in Cornwall.
[R]esearchers have begun to look at the nature of rural land-scapes
Page 102as more than the materialisation of an English middle class ideal (or idyll). (Dupuis 2006: 126)
In recent years there has been a growing research interest in those ‘others’ of the countryside whose position has either been ignored or rewritten by dominant representations of the rural. There have been a number of publications giving attention to alternative stories of rurality (for example Cloke and Little , Little 2002) combined with a concern that for far too long research agendas represented rural life as follows:
There remains a danger of portraying British rural people… as being all men in employment, earning enough to live, white and probably English, straight and somehow without sexuality, able in body and sound in mind and devoid of any other quirks … (Philo 1992: 200)
Whilst Philo's description criticizes the way that rural communities have been represented by academic researchers, it is clear that these representations—masculinist, heterosexist and racist—still speak to a certain normalizing and exclusionary dimension of rural life. Given that the countryside has communities overtly seeking escape from the diversity of city living, then such restrictiveness and a policing of difference is not surprising. This is exacerbated by the isolation of rural communities, who are not fertilized by the constant migration of other cultures and other people so common in urban life. However, such migrations happen very occasionally in the countryside and are uncomfortably challenging when they do. Whilst the previous section drew attention to a more porous and hybridized relationship between city and country, there are still huge swathes of rural living that remain impervious or resistant to these new technologically-driven influences. In my local community difference is managed by its obliteration, an obliteration that can then masquerade as acceptance. There was a very good example of this when a gay couple moved into the hamlet a few years ago. Their very evident difference was accommodated by both not naming the difference and by making the couple over into ‘the same’ as the rest of the community. This seems on the surface to be a form of acceptance
and inclusion; however, very subtly there is the message that their non-familial otherness must be minimized as a condition of this acceptance.
As the former section indicated, the rural idyll always operates to exclude forms of rural living which contest the ideal countryside life. Cloke et al. (1995), for example, discuss how rural poverty is denied, not only by those middleclass incomers wishing to preserve their ideal view of the rural, but also by those actually experiencing poverty. Their account shows that people living in considerable material deprivation claimed that living in a beautiful landscape compensated fully for their poverty. What is interesting here is the move to minimize or obliterate otherness in contemporary rural life, along with the complex emotions that might accompany those forms of otherness. The misery and the depression that are commonly consequential to poverty are not permitted to circulate either culturally or psychically.
Foucault has an exemplary methodology for recovering the conflicts, differences and buried voices of rural others, whose histories have been eclipsed or submerged (Sales 2012). His genealogical work targets the apparently unalterable truths produced by certain stabilised forms of cultural knowledge, which work to marginalise and exclude other forms of knowledge.
What it [genealogy] really does is to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge. (Foucault 1980: 83)
The importance of recovering the buried histories of ‘rural others’ lies in their potential to disrupt the dominant and singular narratives that impose their singular truths upon the cultural field. Taking my bearings from Foucault, I want to conclude this section by a brief discussion about the low cost clinic set up by the Site in Cornwall. The clinic is certainly an instance where those who are largely invisible and certainly subjugated have been given the opportunity to recount their lives and begin to recover histories which the wider culture has buried. In its inaugurating philosophy, The Site not only set out to establish a
critical relationship to the closed and universalizing tendencies of the psychoanalytic institution, but also to pay particular attention to those groups made marginal or pathological by that institution. The low cost clinic is then, an exemplary Site project.
Consistent with much of the UK, the form of counselling available in primary health care in Cornwall is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). There is very little long term therapy either within the NHS or within the voluntary sector. Psychoanalysis is largely available only as a private form of therapy and this situation operates to exclude many of those who might want longer term help. Most of the people who come to the low cost clinic have the complications of poor, insecure housing, poverty, rural isolation and unemployment, all of which have complex effects on their mental health. These people are the ‘other’ of the rural idyll, whose lives have only been raised to visibility by their mental health problems. They come to the low cost clinic via the statutory mental health services with which they have commonly acquired a mental health history. Following Foucault (2000), it could be argued that this mental health history describes a particular relation to power, one that works to obliterate even as it brings into momentary view the patient in all his/her unfitness. This is a strange kind of visibility, predicated as it is on a form of pathologisation, one which creates the possibility of an identity position within a rural culture, a culture that at the same time powerfully prohibits any form of recognition of this group.
The low cost clinic has quickly become an important resource in the County, providing low fee twice weekly psychoanalysis for up to two years. Given the historic dominance of short-term CBT, the increasing level of demand requires further analysis. For now however, it seems important to note that the clinic speaks to a desire for a space where unhappiness can be unravelled, not fixed and depression understood, not medicated. It operates as a form of asylum or sanctuary from the more normalizing services within the main stream health service.
I now wish to conclude this paper by discussing the practices of psychoanalysis in a rural setting. This discussion will explore both private psychotherapy work and the provision of a clinical training in a county where there is no operative culture of psychoanalysis.
What are the conditions under which a culture of psychoanalysis can emerge? Clearly there are psychoanalysts practising in Cornwall, but they work in an atomized, singular and protectionist way, unsure and wary of newcomers and of any differences that they may bring. Unlike London, there is no history of psychoanalytic training in Cornwall to frame and foster specific cultures of psychoanalysis and to generate dialogue and debate. Psychoanalysts do meet together to talk psychoanalysis and these groupings clearly reflect certain shared assumptions and beliefs about the work, but these conversations do not take place in the public domain and therefore do not contribute to a culture of psychoanalytic thinking.
The Site training, established in Truro in 2010, is the first psychoanalytic training in the county and only the third in the south-west region. Being the first and only is strange. The Site in London is accustomed to being sought out for its particular critical and deconstructive philosophy; people choose the Site in comparison with and in opposition to a number of other competing trainings. Does the Site philosophy only make sense within the competitive, urban market place of London? What happens to the singularity of the Site training, when it is the only training?
These questions emerged most sharply when the Site put on a number of public seminars in Truro in order to raise awareness of the Site training. The first seminar was extremely well attended by psychotherapists and counsellors from a wide range of backgrounds. One participant pointed out that she came because it was such a novelty to drive west for CPD (continuing professional development), suggesting that Cornwall is not known as a culture for professional training. Clearly, there is not only a negligible culture of psychoanalysis here, but also a negligible culture of psychotherapy training. There are, however, within the county, traditions of ‘healing’ and spiritual practice rooted in much earlier pagan cultures. These more communal and community spirited traditions intersect problematically with the newer, more individualised and regulated therapies. There is an insidious hierarchy already operating, where the more indigenous forms of therapeutic practice are being
relegated, marginalized or simply colonized by forms of psychotherapy imported from elsewhere, which includes psychoanalysis.
The absence of any tradition of psychoanalytic training in the region means that people have had to go elsewhere to be trained, most commonly London. This of course raises some interesting issues around the importation of psychoanalysis from an urban to a rural setting. Do these urbanely trained analysts impose or inflect a certain kind of understanding upon subjects living in the very different setting of the rural? Does psychoanalysis very subtly colonise ‘other’ forms of help or ways of understanding? I had a good example of this at a conference on class in Somerset a few years ago. A psychotherapist was discussing her work with a woman from a small rural community. The psychotherapist was troubled that the provision of therapy to this woman had disrupted the traditional networks of support that the community usually provided. She even wondered if the therapy offered from outside might have promoted a stigmatising of the woman's difficulties, marking her out as different. It is noticeable in rural cultures how important community is to one's identity and sense of place and belonging. Clearly in the example above, the psychotherapist felt that the more individualising and atomising trends of a psychotherapy encounter worked to un-hinge this woman from her more collective moorings in the community.
In one very good sense the Site has an exemplary philosophy for setting up a training in a rural space like Cornwall. Its critical non aligned position and its willingness to interrogate difference will mean that the Site will not only be reluctant to impose a particular kind of psychoanalysis on Cornwall, but will also be receptive to the impact of Cornwall on the theories and practices of psychoanalysis.
In this final section I want to discuss working in private psychoanalytic practice within a rural setting. In undertaking this, I will not be making any claims to represent a general picture of psychoanalytic work in the county. However, I hope to open up some general themes that have emerged within my own work here as an analyst. Who are the subjects for psychoanalysis in my rural hamlet of Cornwall? Are these subjects
‘other’ to the psychoanalytic clinic and do they bring stories and experiences that are ‘other’ within the context of its dominant interpretive frames? Here is a recent story from the clinic, which captures the ‘otherness’ of working here.
During her second visit, a woman was describing her lengthy experience of depression. In desperation, some years earlier she had consulted a witch. The witch had suggested that she wrote down everything about her depression and its long history and then set fire to it within a specific ritual. She was then to bury the ashes in the most distant area of her garden. What seemed to be the most revelatory moment occurred after she had burnt all the papers. There was one scrap remaining which said ‘being human’. The woman said that here was the power of the magic; the ritual given to her by the witch had showed her that she could neither burn nor bury her human condition; she needed to find a way of living with herself. Clearly, some years on, this realization had eventually brought her to me.
Undoubtedly there are many psychoanalytic thoughts one could have about this story, but my interest is focussed on its cultural location. For this woman, witches and analysts occupy much the same territory; indeed there is a long and rich history that understands this relationship well. In an urban setting the link is not so close, whilst here in Cornwall, it feels powerfully present. In Cornwall different forms of help are not so rigidly separated, in marked contrast to the policing and regulating of professional boundaries in an urban setting.
The woman had also had some CBT and she drew a parallel between this form of counselling and the witch's ritual. The ‘homework’ that her CBT counsellor had given her—write about your depression ‘triggers’—had some proximity to the exercise given to her by the witch. However, there was one important difference that the woman really understood: The CBT counsellor wanted to ‘fix’ her, whereas the witch simply wished to reveal her to herself.
This story suggests that psychoanalysis, in its less normalized and developmental forms, may well find a home within a rural culture that has deep roots and connections to older practices of the self.
It is a truism of rural living that in countryside communities everyone not only knows everyone else, but also everyone else's business! Whilst this is often held up as one of the advantages of belonging to a
rural community, this form of support can quickly become a form of surveillance of behaviours deemed too ‘other’ to easily fit the dominant cultural ethos. In his discussion of one of the few studies of rural mental health, Paul Cloke draws attention to the difficult interface between the private and confidential matter of therapy and the intrusive networks of community in rural living:
The absence of anonymity in small places presents real difficulties in maintaining personal confidentiality and avoiding ‘gossip’, with the result that individual conduct, movement and service use tend to be visible and identified in potentially stigmatic ways. (2006: 451)
Soon after moving to Cornwall, a person I was seeing from the locality was very concerned that her parent (also a local resident) was keen to find out about her therapy. The patient reported that her car had been ‘spotted’ outside my house and her parent had been making enquires about me and my partner. Some time later, I met the parent at a neighbour's party and was subjected to invasive questioning. Having been accustomed to practising in the anonymity of the city, I suddenly felt extremely exposed and subject to intrusive local surveillance. Cloke goes onto elaborate the difficulties of this kind of rural culture for those seeking therapy:
Although the presence of a rural ‘community’ supposedly offers networks of natural support in rural areas, the close-built social networks of some rural places drive some individuals away from seeking such informal or professional support. At the same time, these individuals can be subject to the strictures of rural cultural spaces, which can … require residents to conform to cultural expectations of self-sufficiency, resourcefulness and problem-freedom. (2006: 451)
A person I saw for just a few months from my local area, came to see me because of an issue in her marriage that was the potential source of huge social shame, should it ever be known. The therapy was
the only space she had for discussing this problem, even though therapy in itself was difficult for her. As Cloke outlines above, this was a woman from a rural community where self-reliance and resourcefulness were expected and to ask for help was shameful. These expectations played problematically through the therapy since she could not allow the issues she brought to be unraveled with any psychoanalytic insight. She had turned to me as a professional ally in the hope of diagnosing her husband as organically ill, a diagnosis that would make it possible for both him and their marriage to be re-absorbed back into their rural community. She could not and would not see his behaviour as a psychic symptom of some relational difficulties. To open up such a dialogue would have contested the whole basis of her rural life and uprooted her place in the community.
The above discussion has raised some complex differences between an urban and a rural setting for therapy. One of the implications is that the urban therapeutic setting is ‘freer’ and less constrained than that of the rural—a grossly reductive view. However, whilst constraints inevitably operate across and through the whole psychoanalytic encounter, there is a very specific and constitutive constraint peculiar to the rural. The community pressures that operate on rural subjects, complicate and compromise the ways in which therapy can be accessed and sustained. Furthermore, these constraints are not simply an effect of living in a village, but are endemic to rural culture more generally. A professional woman I see has been quite consistently concerned about her therapy being known to her professional network, given the ‘smallness’ of the population and the close knit ties of professional groupings in rural settings.
These kinds of concerns make confidentiality much more imperative in both clinical and supervisory work. There is a sense that a person's identity could never be fully disguised in such a small rural setting and this poses limitations on how much one can speak of one's work to supervisors and colleagues based in Cornwall. People seeking therapy may choose to travel long distances outside their communities in order to maintain confidentiality. Conversely, however, within a culture of porous community ties, there is also a complete lack of recognition of the need to protect this very same confidentiality. Thus, one patient sought me out because I was local, had no issue with bumping into me
locally and offered to do work for me, alongside the therapy. Of course, all of this could be thought about through a psychoanalytic lens, but to do so is to miss the whole rural context within which frames of confidentiality seem strange. I am slowly becoming accustomed to patients knowing all sorts of people that I know and accepting that this is often not a problem for them.
[There are] sorts of actually realised utopias … in which all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable. (Foucault 1998: 178)
Foucault's concept of heterotopia captures the paradoxical territory of contemporary rurality that this paper has attempted to chart. The rural idyll continues to structure and inform countryside living through a rich play of inclusions and exclusions which attempt to preserve its idealizing trajectory. This paper has traced the ways in which the complex exclusion of the urban within the rural idyll, complicates and limits the use of psychoanalytic thinking—an urban incorporation—within a rural setting. If the countryside signifies an ideal life, then why would anyone need therapy? Furthermore, certain forms of rural life pose a complex resistance to dominant western forms of living such as consumerism. Both ideal and other, these forms of resistance do not sit easily with psychoanalysis and its conformity with the urban capitalist dream.
The paper has also opened up an exploration of the ‘others’ of the rural world who are sometimes casualties of the idyllising imperative, or sometimes simply ‘other’ to dominant urban understandings from the rural viewpoint. There is not space to interrogate fully the urban constitution of psychoanalysis and the extent to which it can speak to the ‘others’ of the countryside. This paper is an initial mapping of the territory involved in thinking about psychoanalysis in a rural space and inevitably raises more questions for future research.