Outside Farkas Auditorium at New York University Medical Center last February, the purple table skirting, the meticulous arrangements of brochures and signs at the registration tables, the book displays all seemed the familiar iconography of the psychoanalytic conference. “The Psychoanalytic Association of New York,” a signboard proudly proclaimed. But some elements were askew. There was a preponderance of best-selling and award-winning novels at the book tables. One attendee stood pointing in frustration at the empty box that had been filled with the current issue of Playboy magazine. A sign indicated that Jim Shepard's latest short story was to be found within its covers.
At a table at the nearby coffee stand, novelists Robert Stone, Jim Shepard, and Denis Johnson chatted with psychoanalysts Shelley Orgel, Jane Kite, and Salman Akhtar, who'd soon be analyzing their work. Johnson, who was about to give a reading of his masterpiece of short fiction “Emergency,” whose protagonists are drug-crazed emergency room orderlies, looked around warily and confessed that he hadn't realized that the reading would take place in a medical setting.
At the registration desk, the size of the queue that had developed made clear how much the advertising in such periodicals as the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker had drawn attention. Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn and fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg stood arm-in-arm in the middle of the line. In the sound booth, NPR had arrived and plugged in.
The event was the kickoff of a pilot project, the Creative Writers and Psychoanalysts Series, that I had initiated with the financial backing of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York and the academic and institutional resources of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. The elements had come together with a great deal of passion in late September 2001. The sense of urgency and public need gave impetus to the wish I'd had for many years to bring psychoanalysts and writers together publicly. The program's title, “Daydreaming in an Era of Nightmares: The Apocalyptic Imagination,” soon coalesced.
After just a few weeks' work, I was astounded at the caliber of the writers I had engaged. I realized that a public event in which literary stars appeared trustingly with psychoanalysts, in which words of consummate artistry were read and responded to with the analysts' depth of insight, sensitivity, and caring wisdom, might be the sort of public demonstration that would benefit the psychoanalytic profession. It would combine aesthetic pleasure with a rare opportunity for the public to understand what the clinical psychoanalyst is about. The American Psychoanalytic Foundation agreed and provided additional funding.
Photo by Kerry Sulkowicz
Meanwhile, the psychoanalytic panelists agonized about their fifteen-minute presentations. Unusual for such discussions, the artists whose work the panelists would analyze were not only alive but would be present and ready to respond, while an audience — of uncertain orientation toward psychoanalysis — looked on.
Moderator Dennis Haseley, a psychoanalyst on the NYU faculty and a writer of fiction, introduced the writer-analyst pairings:
These authors' portents of emotional and physical violence, their portrayal of lonely cataclysms, have a revelatory power, and the poignant longing for an ultimate peace suggests a secular version of a prophet's longing for the everlasting peace of the end of days.
Robert Stone, with white beard and sunburned cheeks, looking every bit the Great American Novelist/sea captain in the tradition of Hemingway and Melville in spite of his black leather jacket, announced that he was reading Chapter 34 of Outerbridge Reach. He launched into what Orgel would characterize as “the dreamlike poem” that is the central chapter of Stone's novel. The audience was rapt as the tale unfolded of Owen Browne's lonely struggle with nature, his craft, and his own psyche as he pilots his yacht solo in a race to circumnavigate the Earth.
When the chapter came to a close, and the applause had died down, Orgel began by stating how much he loved Outerbridge Reach. He talked about recurrent psychological themes in Stone's novels and short stories: creativity, madness, death. He posited that in the conflict between the novel's main characters, Strickland and Browne, each character projected hated elements of the self onto the other.
Orgel described Browne's conflicts in the chapter Stone had read: his struggle — identified with the artist's struggle — to express pre-Oedipal, non-verbal experiences with mother; his yearning to overcome self-destructive impulses. In the end, Orgel expounded upon
the quest of the artist who seeks to move and dream in and between both worlds, sometimes with the aid of drugs and alcohol; who risks his life, at the edge of vision; who rebelliously asks the God who protects sanity to turn His face away for awhile, but who “prays” ambivalently to be shown a path that will allow a periodic return to the “real” world inhabited by other people.
Stone teared visibly at points in Orgel's talk. The crowd burst into applause. Unscripted, Stone seemed moved to reply. A suspenseful silence descended. Stone spoke haltingly.
I can't tell you how moving it is to have written something and then to have a response to it in such detail, with such insight. … It isn't the experience writers often have…. Insight is the beginning and end of the art of fiction, and a response to one's work in terms of insight is the most that one can possibly ask for. …
I would like to say how moved and pleased and gratified, how worthwhile it makes me feel to have done a work that has called forth that degree of insight and analysis. … I'm very grateful for it.
It was Shepard's turn to read “Love and Hydrogen,” his award-winning short fictional version of the Hindenburg disaster. “Imagine five or six city blocks could lift with a bump and float away,” he began.
Jane Kite would describe Shepard as “hanging” the human story of forbidden love (and occasionally acrobatic and aerially suspended sex) between two male crew members “literally from the euphoric hulk of the huge zeppelin.” She began her discussion by praising the language in Shepard's “truly radiant story.” She spoke of the “unbearable anxiety” generated in us by apocalyptic events, positing that “in revealing, interpreting, and opening things that are sealed, both writers and analysts are ‘apocalypts.’”
Sandra S. Leong, M.D., is on the faculty of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. She is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine.
Kite then discussed the themes of childhood innocence and phallic pleasures in Shepard's work. Shepard had drawn in his other fiction the link between his obsession with apocalyptic themes and the real-life eruption of his brother's mental illness in childhood. Kite traced the complex themes of external and intrapsychic causality raised by Shepard's work.
“Closest to the Shepard hypothesis” of the Hindenburg disaster, she said, “is a young boy of my acquaintance … who once asked, while intently observing himself pee after an … exciting ‘Road Runner’ cartoon, Do you think I could kill somebody with this?' In the world of fantasy, it could work that way. An excited penis could explode the world.”
After the talk ended, Shepard was asked to reply.
“The paradigm in my personality has never been so perfectly encapsulated as in the figure of the little boy peeing,” quipped Shepard, sounding truly pleased. “That says so much about me in so many different ways that I'm just going to be mutely grateful pretty much for the rest of the afternoon.”
Denis Johnson's quiet, Western-inflected reading of “Emergency” was met with close attention and laugh-out-loud appreciation of his deadpan yet over-the-top humor.
Salman Akhtar gave an impassioned formulation, identifying the signs of “dehumanization” in the characters in Johnson's story, redeemed by the move towards hope, and the attempt to contain aggression and save symbolic “remnants of human goodness.”
“Sometimes looking in the belfry illuminates the center,” concluded Akhtar. “When we read and learn about dehumanization, we also learn about humanity.”
“I enjoyed that quite a bit. I wasn't liking it at first,” said Johnson. “But I liked the end. It sounded like the story was breaking through beyond dehumanization. And I feel honored that that kind of reading came out of it.”
After some questions and conversation between authors and audience, the program ended. A pleased and stimulated group entered the reception hall for wine and cheese and book-signing. Numerous audience members inquired when the next installment of the Creative Writers and Psychoanalysts Series would take place and asked to be included on the mailing list. And thanks to the public relations efforts of Dottie Jeffries, the conference was featured on NPR on March 9.
The conference tapped into a dramatic cultural niche for psychoanalysis. It demonstrated a way that the skills of the clinical psychoanalyst can be displayed to advantage in a public forum.