Creative writers and their works have become my other psychoanalytic teachers. My interview here with the writer Rivka Galchen will demonstrate something of what I mean by this. But first, a bit of context.
An increasingly important source of learning about what I do as a psychoanalyst comes from writers of literary fiction. But this cannot be achieved by simply reading these writings. It requires psychological work: an immersion experience in which I generate a form of psychoanalytic process with these texts—or with the consciousness captured within their literary forms. More than a willing suspension of disbelief, it requires my becoming lost in these works for a period of time. I must permit myself to be moved by the language and sensory experience found within their universes before I attempt to understand—to apply meaning to what I find there.
Through my immersion experiences, I am developing something of what Keats, in 1817, called negative capability: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Possessing this capacity is vital when I feel lost in emotionally intense and uncertain territory within the analytic experience and am tempted to reach for easily available theoretical constructs to provide structure, stability, comfort in the midst of disorder. Spending time with works of fiction in the manner I describe helps me cultivate a fertile psychoanalytic mind: a mind more emotionally receptive, open to surprise, more capable of make-believe; one possessing greater patience and resilience in the face of the intensity of an intersubjective experience that threatens to reduce the complexity of analyst and patient into two-dimensional characters.
Close psychoanalytic listening involves the analyst participating in a process that both draws from the structured knowing of consciousness and reaches into the not-knowing disorder and fertility of unconscious life. I find the most original imaginative writers live comfortably within their own preconscious workspaces of creativity.
Rivka Galchen is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a teacher in the MFA program for creative writing at Columbia University.
Galchen’s short stories and novel contain much of what characterizes postmodern writing. Her work demonstrates much playfulness with language and experimentation with form. It generates a blurring of reality and fiction. When reading her work, I am convincingly brought into surreal universes, where I am jarred loose from my usual perceptions of reality. One interviewer of Galchen, Alice Whitwham in the Paris Review , said that in her short stories “real things take on the patina of the artificial, while the fantastic and strange can feel more real than what we call real life.” Galchen’s works possess a form and obey a logic much like that found in dreams. Writing these works must require the possession of a mind that shares much in common with what is necessary for us psychoanalysts to do our work creatively.
Galchen’s writings draw me into psychic spaces that become laboratories in which I may practice playful engagement with the disorientation and uncertainty that characterize the as-if experiences of transference-counter-transference in the analytic situation. Here I am being taught to bear—and to come to trust—creative states of not-knowing.
Galchen and I had this exchange about her novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and one of her short stories.
Fred Griffin: I refer above to pieces of fiction that contain dreamlike states of consciousness. The literary critic James Wood said, in 2014, your Atmospheric Disturbances is “a novel of consciousness, not a novel about consciousness.”
In the opening sentence of this novel, the central character, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, says: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Dr. Liebenstein believes his wife Rema has gone missing, and a substitute who claims to be Rema has taken her place. Insisting he is her husband, this Rema shows no intention of leaving.
Liebenstein begins to refer to her as an “impostress,” a “simulacrum,” and “the ersatz Rema.”
We are provided an improbable central metaphor, an unlikely situation that we as readers come to believe as we enter deeply into the subjectivity—into the consciousness—of Dr. Leo Liebenstein. In reading your novel, I was impressed by your success in keeping the reader within this state of mind throughout the novel. When reading, I, at times, became Leo Liebenstein.
In this novel you have inhabited your protagonist’s mind—his subjectivity—so completely. How do you do this? We psychoanalysts need to learn from you about this. I am trying to get at how you were able to live within the mind of this character so completely.
Rivka Galchen: What I think most helped me in writing my novel was quite simple—it amused me. Liebenstein’s conviction made sense to me, in part because often when I talk to people, I feel like what I’m hearing is a tracing around the outlines of some knowledge that person, for whatever reason, is avoiding. And there’s something charming to me, winning, all the work we humans do to avoid some space that to an outsider often looks like perfectly normal, acceptable ground.
Once I had Leo’s voice, I found I had that wonderful sensation of following rather than leading. Even though, of course, I had to put the words down on paper, I felt constrained almost as if by an organic algorithm—this was a guy who had a pretty extreme need to be faithful to a past moment, a love as it was at some other moment in time. I tried to just follow the circuitous paths he was forced into by trying to avoid certain knowledge—knowledge that some other part of him must have known, in order to so studiously avoid it. That seemed to me comic, human, recognizable.
FG: Reading your book helped me to become more emotionally receptive to a patient who had a dramatic reaction to an extended break created by my vacation. After I returned from vacation, he began to treat me as though I had become someone strikingly different from the person he had previously known me to be: I had become an ersatz Dr. Griffin.
I was not sure what was happening. In my state of disorientation, I found myself desperately reaching for interpretations that sounded formulaic to me. Recalling what it was like to enter Leo Leibenstein’s subjectivity helped me have the patience and imaginativeness to live within this experience with this man long enough for us to grasp this dramatic shift in his perception of me heralded the emergence of an emotional experience so painful to him that he had previously been forced to disown it.
RG: That is such a moving story to me. In part because it shows how attached your patient must have been to you, and how being angry at you for going on vacation—that simple, childish but also understandable response—seemed to metamorphose into something so much more intense, and bizarre. I wonder how that situation evolved. And what it was
like for you to be shifted out of the position of being viewed as a kind of good parent and into the position of being viewed as a kind of bad parent. That ability to handle another’s anger or disappointment is part of what especially moves me in a dynamic like that you describe with your patient.
FG: Like you, Rivka, I was committed to seeing where the story led.
Now, let’s discuss one of the short stories found in your collection, American Innovations. In each of these stories the crucial action takes place within the character’s mind. I want to talk with you about “The Lost Order.” (The story was also published in the January 20, 2013, issue of The New Yorker and may be found at the following link: .)
We are told on the book cover “The Lost Order” “covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” this time with a woman as its protagonist.
In this novel you have inhabited your protagonist’s mind—his subjectivity—so completely. How do you do this? We psychoanalysts need to learn from you about this.
In this story a woman has lost her job. Without the structure/order of her work, she has become what she calls “a daylight ghost,” someone “aiming to not do something,” a state of mind that made it possible for her to dream up various possibilities. This central character seems to wander aimlessly from one event and conversation to another, as if trying various identities on for size (for example, she feels compelled to respond to a takeout order that has been incorrectly phoned in to her; seeing two women dressed in UPS uniforms, she imagines being them). At the end of the story, it is revealed she has been lying to her husband: She did not resign from her job, as she told him; she was fired. It is unclear whether this story is about real events in the woman’s life or is a kind of dream.
FG: What was the seed for this story? Where and how did the idea germinate?
RG: That story snuck up on me, in a nice way. It began just as a little joke I had with myself. Whenever I would find my own inner life dull or irritating to me—if I found myself, say, worrying about my appearance, or some other standard “feminine” preoccupation—I would think: The Secret Life of Willa Mitty. The thought was, couldn’t at least an inner, private life be filled with heroism and adventure, as it is for Walter Mitty. Surely that space, of the idle mind, could be better used.
So, it was basically a little joke I told myself. But then also it did seem odd to me, and interesting, that I couldn’t easily picture what the inner life of a female Walter Mitty would be. Just like I couldn’t quite imagine a female Don Quixote. That lack of ability to imagine that was like a little prompt. The story itself then took a turn away from those ideas and was more about finding out—it was news to me as a writer—how that “boring” inner life was serving the character. How she used it to lie to herself.
FG: In your story, the central character’s private musings are much like an hour of therapy in which a patient is free-associating, generating a stream of consciousness—a unique form of disorder, or of order that is temporarily lost.
But your story is hardly aimless. There is clearly some sort of engine that propels one through the twists and turns of this story. In the Paris Review interview I mentioned earlier, you say you draw from something inside you: “some inchoate emotion trying to play its little tune … a weird residue … [an] intangible murk … “what fiction is actually good at,” which, “has something to do with intangible murk from which stories start to organize themselves.”
We psychoanalysts might say it is the intersubjective experience between analyst and analysand that moves our work along—a force and intelligence smarter and more compelling than that generated by our conscious minds. Can you speak further about the organizing process that shapes your writing?
RG: I do like a story to have an engine, to deliver surprises, to have unexpected turns. That said, I know from experience that a story feels dead and untrue if I plan it out and obey that plan. Planning can be helpful, so long as the plan is not followed. I call the process gardening for truffles. You can’t plant truffles. But you can go on walks in the forest where they have been known to be found. You can befriend truffle hogs. And then you can obey the small, little unconscious random thought that got the story started in the first place. Often I find—and somehow it surprises me every time—that the future of the story was hidden in there, latent or disguised. So when you obey that prompt, still mysterious to you, you get to have structure—the structure that lies hidden in that prompt—without imposing a structure. Imposed structures
somehow always turn out to be misleading, and flattening, even as they present themselves so proudly, so assertively, so well-dressed.
FG: Imposing a structure before an organic one can take shape is deadening for the psychoanalytic process. Obeying the yet-to-be defined prompt of emotional experience is what we analysts try to do. Often enough I have to sit for some long time with the ineffable emotional “murk” of analytic experience. Sometimes I discover I am waiting for a psychic space to be cultivated in my mind that can accommodate this new experience that is finding a way to become articulated. I am often most convinced I am on the right track when the clinical material takes a surprising turn.
As you were writing this story, did you find it uncomfortable or frustrating that you did not know where it was heading? Do you, as well, engage in a process that cultivates a creative space that makes room for a story to be born?
RG: There’s often a kind of useful depression that accompanies me in the writing process. I’m not sure why, but I’ve come to not take it so seriously, and to assume it is serving me. Maybe it’s like a cloud that lets me put genuine emotion into the work, emotion I would otherwise withhold and defend. The cloud helps me not notice I am letting real emotions in? That’s my best guess. But even as I say there’s a depression, there’s a stronger steadier sense of peacefulness—writing feels almost like exercising. It occupies all of me, in a way that simply feels good. And feels like a relief from the buzzing and whirring of the unfocused mind.
I call the process gardening for truffles. You can’t plant truffles. But you can go on walks in the forest where they have been known to be found. You can befriend truffle hogs.
FG: What you describe has much in common with the states of mind we analysts must possess when at work. We too enter a creative workspace of make-believe—the as-if worlds of transference and countertransference. And we become so involved in the intersubjective experience with our analysands that we come to have a sense of what it might be like to be them—what I call imaginative empathy. What was your way into the protagonist of “The Lost Order”? How did you inhabit her? Is she someone you could identify with?
RG: That character is very passive, which is unlike me; but then again, in moments, it’s very like me. She’s also very pushed around by her emotions, by the emotions of others—and that I recognized. But I really don’t worry too much about identifying with my characters; even when they are in no obvious-to-me way like me, I have faith they came to my imagination through some personal preoccupation, even as I necessarily don’t quite know what that preoccupation is. If I knew, I would dismiss it as boring! For it to seem alien helps me take an interest in it.
FG: Are you at times surprised to find you have come to better understand something in your own life through writing a story about characters who look very little like you?
RG: One thing I share with my “Lost Order” character is that I find it terrible to catch sight of myself. I’m sure I could catch sight of myself—probably not a flattering sight—in my work, but I really, really, really don’t want to. I avoid it so scrupulously, I assume I already know what I would see there. That said, I have at times felt “cured” in small, simple ways.
When I wrote my novel, I incorporated my father’s name and some of his scientific research—albeit in a comic way—but that did give me some relief from years and years of arrested mourning. Before I wrote the novel, I hadn’t been able to say his name out loud. So, there was a classic insight there—that he was really gone—that mattered to me, even though I never, ever would have pursued that insight directly.
FG: Clinical psychoanalysis has much to do with arrested mourning. This is something the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald speaks of as turning ghosts into ancestors.
This seems like a fitting place for us to close. But I am comforted to know we psychoanalysts can return to our conversation when we read your writings. Thank you, Rivka, for spending some time with us psychoanalysts. And for helping us to live within our clinical experience in more emotionally receptive, imaginative, and empathic ways.