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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 20. Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi

9/11/2015

4 Comments

 
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Jamal Khan is a London psychoanalyst in his fifties, haunted by memories of his late adolescence: his first love, Ajita; the highs of sex, drugs and idealistic left-wing politics; the shady dealings of his college friends, Wolf and Valentin. As he navigates the indignities of divorced middle age alongside his best friend, Henry, he revisits his adolescent obsessions, under the shadow of his lonely childhood with an emotionally absent white mother and physically absent Pakistani father and bullying out-of-control older sister, Miriam. Amongst all this he somehow manages to maintain his therapy practice and share the parenting of his pre-adolescent son, until the repercussions of a brutal attack on Ajita’s father threaten to blow everything apart. A dark and comic tale of London hedonism and politics in the 1970s and in the early years of the twenty-first century, Something to Tell You also supplies some interesting insights into psychoanalytic ideas:
Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear? (p3)

Like a car mechanic on his back, I work with the underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmares – the world beneath the world, the true words beneath the false. The weirdest intangible stuff I take seriously; I’m into places where language can’t go, or where it stops
(p4)

In sharp contrast to the allusions in both John Katzenbach’s The Analyst and in Pat Barker’s Regeneration to therapy as a means of silencing dissent, Jamal tells us that

psychoanalysis doesn’t make people behave better, nor does it make them morally good. It may well make them more of a nuisance, more argumentative, more demanding, more aware of their desire and less likely to accept the dominion of others. In that sense it is subversive and emancipatory. But then there are few people who, when they are old, wish they’d lived a more virtuous life. From what I hear in my room, most people wish they’d sinned more. They also wish they’d taken better care of their teeth. (p81)

Nor, in the character of Jamal, is the analyst presented as any closer to sanity or more virtuous than those who consult him. Though I’d agree with this sentiment, I struggled with his collusion with his crazy sister’s dealing in stolen goods and her neglect of her children. Little wonder Jamal doesn’t protest when Henry comments:

A cursory glance at the early analysts and their disciples and colleagues will show what a bunch of perverts, suicides and nutters they were, apart from Freud. Completely human, then. But at least they knew one true thing … You either love or fall sick. (p317)

With his evident knowledge of analytic theory, Hanif Kureishi does not appear to be a writer who is suspicious of therapy. In fact, he narrows the gap between the two professions by giving his analyst, like real-life psychotherapist Stephen Grosz, a couple of successful books of case studies Six Characters in Search of a Cure and The Reader of Signs. Although, along with many fictional therapists in this series, we don’t see Jamal having supervision, his path to the profession is convincingly portrayed, borne out of his own desperate need for analysis in early adulthood. But, for a contemporary London analyst, Jamal seems over-reliant on Freud (although his disciples do get a mention), which might account for my confusion around his division of people into “neurotics” and “psychotics” (whereas later theorists, especially Klein, would consider these types of processes rather than people – in fact, I wondered (p355) if he might be confusing psychotics with psychopaths).

I also disagreed with his assertion that

The difference between therapy and analysis is that in therapy the therapist thinks he knows what’s good for you. In analysis you discover that for yourself.
(p223)

Nevertheless, Jamal is by far one of the more convincing fictional therapists I’ve encountered for this series, perhaps less in the doing than in the mindset of this strange profession. Echoing Wilfred Bion’s thoughts on therapy taking place between “two frightened people”, he tells us:

I soon learned that listening to another person was almost the hardest thing you could attempt … the truth wasn’t hidden behind a locked door in a dungeon called ‘the unconscious’, but that it was right there, in front of the patient and analyst … Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love. But, sitting with my first analysands, trying to bear the anxiety of hearing someone unknown, whose dreams and ramblings I could not comprehend … I’d want to flee the room, wondering who was more afraid, analysand or analyst (p265)

A good-enough place to leave this, I think. Something to Tell You was published in 2008 by Faber and Faber. Once again, I coughed up the dosh to buy my own copy. Thanks for reading and do share your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
4 Comments
Charli Mills
10/11/2015 01:40:44 am

I always enjoy your reviews of fictional therapists, Anne! It gives me pause, though, thinking how important details can be while trying to use them to further a plot.

Reply
Annecdotist
10/11/2015 05:44:45 pm

Thanks, Charli – if you were just a little bit nearer you could've come to the talk I gave on the subject on Saturday!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
12/11/2015 12:12:51 pm

I was surprised when I got to the end of your review to find that you found this fictional psychologist one of the most convincing of your series. I had thought with his use of Freud's work, and collusion with his sister, in addition to not having supervision, that there would be too many gaps. I hadn't heard the word "analysand" before, so I found that interesting. When I was in Paris (briefly) a few years ago I stayed one night in a hotel that Freud had spent some time in. I think, out of respect for him, they hadn't cleaned it since! (Just joking!) I can't think of Freud now without thinking of that, or of what Germaine Greer had to say about him in the 70s. I'm not sure what he'd say that says about me! :) Thanks for your review and the opportunity of making a few flippant remarks.

Reply
Annecdotist
12/11/2015 02:46:11 pm

Fancy sharing these reflections, Norah – I think my image of Freud is also going to be tainted by what you said about that grubby hotel! I wonder if that would have changed if you'd visited the Freud Museum when you're in London – not that I've ever been either! He definitely brought a lot of rubbish about women, but he was a creature of his time and culture, and I remember getting a lot out of Juliet Mitchell's writings on psychoanalysis and feminism. But there's also no doubt that his ideology provides a good foundation for some subsequent theorising, although ever since struggling through Mourning and Melancholia as an undergraduate I'm happier reading about his ideas second-hand.
I was writing this review around the time I was also preparing for a couple of talks I've done lately on fictional therapists, and I kept coming back to quotes from this book. So in that sense, and in the way that the author has reinterpreted the theory in his own words, I do find Jamal quite convincing. I could imagine meeting him at a conference and thinking he knew what he was talking about, Which cannot be said for a lot of the other therapists. And given that the novel was actually less about his work than his life outside it, the absence of supervision didn't matter so much.

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