I started writing this newsletter as a way of thinking about my next book. I find it hard to explain what ‘Poor Freud’ is about. I’ve always found it hard to talk about anything I’m writing – after all, I don’t know what it is until it’s done. Generally, with this one, I squirm around a little and then say it’s about my mixed feelings about my problematic fave: the excitement, the consternation, the irritation, the love – the love! – I feel when I read Freud. It’s also about thinking with him, now, in relation to feminism – now, right now, where we are. And it’s about trying to figure out what versions of therapy and analysis, out of the multiple and often contradictory versions that find their source in him, I ultimately want to settle into – if I have to settle at all, that is.
At the moment, I’m reading a lot – after some weeks of finding it so hard to focus – and I’m excited, all a-buzz with it. I want to read myself blue in the nose, as Woolf wrote in her diary when she was young. But I have a lurching feeling, sometimes, that I won’t be able to do it – that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. What on earth am I doing? Freud! One of the most important, controversial, and complex figures of the last 150 years, whose thought has spawned entire disciplines, and entire counter-disciplines; about whom so much has been written that it makes me feel dizzy just thinking about it. Pete casually said to me, smoking a cigarette on the fire escape: It’s a big responsibility! I was nearly sick. What on earth am I doing, attempting to write about Freud – I who have never been any good at a comprehensive, thorough approach to reading, who gets easily distracted, who am almost physically unable to get to grips with a writer’s entire oeuvre?
There’s a bit in Peter Gay’s biography of Freud which makes me smile – he’s writing about the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who influenced Freud early on. Gay writes that Feuerbach acknowledged, ‘or, rather, advertised’, that he ‘lacked a talent for the “formal philosophical, the systematic, the encyclopedic-methodological”. Gay notes that Freud would say the same of himself later. I laughed out loud reading this. If these guys felt this way, what chance do I have? Occasionally, I think about returning my advance and writing to my editors: I’m so sorry, I’ve made a terrible mistake, I clearly thought I was someone else, I’m sorry for all the trouble.
I suppose, though, Freud didn’t elaborate his oeuvre encylopedically, systematically, comprehensively – because that’s something one can only do across time, and in retrospect, in summary, in a probably distorting simplicity. What Freud did do was constantly write, and constantly revise. He added paragraphs to new editions, and innumerable footnotes as he went along, going back, revisiting, tweaking, amending. The overall effect, looking back at the whole, can be overwhelming and dizzying. One has to be a detective, and very organised, to get a grip on what he thought at any given time, and how his theories developed. I am neither a detective (I’m hopeless at plot, for a start), and I am nothing if not disorganised.
But Freud was just going one step at a time, too. It’s true that he often did try to give a comprehensive account; introductions and summaries that are very useful, if full of their own mysteries and evasions that then require more detective work. But for all of Freud’s grandiosity – a grandiosity that has, to put it mildly, got him a lot of stick – it’s so wonderful: there is a humility, and a will to honesty in his writing. Of course he often fails himself and his readers. But what he models in the attempt is also it, the thing I love. I don’t know about this, he often tells us. We don’t know enough yet, he emphasises. Let me rehearse again the arguments against my view; I believe this but I cannot yet prove it; I confess to being confused.
When I get overwhelmed, I try to just go back to his writing, and give up any particular aim. I sometimes have an image of gently lifting the corner of some fabric; or of zeroing in on one image, on one sentence. Of starting from a very small detail, a particular place, and having faith that something will build from it. I think this is why I keep thinking of Unmastered, my first book. At some point in the writing of that, when I was groping in the dark, I read something in the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit – something about figuring out what your scale is as a writer. I remember realising my scale is not a large, grand canvas. (I still hate being asked big, sociological, state-of-the-nation questions.) My scale – at least the place that I start from – is the detail. It’s something small, and it’s often sensory, physical, textural. The small, though, is not insignificant. Everything is in it.
When I was thinking about Unmastered, before I had any clue what kind of object it would become, I met with an agent who told me I’d need to ‘get in the tent’ and really ‘duke it out’ with the big hitters, the feminist titans. I think he meant that I had to really figure out my position and declare it loudly. I felt alarmed, and put that thought aside. What gradually began to emerge, when I found myself writing at odd times of night, feeling visited by images and sentences, was a much quieter book, that began in small places. I didn’t meet again with that agent.
So here I am, turning away from the big scale, from Feuerbach’s ‘formal philosophical, systematic, encyclopedic-methodological’, away from the tent, with its warring dukes. I’m turning towards what excites me – the words and images that recur in Freud and that return to me when I’m not trying too hard to write a book. Towards the fires, the surgeons, the shadows, the things that are upside down.
This is really interesting to hear! I hope you found the faith that you will find the small things no one else has their eye out for...
But they didn't notice it *now*.