Abstract
Stephanie Brody approaches her extended meditation on loss, mortality, and psychoanalysis through the lens of storytelling. The genesis of the book emerged from an unlikely place. Brody enrolled in a community education class on the Odyssey with Dr. Michael Fiveash, a recently retired teacher at the public high school in Lexington, Massachusetts.
She found him an inspired and inspiring teacher, “simply the best teacher I had ever encountered” (p. 1). Brody took four classes with Fiveash, in which she found a resonance between stories in the tradition of the classics and psychoanalysis: The concepts of storytelling, the oral tradition, and the development of character, the effort to achieve a life of kelos
Brody had previously published two of the chapters included in this volume, and as she began to construct a framework for the book, she imagined that Dr. Fiveash would serve as her consultant and guide. Two weeks after she signed the book contract, however, he became very ill and died. “That I decided to go forward anyway could only be regarded as an act of personal necessity: I wrote in a fever of mourning” (p. 2). An elegiac tone pervades the book. Let me say here that I believe Brody is making an assumption, rather than a strong case, regarding the resonance between storytelling in the classic vein and psychoanalysis. I feel that Brody has written two books, which run in parallel. One is about the effect on her, and on her psychoanalytic thinking, of her immersion in these stories. The other is a more traditional book about loss and resilience in psychoanalysis, as her subtitle suggests. These two projects sit somewhat uneasily side by side.
Brody begins the book with a brief description of each chapter. The chapters follow a pattern—an essay or series of reflections followed by a clinical vignette that speaks to the concept under consideration. It’s an interesting arrangement—one that does not immediately seem intuitive, as the tone and writing style in each mode are quite different, as befits my experience of two books in one. The reflections that precede the vignette are the heart of the book that Brody set out to write. More memoir than clinical text, this part of the book could stand alone, I believe, a personal memoir of mourning and healing through immersion in literature. It must be said as well that the clinical vignettes are uniformly excellent—potentially helpful to beginners exploring the terrain of loss, mortality, and mourning in clinical work, and of genuine interest to experienced clinicians also. These vignettes fit well with Brody’s later reflections on analytic technique and self-disclosure, and are more aligned with her subtitle than the personal reflections preceding each vignette.
Chapter 1 is titled “The Subtle Art of Psychoanalysis.” Here Brody announces her theme, the awareness of life’s limitations. She introduces the concept of liminality—“the capacity to be betwixt and between”—which she uses to anchor much of her thinking throughout the book. She begins by describing her response to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a book written for teenagers based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The two main characters are Lyra, a heroine who can uncannily read the truth of others, and Will, her companion, who owns a “subtle knife . . . a holy weapon, capable of opening doors to parallel worlds” (p. 7). These two characters speak to Brody’s interest in resilience, but this is not made explicit. Brody’s attraction to this book and these characters will give prospective readers a feeling for the kinds of writing and parallels that Brody explores throughout the book. Like the concept of liminality, Will’s subtle knife becomes an anchoring point for Brody. “To me, the subtle knife is a metaphor that describes an aspect of the psychoanalytic process. In the analytic dyad, we co-create a relational, affective container in which emotional memory is observed, held, and processed. And then, just like Will with his subtle knife, we open up that container” (p. 9). Thus Brody announces herself as one who has found her anchor in relational concepts. (Indeed, the book was published in Donnel Stern’s Psychoanalysis in a new Key series.) Will and Lyra also seem to stand for the resilience mentioned in the book’s subtitle, but again this could be stated more directly.
In chapter 2, “The Pearl Fishers,” Brody describes the psychoanalytic relationship, emphasizing the commitment to intimacy, risk, and the need for a setting that provides boundaries and safety. Her tone is both poetic and earnest. She describes the beginnings of new relationships as the Golden Age, with reference to “the flow of possibility, the excitement of arrival, and the comfort of fit . . . a time of possibility and innocence” (p. 22). She compares this golden age to Camelot, and to “Aurea Aetas, the imagined state of perfection, harmony, and prosperity at the beginning of the world, the way the ancients ascribed the Golden Age” (p. 22). After an extended description of the daemon’s empathic qualities, Brody inquires, “Do we strive, as analysts, to become the daemon to our patients?” (p. 27). The reader will recognize that Brody writes and thinks in the romantic mode, yet her many references to the tragic literary classics inaugurate and permeate this book: Each of these epic stories ends with a loss, and the pain of unfathomable grief. Resonating with the fear of the solitary we seek the solace of contact with the perfect other—attuned, bearing knowledge, exquisitely attached. Each of us is, perhaps, seeking a return to the womb-like embrace—an embedded awareness of life before consciousness. A kind of seamless sleep before birth brings us to this life. When there is no separation until the cord is cut [p. 23].
I found it hard to reconcile Brody’s romantic tone with her focus on the tragedy of loss with which we all live.
When I came to Brody’s first clinical vignette, I found a skilled clinician who was able to bear her patient’s rage when she does not forgive a fee. “You had every right to want me to forgive the fee, and I might have done that if I had been afraid of your anger, of you being angry at me. It wasn’t part of any plan, but it happened, and so I realized you would be angry. But I didn’t want to avoid that. It’s where we were, where we have to go. I guess I felt that we could bear it and it wouldn’t destroy us, or me. I want you to be your whole self with me” (p. 32).
Chapter 7, which shares the book’s main title, is the fulcrum of the work. “Night country has always been within me,” Brody writes. “Tugging, inviting, penetrating. The writing quells my dread—it is a useful tactic for someone like me” (p. 91). The Night Country is a memoir by the naturalist Loren Eiseley, given to Brody by a supervisor early in her career before she was able to make sense of the memoir form. She finds herself turning to it now, many years later, in her grief. “It begins with a benign childhood wandering that leads to a terrifying entrapment in a dark submerged culvert” (p. 91). Eiseley introduced her to a dark world, and a new way of writing that abandons conventional narrative. Brody describes the contradiction she experienced in writing this chapter: And now, the only thing that is clear to me is the contradiction. I am a deeply private person, writing about self-disclosure. This disclosure did not emerge out of an enactment constructed within a therapeutic dyad. I was forced to disclose a personal fact that arrived on my professional doorstep unbidden, unwelcome, unexpected. I say forced, because I felt I had no choice. . . . Without warning, after surgery to remove a parotid gland tumor, I received my surprise. Unexpectedly, the tumor was malignant and I required radiation. I had cancer [p. 92].
This disclosure startled me. I expected Brody to continue writing about the loss of her dear teacher, or perhaps her memories of her father, to which she alluded earlier in the book. Perhaps my reaction repeats Brody’s shock at this confrontation with mortality, and the shock of her patients when told. I remember a patient, many years ago, who suddenly opened her blouse to show me the scar from her mastectomy—her need for me to see, but also, I felt, to shock me as she had been shocked by the sight of her damaged body. Much of this chapter takes up the question of self-disclosure, a topic that has drawn Brody’s interest in the past. But this felt different to her. It involved a personal fact that she did not feel she should hide, in part because treatment would mean absences that required explanation. Her cancer was never life-threatening, she writes, and is unlikely to return.
A colleague encouraged Brody to write about her experience when the treatment was over, but she thought it would be too hard. “And it was.” She continues: “I have chiseled this out of the hard rock of my resistance. This knife did not cut through easily—the boundary between the worlds of fantasy and reality, of the psychoanalytic worlds created with my patients, were different each time” (p. 93). After this anguished, determined beginning, Brody devotes the chapter to her experiences with self-disclosure of her cancer to her patients, with detailed clinical vignettes. She quotes a number of analytic theorists who have written on this subject (Aron, Bromberg, Mitchell, and Cooper, among others) as she investigates the rationale for self-disclosure with each patient, and examines it as an analytic technique. She also acknowledges that while she spoke of her illness with trusted supervisors and with her patients, she was extremely guarded about making her medical situation public, unsure about the response of colleagues, and whether or how this knowledge would affect her practice. “But this is what I have come to know,” she writes: Within our field, there is an absence. There are no rules for public disclosure; there is no framework within which to understand and explore the source of a colleague’s curiosity or fantasy, or a distortion or rumor about another colleague. Once the information was out of my mouth, there could be no guarantees, or assurances. . . . Even though we know how essential it is for us to have safety in order to bear the inevitability of life’s vicissitudes and the unique, sometimes flawed attributes that make us who we are, we have trouble creating safety in our own analytic community [p. 108].
Asking herself how we as analysts can address this gap, Brody ends up by suggesting that this is “the moment of our developmental penetration” (p. 108). I’m not sure what this phrase means, but she describes it as the moment of our acute dilemma, the desire for omnipotence and the painful reality of our essential vulnerability. Wisely, Brody does not attempt to resolve questions about issues of privacy or disclosure in the public community, but she has provided a useful framework for thinking about this. I can imagine this chapter being part of a curriculum on technique, as well as a basis for a more general discussion within institutes.
Brody concludes with the anniversary of her beloved teacher’s death, and links this loss to her early knowledge of her father’s impending death. “It was only one year ago that the news of my teacher’s illness arrived. The dread and helplessness, this summer light, reminding me of a time, decades earlier, knowing somehow that my father was ill. That this birthday would be the last. The frantic hope for miraculous cure was quickly replaced by the dominating reality” (p. 156). This disclosure does not come as a surprise. Somehow we begin to anticipate this as we read, through a few scattered clues, and as we witness the depth of her distress over her teacher’s death. Brody concludes: “The psychoanalytic song, the liminal space that we share with our patients, is my form of this ancient tradition. This intimacy of psychoanalysis is lit in the dark night by the human fire of contact and connection where a story is shared, where a song of grief is composed and sung. It is the ever-changing dialogue that measures out life from the first cry of grief to the enduring losses” (p. 160). As I noted earlier, Brody’s view of the analytic experience is a romantic one, colored by her love of myth and story. “Take your travelers, Lyra the truth teller and brave Athena. Bring your poems and stories. Hold tight. Consolation is the only cure for mourning but, unlike the immortal elixir, it can be found” (p. 160). We may not agree with this cri de coeur—with its call to myth and story, its insistence on successful mourning. We can note that Brody fails to reckon with the possibility of analytic failure. But this is not Brody’s project. On finishing this book we will have taken an unusual journey through grief and the byways of loss through one analyst’s experience.