CRITICA

Ok, good morning to myself and to Kathy and to the world.  I feel like I’m having an inkling of waking up.  It’s been very obscure and my vision of myself has been very shadowed by this mysterious arrival of a brain block, if that’s the most direct way of putting it.  I haven’t really understood it for understandable reasons.  The changes in my brain have made me lose a certain sense of direction and my confidence has kind of slipped away, almost outside of my awareness as well.  I think there have been some significant changes in my brain or something like that has robbed me of my acuity and thoughtfulness and yet I still have a considerable creativity in me, even talking as I am into this target of reception.  I still have that and it’s been monumental for me that Kathy has been so appreciative and supportive during this reorganization of who I am. It’s a very strange experience to have the kinds of things I used to be able to do very easily and quickly have slipped away, and I live in a muddle at times in terms of my thinking and when I have a wake-up call like I’ve had this morning, like these drops of awareness of the changes that have taken place in my brain I think it has left me depressed, confused and angry and yet there have been shades of considerable creativity that also seem to come to me, even as I speak into this plastic screen that there is way more to me than I even realized was missing.  So, this is a very drip drop experience of little changes in my self-awareness.  And I wanted to get through with this bitterness and anger and frustration and recognize that these are limitations, and they also are not rigid to the degree that I can’t find moments and days of lucidity.  So, I am pleased to be able to have these weird wake-up calls, literally with a thought that there’s another me that has been existing, hiding out or withdrawing and fearful that I have lost a certain capacity that I used to have and hopefully it does seem to appear from time to time like what I’m doing now. This is a kind of wake-up.  This is a kind of leakage – a wake-up leak.  The world is much more accessible than I believed and it has been that way that things stick in my mind that have not left but when Kathy in her caring and also frustration says to me ‘you have a condition’ which I resent hugely.  I do have a condition and it’s been very hard to recognize its presence because it’s embedded in my personality and my brain and I feel this is a kind of wake-up moment that I’m trying to recognize the limitations that have come with it on and off, in those procedures of visitation and disappearance.  I have been in a rage and a depression.  I guess they are cousins: rage and depression. (At this moment, Marc’s attention is drawn to a driverless car on the street). I see a car being driven by nobody, just passing in front of me and I think I have been like that car – you look at it and say there’s no driver there.  You wonder what the fuck is going on and this is a kind of parallel experience.  There has been no driver in my brain in a certain way. I have ideas that come to me and so when Kathy has been so appreciative and I value it.  It’s the core of my survival.  It’s also exciting to me that I’m waking up in a very slow laborious patched up way as to who I might be.  There’s an opportunity which Kathy helps me grab onto.  I don’t want to get carried away. I distrust my brain. I was listening to Kathy talking to what’s-her-name about seeing something in me.  Like there’s somebody at home.  I kind of connected to it, in other ways I am a stranger to it.  

Kathy and Marc are my oldest, beloved friends. Not just friends, but inspirational role models as humans, as parents, as partners. They came into my life on the cusp of my adulthood, when I had become prematurely certain that love, respect, joy, continuity, equality, working through conflicts, creativity, and ongoing growth couldn’t possibly exist in a marriage let alone within an entire nuclear family. Least of all in a family headed by two psychoanalytic psychotherapists. One of Marc’s superpowers has been to harness countertransference in a most inimitable, wordsmithy, often hilarious way. When I was a nascent therapist-in-training out to dinner with Kathy and Marc, I would share a snippet of a reaction to an adolescent client I was seeing at the time (providing zero details about the client themself). Marc would pepper me with what appeared to be random questions, when in fact they were the churnings of his associations to my countertransferential aesthetics. Soon enough, he would come up with a tale about my treatment relationship, such as, “Shelly has become your mother who you want to step on and crush, so you made her into a diminutive, helpless bug-Shelby Bug!” Zing, my most hidden vulnerabilities exposed, touched, held and reframed by him in a way that engendered faith that even the most unsavory truths could be upcycled into something usable. For decades, he taught classes, consulted on, and wrote about making use of countertransference in treatment and in supervision. He offered his gifts generously, which made me that much more appreciative of how he seemed to take the greatest of pleasure in the creative relationship he had with his words and his psychic productions. 

When I have a wake-up call like I’ve had this morning, like these drops of awareness of the changes that have taken place in my brain I think it has left me depressed, confused and angry and yet there have been shades of considerable creativity that also seem to come to me, even as I speak into this plastic screen <iPhone> that there is way more to me than I even realized was missing, Marc goes on. The template of creativity and self-awareness that psychoanalysis co-fostered in him is a through line, just as Kathy is. These two powerful forces-psychoanalysis and Kathy’s love-have become part of his infrastructure. They have co-created discernible routes to his mind and to his heart, even as the fog of ‘a brain block’ has set in. Out of what would seem to be the most terrifying loss, something new comes about. As Thomas Ogden writes in Borges and the Art of Mourning (2000), “Mourning is not simply a form of psychological work; it is a process centrally involving making something, creating something adequate to the experience of loss…to be equal to, to do justice to, the fullness and complexity of his or her relationship to what has been lost and to the experience of loss itself…a voice brought to life in the experiencing of that loss” (p. 66, 86). 

Marc struggles to make cohesive contact with the precious pleasure of using his mind to play with words and associations. He has advanced Lewy Body dementia. Kathy cares for him at home. (Correction: they care for each other, just as they have done for the past six decades.) The italicized passage at the start of this essay is a transcription of his reflections spoken into a ‘target of reception’ (aka, iPhone audio recorder). In this monologue, his ability to gather his senses to create a narrative, cultivated throughout his lifetime, is palpable. This brings me to tears. Not just sad tears, though. Maria Stepanova says (2023), “…memory is not an ability or a capability. It is not a skill. It is a country. It is a space to move through. Every small person is taking her own route and sometimes the route might be quite misleading…” If I think of Marc’s memory of himself as he used to be juxtaposed with who he is now as a space, I feel he is just like the rest of us, muddling around in our respective countries, sometimes on what we think is the correct route, sometimes entirely misled. Perhaps in reconstructing my perceptions about my younger self, or about the world at large, for that matter, I am way more off track than I am able to recognize. In Marc’s words, I see laser-sharp discernment: The changes in my brain have made me lose a certain sense of direction and my confidence has kind of slipped away, almost outside of my awareness. He knows what he doesn’t know and no longer possesses, that his confidence and his awareness have slipped away. And yet, he is not only aware of that slippage, he knows how he feels about it: I have been in a rage and a depression.  I guess they are cousins: rage and depression.

Marc feels he is like a driverless car where nobody is there, and wonders what the fuck is going on. He relies on his ‘wake-up leaks’, moments of lucidity when he can notice and reflect upon the cataclysmal realities. Those in themselves are paradoxically generative spaces, where he can feel his fucking aliveness. Death and loss have always been attendant to the bargain of living. Many of us are fortunate enough to be able to choose to maintain agency, to show up for ourselves and others, however painful. Even though devastating dispossession is part of what we must face when we open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds. I don’t want to foreclose as I started to do as a young adult when I pronounced the institutions of partnership and family as futile. I want to choose to be fully awake to all of the possibilities. Otherwise, I would miss out on the beauty, vitality, and connection which emerges from loss. Creativity spawning from loss can only be sowed under the conditions of aliveness.

References

Ogden T: Borges and the art of mourning. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2000; 65-88.

Stepanova M: Memory is an ability to collect things. YouTube 2023. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7G_Mju7aJw