How Did I Get Here? On Becoming a Psychoanalyst
In the fall of 2021 I was working labor in a very large warehouse in Harrison, New Jersey, using an 18 ton overhead crane to build the mockup of a finished apartment unit that would fit into a speculative modular building. The architects here admired the production values of Tesla, and the business fuckery of Elon and they wanted to build buildings like Elon builds cars, that is, as fast and cheap as possible, and with little to no quality control. These same architects, feeling they are doing the lord’s work, had designed one of the super-tall, very skinny residential towers that now blight the flowers down on central park. They also designed the Brooklyn super-tall tower that looks like the tower of Mordor, but that since has failed utterly, gone bankrupt, because it turns out that very few rich persons want to live above Trader Joes in downtown Brooklyn.
I was not liking the work that much, but work is work, as they say in the trades and so I did it, day after day. I was unconscious. And by that I mean that even my consciousness was not particular conscious. A creature of habit, I seemed to roll, like a tumble weed, or a flat tire, from pay check to pay check; I was the laborer alienated from myself, par excellence. What did my future have in store? I do not believe I was capable of thinking of that. Hopefully another paycheck. Meanwhile I was wearing out my knees.
As I ambled, limping, around the warehouse, drilling an endless number of pointless holes into steel beams, my friend Isak texted me a question: had I ever thought about becoming a psychoanalyst? This question struck me from out of nowhere, as the proverbial lightning bolt, and it felt like the top of my head came off: it appeared to me as a completely new thought. I stood there, holding my drill, stupefied. “You can do that?”
And yet, strangely enough, some part of me had been thinking about becoming an analyst, if only a fictional one: I had a created a twitter persona named Skog Pearson, a Swedish psychoanalyst based in Stockholm who would say things like: “fire stole man from the gods” or, “the apocalypse is our favorite dream.”
Apparently this fictional career was all that my mind was capable of imagining. At least until given a prompt by Isak and then the rest of my life seemed to spring into action. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments followed by absolute conviction. Not to say that I was particularly conscious. It was as if Isak had opened up a hole under me, and I willingly fell into it. I think I’m still falling. While I would normally have consulted the I Ching regarding such a large decision I did not do so, because I was afraid the oracle might tell me no. I made the decision to become a psycho-analyst with as little thought as possible. Deliberately so. I thought, for example, that the occupation of psycho-analyst had strong sci-fi aura to it, complete with a kind of cognitive estrangement: this obscure and arcane styling appealed to me. Could I sit with a stranger’s feelings? Who knows! It’s a growth industry, I said to myself. It’s recession proof.
Like the reflex-arc that Freud describes: the impulse to become an analyst leapt up from out of the recesses of dream and, bypassing rational thought, went straight to motor function.
I did no research nor was I aware of any other psychoanalytic institute; I did not even research this institute. I filled out the application form, collected my letters of recommendation and transcripts, compiled my sample essay, applied for student aid and enrolled in the school with nary a critical thought in my brain.
“So you are interested in the work of Hyman Spotnitz?” I was asked at the interview.
“Who?” I said.
This would remain something of a theme throughout my education: my willful ignorance of Hyman Spotnitz.
I entered analysis, not because I felt any need to analyze myself, but because the school required me to do so. This is, as Joyce MacDougal notes, a bad reason to be in analysis. Nevertheless, there I was face to face with the modern analyst in all of their incipient aggression. I have often imagined, since the beginning, that my analyst keeps a spear with which to poke me. I think they call that the toxoid response in the handbook of modern technique.
Throughout my life I have had the feeling of continually waking up; as if self-consciousness were a constant dynamic process that never completes. At times this can feel like a revelation, realizing precisely how unconscious one had been in a rare flash, a moment of acute and excruciating awakening, in which one apprehends in an instant the total brutal reality of one’s short life—only to soon return to being unconscious again. It’s like the Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime. “And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack! And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile! there is water flowing at the bottom of the ocean!”
The truth of this song is that awakening, Buddhist or otherwise, only happens inverse to the degree to which you had been unconscious. I feel awake only in proportion to just how asleep I had been. In this sense, and like Immanuel Kant, I am always waking up from my dogmatic slumber, all the time.
It is this kind of awakening I’ve experienced in my own analysis, only at the slowest pace imaginable. Something is dawning on me, it is true, but it’s an extremely slow dawn that is now entering its forth year: a four-year dawn, cut up between various regressions and bouts of nachträglichkeit.
On second thought, regarding the occult nature of the unconscious, the metaphor of dawning light is probably inadequate. Being in analysis is more like coming-to in a twilit gloaming, during the long fall of light just after the sun has set, when all of these impossible colors begin to pool up from out of the earth. One becomes aware that something enormous had happened, but one is not quite sure what it is. Then it will be night again. This is the story of modernity.
Many times in my psychoanalytic education, and usually at the end of the semester, I have moments when I will find myself reading the 66th psychoanalytic paper in three months, usually a poorly written, jargon-laden snooze-fest, and I will think to myself What is this gobbledygook? How did I get here? This is like waking up into a stupor.
As it turns out, this kind of ignorance and confusion goes with the territory, and is far more generative and useful to the training analyst than any kind of know-how, no matter how sly or comprehensive.
This is all the more true now that I have begun seeing patients: no amount of book-reading could have prepared me for this. While my education up to now has been familiar, just the same old reading and writing, seeing patients is a completely new endeavor. I have made the alarming discovery during the first sessions, to my great shock and consternation, that my patients believe me to be a professional psychoanalyst. This gives me the bewildering sensation of having arrived too-early for the first day of the rest of my life.
The impulse to become a psychoanalyst has leapt up from out of the dreamworld, arced past categorical thought, sprung motor function and I am now plunked down in front of total strangers asking for my attention and responsibility, in perpetuity. Little did I know that, as with becoming a parent, one becomes a psycho-analyst by being thrown into it. Once you begin seeing patients you become a psychoanalyst immediately; one does not wait around for a diploma or license, one is doing it, whatever it is, as soon as the patient starts talking.
So I have woken up again, just now, in the twilit foothills of a very steep learning curve, the features of which can be found in no library, for it is probably more like an unlearning curve. And the unlearning of this curve goes down, dropping down steep sidewinding paths into the haunted jungle valley of intuition.
and you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
