If I’d had to wait more than a week, I wouldn’t have turned up. Waiting was another of my phobias. Surely I would die before the appointment? Also, I knew therapy would be expensive, exhausting most of my small income. But I couldn’t see what else to do, and having nothing didn’t hurt me; it was what I was worth.
But would I ever tell him the truth?
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I walked into that room where my life changed, although I’d studied some Freud at university and also when I was in Pakistan, I had little idea what an analysis involved, and there was no one I could ask.
In the lefty house where I lived, I kept Civilisation and Its Discontents under the bed, along with my favourite pornos, Game and Readers’ Wives, though with an E. P. Thompson paperback on top of them. This was because, among the young intelligentsia, class was the paradigm. As a useful concept, it was easier to deal with, and less dangerous than sexuality. The problems of the proletariat were not caused by being born a human being and living in families but by class conflict. Once these were solved by social change, most problems would evaporate. Any difficulties left over could be solved by Maoist group discussions.
The Left could be puritanicaclass="underline" in the heaven of the far future, there would be more than enough fucking, but right now the priority was that everyone pushed for change. Freud was reviled as a white, bourgeois, patriarchal pig, and psychoanalysis was considered to be exhausted as a theory. What woman would admit to, or even accept the idea of, envying our little penises?-though that, of course, was exactly what feminism was. As Adorno wrote, “In Freudian psychoanalysis, nothing is more true than its exaggerations.”
Nonetheless, R. D. Laing-popularly known as “the Two Ronnies,” after the television comedians-was still admired by students, mad behaviour was often idealised, and numerous therapies, a mixture of Vienna and California, were emerging. I knew Lennon and Ono had screamed and rolled around with Janov, and that the great Plastic Ono Band album had been the result. But I didn’t see what any of this could do for me. What of the quietly mad, the ordinary and unphotogenically disconcerted?
Tahir Hussein told me that not knowing anything about technique was the best way to approach analysis. To drive a car you didn’t have to know what was under the bonnet.
“You’re the mechanic of souls?” I said.
He invited me to lie down on the couch and say whatever came into my mind. I did this immediately, determined not to miss the full Freudian experience. His chair was behind my head, but by his breathing I could tell he was leaning towards me, scratching his chin, waiting to hear. “The thing is…” I said.
I began: hallucinations, panic attacks, inexplicable furies, frantic passions and dreams. It seemed only a minute before he said we had to finish. When I was outside, standing on the street knowing I would return in a couple of days, waves of terror tore through me, my body disassembled, exploding. To prevent myself collapsing, I had to hold on to a lamppost. I began to defecate uncontrollably. Shit ran down my legs and into my shoes. I began to weep; then I vomited-vomiting the past. My shirt was covered in sick. My insides were on the outside; everyone could see me. It wasn’t pretty and I had ruined my suit, but something had started. I came to love my analyst more than my father. He gave me more; he saved my life; he made and remade me.
After a few sessions, when I asked him how he thought I would pay for my analysis, he only said, “You will get the money.”
This did concentrate my mind. I noticed that the man who had given me Tahir Hussein’s phone number always studied the racing papers at lunchtime but never bet on horses, even though, as he put it, he believed he could make a lot of money that way. I told him my situation so far with Tahir Hussein and asked again for his help. “Easy,” he said, giving me a tip for the following day. I slung everything I had on the nag, about two hundred pounds, saved to pay my rent, and won over two thousand pounds, which I spent on my treatment. I went three mornings a week. It was serious and intense, the first time I’d taken myself seriously, as though normally what happened to me was not worth noting, and it wasn’t a moment too soon.
My academic friend had told me that one of the virtues of psychoanalysis in England was that it had been developed not only by women but by people of all nationalities, by which he meant European. Unusually for an analyst, Tahir Hussein was a Pakistani Muslim. Tahir had a smart flat at a smart address, in South Kensington. Even as I walked there, I felt rays of hatred emanating from passersby.
Tahir’s place was full of pots and rugs and furniture that had to be polished, paintings that had to be insured and sculpture that had to be plugged in. He was extravagant too. I’d almost expected a quiet guy in a suit and bow tie. But Tahir was something of a show-off, dressed in postwar ethnic gear. He’d wear salwar kameez, a kaftan, hippy trousers, even a fez, and those slippers which curled up at the toe. I’d say, at times, that he looked more like a magician at the end of a pier than a doctor.
Nevertheless, he had the complete exotic-doctor presence and charisma. Dark-skinned, with long, greying hair, he was imperious, handsome, imposing. He must have been aware that he could seem ridiculous. Few would doubt he was arrogant, cruel, alcoholic and more than a little narcissistic. But I guess he reserved the right to be himself, as much himself as he could be. For him, as for the other hip shrinks, it wasn’t the work of analysis to make people respectable conformists but to let them be as mad as they wanted, living out and enjoying their conflicts-even if it meant suffering more-without being self-destructive. I caught on early when he quoted Pascaclass="underline" “Men are so fundamentally mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”
I fell in love with him, as I was supposed to, perhaps before I met him, and fantasised about his private life. I tried to seduce him, begging him to fuck me on the couch, while convinced that this was not something I really wanted; I took him small presents: coffee, pens, postcards, novels.
When it came to the important things, listening and interpretation, he was there, on the spot. He wasn’t one of those analysts who terrify you with their silence, sphinxes identified with their own stillness. Once he asked if I thought he talked too much, but I said no. I loved the exchange. He said that silence is a powerful tool but that it could re-create the inaccessible parent and “frantic child” scenario. So when he had something to say, he said it. Discussing Freudian theory was always considered a resistance, I knew that. But resist I would; the theory began to fascinate me.
Every time I saw him, I felt I’d moved forward in understanding; even as I rejoined the street, I’d be asking myself new questions. Gossip had it that Tahir had had affairs with his patients; apparently he’d talked on the phone while seeing them, and even went to the opera with them. But he was nothing but focused with me. Occasionally, if I asked him what he was doing that night, he would speak of his friendships with painters, dancers, poets, knowing I liked to identify with him, that this was something I wanted for myself.
After sessions he’d watch me looking at his catalogues, at his poetry books. “Take them,” he’d say. “Take anything you need.” He knew I wanted to extend my mind, having by now a thirst for intellectual matters. When I said I wanted to understand Freud and analysis, he encouraged me to read Proust, Marx, Emerson, Keats, Dostoevsky, Whitman and Blake.
He said that in most of Shakespeare’s plays there was at least one mad person, and in their madness they not only told you who they were, but they spoke important truths. He said that analysis was part of literary culture, but that literature was bigger than psychoanalysis, and swallowed it as a whale devoured a minnow. What great artist hasn’t been aware of the unconscious, which was not discovered by Freud but only mapped by him?