Also, he’d say: My profession is not, and should not be considered, a straight science. It was impossible for Freud to say that he cured people by poetry. Yet observe the important figures and see how like poets they are, with their speculative jumps and metaphors: Jung, Ferenczi, Klein, Balint, Lacan, each singing his own developmental story, particular passion and aesthetic. Their differing views don’t cancel each other out but exist side by side, like the works of Titian and Rembrandt.
Of course, at the beginning of the analysis, there was something we both had to overcome, something sombre I had to talk about. But I wanted to know him a little, to know I could trust him, and myself, before I laid what I called my “son of night” murder story on him.
His virtue, I discovered, was that he could speak deeply to me, that he seemed to understand me. He talked to the part of me that was like a baby. It was like being addressed by a kind father who could see all your fears and fantasies, and was entirely committed to your welfare. How did he have such knowledge of me? Where did it come from? I wanted to be like him, to have such an impressive effect on another human being. I still do.
I always thought of myself as a speedy person, uptight, impatient, getting anxious easily. With him I could let myself relax. What was I in love with? The quality of the silence between us. Sometimes fear makes no sound, I thought, as we sat there, combing through it all, Mother, Father, Sister, Ajita, Mustaq, Wolf, Valentin. Him leaning towards me, with just a side light on, during those dismal, wet London mornings, as people rushed to work. But this was a good, loving silence, minutes long, supporting peace between people, not the sort of silence that made you unruly with anxiety.
“Was it a noisy house you grew up in?” he asked. “But yes,” I said. When I did turn and look at him, he inevitably had a look of amusement on his face. Not that he found human suffering entertaining, even when it was self-inflicted, as he knew it mostly was. He was showing me he knew it went on. “Illness is lack of inspiration,” he’d say.
Before I began analysis, I’d had a dream which had disturbed me for days. It was like a Surrealist painting. I was standing alone in an empty room with my arms by my sides and scores of wasps in my hair, making a tremendous noise. Although I was standing by a door, a man with a head full of wasps cannot either move or much consider his emotional geography.
The “wasps,” of course, were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among other things, and once we began to discuss it, the image opened up numerous possibilities. Analysis didn’t “cure” my mind, then, of its furies and darkness, but it brought these effects into play, making them real questions for me, worth bothering with and part of my lived life, rather than something I hoped would just go away. For Tahir, the wasps represented something. If I could find meaning there, I could increase my engagement with myself, and with the world. The wasps were asking useful questions, ones worth pursuing. Despite the tremendous grief of depression, Tahir spoke of the “value” and “opportunity” of the illness.
So it was, I found, that analysis creates interest, and makes life. I never left a session with nothing to think about. I’d sit in a café and make pages of notes, continuing to free-associate and work on my dreams.
I had already studied The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilisation and Its Discontents, but now I began to read up on how Freud first began to listen to the words and stories of the mentally distressed, something that had never been done before. He found that if he concentrated on their self-accounts, the trail inevitably led back to their pleasure.
For Freud, as for any other poet, words, the patient’s spoken words and those of the analyst, were magic; they brought about change. I was gripped. Fortunately, working in the museum, I had access to all the books I wanted. If a reader requested a particular volume I was working on, I could say it had been lost. I’d sit on the floor in a faraway tunnel in the library and read; then I’d conceal the book until I returned. I reread Freud’s “book of dreams” as a guide to the night, making going to bed the day’s most worthwhile experience.
I adored the practice of two intelligent people sitting together for hours, days, weeks, maybe years, sifting through the minutiae of experience for significant dross, peering into the furthest corner of a dream for a coded truth. The concentration, the intensity: analysis was not a moment too soon for me. What compelled me was the depth of the everyday, how much there was in the most meaningless gesture or word. It was where a person’s history met the common world. Like a novelist, this way I could make meaning and take interest from the mundane, from the stories I liked to hear.
It seemed to me that Tahir and I had both been talking a lot, working on a deep excavation. Miriam’s understandable hatred of me as a child; her howling, psychotic violence and her attempt to keep Mother away from me, for herself; the feeling I had of being alone, having been abandoned by both parents, Kafka’s wounded beetle hiding under the bed.
But one day, after a long silence, Tahir said, “Do you have something to tell me?”
That was it! I believed he was implying that he knew I was leaving out the most important thing.
I had lost my capacity for happiness. The truth was I had murdered a man. Not in fantasy, as so many have, but in reality, and not long ago. In the end I could only measure Tahir Hussein in terms of that: whether I could trust him, or whether I would go to jail. I had told no one my secret, though often I was tempted, in one of the putrid pubs I went to most nights after work, to unburden myself to some soak who’d forget my story by morning. But I was smart enough to know it wouldn’t help me with my loss.
The murdered man wouldn’t let me go that easily. He clung to me, his fingernails in my flesh. I would wake up staring into the flickering fright of his doomed eyes. The past rode on my back like a devil, poking me, covering my eyes and ears for its sport as I puffed along, continuously reminding me of its existence. The world is as it is: it’s our fantasies which terrify; they are the Thing.
My mind had begun to feel like an alien object within my skulclass="underline" I wanted to pluck it out and throw it from a bridge. Books couldn’t help me; nor could drugs or alcohol. I couldn’t free my mind by working on my mind with my mind. I thought: light the touch paper and see. Will it blow up my life or ignite a depth charge in my frozen history? Could I rely on another person?
Finally, I was forced to do the right thing. I would throw myself on his mercy and take the consequences. One morning, after making up my mind, I told Tahir Hussein the truth. How would the analysis ever work if I repressed such a momentous event? So Tahir heard about the physical symptoms, the shaking and paranoia. He heard about the dreams of the dying eyes staring at me. He heard about Wolf, Valentin, Ajita. He heard about the death.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He said, simply, straightaway, that some people deserve a whack on the head. I’d done the world a service, offing this pig who was bad beyond belief. It didn’t stop me being a human being. It was only a “little” murder. He didn’t seem to think I was going to make a habit of it, or go professional.
What a relief it was to have my secret safely hidden in the open! Tahir was worried about my temptation to confess and then be caught, my need to be punished, as well as the temptation to have everyone know me. To conceal is to reveal. Most murderers, he said, actively lead the police to the scene of the crime, so preoccupied are they with their victims. Raskolnikov not only returns to the crime scene, but wishes to rent a room in the “house of murder.”
Tahir was the only person I told. I was desperate at the time, and now Tahir is dead, along with the secret which will never be uncovered, the secret which had been turning my soul septic, until I couldn’t proceed alone. After Tahir, with my two other analysts, I kept it to myself. It wouldn’t reflect well on my career prospects.