Then it started: I began to see my first patients, and I soon learned that listening to another person was almost the hardest task you could attempt. Tahir had taught me that the truth wasn’t hidden behind a locked door in a dungeon called “the unconscious,” but that it was right there, in front of the patient and analyst, waiting to be heard. The lost object was the key to the language. Freud said one should attend to the unconscious with “evenly suspended attention.” The therapist’s unconscious was the useful tool here, along with the free play of his associations and fantasy. The interpretation, when it came, had to be like a surgeon’s incision, in the right place at the right time.
Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love. But, sitting with my first analysands, trying to bear the anxiety of hearing someone unknown, whose dreams and ramblings I could not comprehend, I felt, at times, as though I were trying to decode The Waste Land at a first reading. I’d even hate the patients and my own clumsiness, as I became dragged into the vortex of their passion, of the spume and irruption of their unconscious. I’d want to flee the room, wondering who was more afraid, analysand or analyst. I was having to learn that this fear-on both sides-was part of the anxiety of hearing the new. It was patient work, learning patience, developing my analytic instinct, creating the time and space so the analysand could hear, or meet, herself. This was how, in the end, I trained myself.
I would go and talk to Tahir about it, and although he was drinking then, and often argumentative-he could be infuriated by the theories of other analysts, particularly Lacan, Freud’s most significant heir-he had important and urgent things to pass on. Unintentionally, during a recent session, because I was tired, I’d found myself in more of a reverie than I was used to. Yet this hadn’t made anything worse. Tahir said I’d hit on something usefuclass="underline" my unconscious was more closely in touch with that of the other if I didn’t try too hard to understand. I had a tendency, he said, to overtheorise, and to decide too quickly what was going on.
He made me aware, too, that I was part of a tradition of listening. As Schoenberg had gone to Mahler for instruction and guidance, as T. S. Eliot had turned to Pound, so the analysts had handed down learning and procedure. Tahir had been trained by the great child-analyst Winnicott, who in his turn had been analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, both of whom had been analysed by Freud. Having so little knowledge of my sub-continental family history-the Indian threads being severed by Father’s death-I had little sense of my connection to the past. Being an analyst joined me to another tradition, to another family, which would “hold” me during the insecurity of my training.
As my career started, Karen’s faltered. It was a bad day for her when it became obvious she was no good on television, being too nervy. Her big eyes made her look homicidal. Even when she wasn’t on cocaine, she was like someone on cocaine, about to burst out of the screen and bite into your windpipe. She was quick enough to know that power in the media rested with the producers, not the presenters, and began to work as an associate producer on a youth programme. I even went along to the studio a few times. What was happening to the world? Young presenters virtually naked, teenage bands, puerile jokes, pranks, interviews with idiots.
“Don’t you like it?” she said. “Perhaps you weren’t stoned enough to relax.”
I’d used LSD in my teens, but found the effects of an acid inferno lasted too long, a horror movie you couldn’t walk out of. I’d had more than enough adventures in my own head. But working on youth programmes, Karen heard of a new, less solipsistic drug being used in New York clubs, called Ecstasy or E. It took us a while to track some down; it was hard to get in London then. We started to hold Ecstasy parties in her flat, where she had a large circular bath. She liked the new pop: Sade, Tina Turner, the Police, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics. I didn’t wake up wanting to hear a new record until later, when Massive Attack released Blue Lines-“you’re the book I have open”-during the first Gulf War.
Nights and nights on E, our pupils spinning in what I considered pure hedonism, with the guilt and anxiety it brought-for which I would compensate with days of heavy study-had me thinking about the uses and difficulties of pleasure, the whole question of jouissance in a person’s life. Ecstasy connected me with others; it made me want to talk, as I disappeared into the dreadful voice of ultimate pleasure, a cheap ticket to the place mystics and psychotics have always headed for.
The music was loud, and the talk facile. Not only that, to prolong the buzz we’d take cocaine, which messed us up. Big new clubs were opening, with huge sound systems, run and owned by public school boys who were turning the “underground” into the Thatcherite market overnight. After a time I realised that Karen had more tolerance for these places than I did. Unlike most of the kids there, Karen wasn’t committed to the project of unwinding and losing the self. She was at work: observing the clothes, the attitude, while going to the bathroom to note down the words being used. She wanted to turn it all into television.
We went to New York for “meetings.” I stood on the roof of the hotel looking out at the glittering city for the first time. We began a frantic round of clubs, bars and the famous Knitting Factory. While I wanted to hunt through the numerous secondhand bookshops on the Upper West Side for obscure psychoanalytic books, she was buying us cocaine and trying to get us invited to parties with what she called “atmosphere.” Londoners, being more cynical and knowing then, were less gullible when it came to celebrity. I began to dislike her; I felt dragged along, like a recalcitrant child, and, back in London, made it clear I didn’t want to live with her.
Karen was becoming tougher, someone you wouldn’t want to work for, as she developed a flair for sacking people. “Had to be done,” she’d say as another loser limped out the door. For Karen, if anyone suffered, it was their own fault; even if you were a persecuted black South African with no human rights, you had somehow brought the badness on yourself. After a while her callousness stopped bothering me because I saw how unbearable it was to her that anyone would hurt anyone else. For her, because it was unbearable it was untrue, and she didn’t have to look at it.
The part of the day we most enjoyed together was breakfast, which we’d have in a Soho café, usually the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, after picking up the tabloids. The shameless Sun was in its prime-the royal family helpless before it-and the other papers imitated it. We’d read bits out to one another, screaming with laughter at the prose. This was before most people realised that the person who’d have the most influence over our time would be Rupert Murdoch-the author of the celebrity culture we inhabit, and clever enough to avoid it himself.
The newspapers were the first to turn wholeheartedly to trash. It hadn’t yet reached TV, except through youth programming, where Karen and her pals encouraged nonentities to eat maggots-“faggots gobbling maggots: What could be more entertaining?”-or share a bath with eels or-why not?-with animal and human faeces. The next day these newly minted celebs would appear in the newspapers, having spent the night with a soap star. Television was now watching us, rather than the other way round.
The papers would celebrate and then desecrate the new stars. I had never liked the punks, but this kind of anarchistic, republican amorality appealed to me at times-I guess it was the lack of respect for authority, its destructiveness. At the same time it fitted with the liberal economics of Thatcher. Who could not be amused by the fact that the capitalism unleashed by the Conservatives under Thatcher was destroying the very social values the party espoused?