Lydia Davis: What She Knew

I’ve been thinking about identity and the internalised object following the PsyLitFilm symposium at Sussex University on Monday. I’ve been wondering, in particular, about a Lydia Davis vignette used to illustrate a loss of perception between the interior and the exterior in a paper given by Professor Josh Cohen on Bion and Laplanche and externalisation in literature and psychoanalysis. Here is the vignette:

What She Knew

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

It’s only four sentences – a wisp of smoke, maybe – but there’s so much happening that it seems a shame to stop at using it to make one point about a problematic situation: a young woman who has not been able to communicate all of herself to a young man and the resulting breakdown between a “perfect” interior and an “imperfect” exterior. It’s amusing for a start. If the young woman is conscious of her external identity and if she is so acutely aware of the object she has internalised that she can describe his characteristics, then it is not really necessary for her to ask herself why the young man is interested in her, except to draw on irony when he flirts with her. There is also a suggestion that the internalised object is a changeable entity. That the object is “often a fat man” tells us that sometimes he is not – he might be a thin man or a muscular man, or even a woman. That he is “more often, probably, an old man” implies that he might be a young man, or, perhaps, a young or old woman during the times when he is “more often, probably” not an old man. The old, fat man isn’t therefore a prisoner of the young woman, or vice versa, if the object shifts and changes – perhaps as quickly as it takes to follow the meaning of the sentences. And what about the internalised object of the young man? Maybe it’s an old woman? Or a young woman? Or maybe not. Maybe the young man is as he appears. Maybe he is even aware of the young woman’s internalised object when he flirts with her. Maybe she knows he knows this too and this is why she finds it difficult to talk to him.

The Dawkins Argument

I have been asked to clarify why Professor Richard Dawkins’ views on sexual abuse in The God Delusion are particularly infuriating, so I will:

Presumably in an attempt to argue that mental abuse can be more devastating than physical abuse, Dawkins tries to compare the psychological fallout upon victims of both. He uses testimonies from people with lifelong mental scars following a childhood spent within the confines of a religious order where teachers would torment children with vivid descriptions of hell fires. He also quotes a woman who was sexually assaulted by a priest, but who said the experience paled against the psychological abuse of hell and damnation administered by the nuns. Dawkins then draws on his own childhood, adding, in the space of a sentence, that he too had an experience with a teacher when he was a schoolboy, but it didn’t do him any harm.

I think Dawkins was fortunate that he didn’t suffer long term. I know of people who have had years taken out of their lives because of the long-term effects of sexual abuse. I struggle to understand how Dawkins cannot be aware of people who do suffer for years, decades or even lifetimes, and I think pitting paedophilia against religious psychological abuse where the latter is argued as the winner in terms of lasting devastation is a very poorly chosen method of illustrating the point he was trying to make.

It reminds me of Martin Sherman’s play Bent, which Daniel Kramer produced at Trafalgar Studios in the West End in 2006 starring the fantastic Alan Cumming. The play was about the inhumane brutality inflicted upon homosexuals at the hands of the Nazis. Sherman would have driven his point home more effectively if he hadn’t decided to suggest that the torture suffered by gay men was worse than that of any other prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp. In a review I wrote of the play at the time I asked (rhetorically) how it was possible to measure differing levels of suffering among men, women and children in a Nazi concentration camp.

I have since read a chapter in a book called The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis in which the incredibly thorough Dr Louise Braddock informs readers that determining levels of psychological suffering is something one learns to perceive through training, but I digress.

The Myersons' Muse

Writers Julie and Jonathan Myerson splashing their son’s troubles all over the nationals to promote their work reminds me of one of the most haunting tales of mother/child animosity. When I first came across psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, I was fascinated by her work. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the price she paid for using her kids as copy. When Melanie Klein was buried in 1960, her daughter Melitta Schmideberg was across town delivering a lecture wearing brilliantly bright red boots, "perhaps the better to dance on her mother’s grave", it is said.