VI

Desire Path

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Psychoanalysis and landscape as interchangeable metaphors

 

Oh! Blessed rage for order

‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, Wallace Stevens

 

 

I first noticed it on the map; a vast tram track through the countryside: two parallel incisions. The Old and New Bedford rivers. I had been looking for somewhere to begin to explore that lone and level land that stretches from the Brecks in the east to the rolling hills past Peterborough in the west, Cambridge to the south, Kings Lynn to the north.
 

I had no idea of the submerged wreck I had struck upon.
 

Today it is a landscape of lines. There is the One Hundred Foot Drain itself of course, twenty-two miles of parallel drainage ditches, but also the grooves of the ploughs over the thousands of hectares of undifferentiated arable farmland that are visible from the water’s raised banks. The Drain is also bisected by a set of pylons; because the land here is so flat you can see for perhaps fifteen miles and thus you can count easily thirty pylons in either direction. Drain, pylon, horizon: like an elementary lesson in perspective. I found myself wondering if there was something wrong; was this landscape saying something which I was struggling to hear. Might it be worth listening to this place in ways with which I am familiar in another context? I want to know how it came to be like this, who gave birth to it and raised it. I want to know about its traumas, its catastrophes.
 

Metaphors are never innocent. Freud concludes section 31 of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, entitled ‘Dissection of the Personality’, with the famous dictum: ‘Where id was, there ego shall be.’ What is in fact the final line of the lecture occurs immediately after this and is less often quoted: ‘It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.’ The Zuider Zee – literally Southern Sea – is an inlet to the North of Amsterdam part of which was drained in the early 20th century to create a landmass on which around 400,000 people now live. The image thus created by Freud conceives the purpose of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as the reclamation of the uninhabitable wetland of the unconscious and its replacement by a hospitable dry ego.

 

Shifting the vehicle and the tenor of his metaphor we might also note that wetlands are perhaps the most vulnerable ecosystem. They are vital for human survival and among the world’s most productive environments; they are cradles of biological diversity that provide the water and productivity upon which countless species of plants and animals depend for survival.

 

So we might rephrase all this once again: What is the relationship between the scientific ambitions of psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it and the industrial and technological forces which made possible the conditions of climate change, of environmental destruction? When does psychoanalysis look to landscape for metaphors? When might a landscape be amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation?

 

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William Camden wrote Britannia in 1586. It was expanded in 1607 and translated in 1610. I quote at length his description of the Fenland prior to its drainage as an act of remembrance:

They that inhabited this fennish Country and all the rest beside (which from the edge and borders of Suffolke, as farre as to Winflet in Lincolnshire conteineth three score and eight miles and millions of acres lying in these foure Shires, Cambridge, Huntingdon, North-hampton and Lincolne) were in the Saxons time called Girvii , that is, as some interpret it, Fen-men or Fen-dwellers. A kinde of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell rude, uncivill, and envious to all others whom they call Upland-men , who, stalking high upon stilts, apply their mindes to grasing, fishing and fowling. The whole region it selfe, which in winter season and sometime most part of the yeare is overflowed by the spreading waters of the rivers Ouse, Grant, Nen, Welland, Glene, and Witham, having not loades [ditches] and sewers large enough to voide away. But againe when their streames are retired within their owne chanels, it is so plenteous and ranke of a certaine fatte grosse and full hey (which they call Lid), that when they have mowen downe as much with the better as well serve their turnes, they set fire on the rest and burne it in November, that it may come up againe in greater abundance. At which time a man may see this fennish and moist tract on a light flaming fire all over every way, and wonder thereat. Great plenty it hath besides of turfe and sedge for the maintenance of fire; of reed also for to thatch their houses, yea and of alders, beside other waterie shrubs. But chiefly it bringeth forth exceeding store of willowes both naturally and also for that, being planted by mans hand, they have served in good steed, and often cut downe, with their manifold encrease and infinit number of heires (to use Plinies word) against the violent force of the waters rushing against the bankes.

A few pages further on Camden sounds a prophetic note of warning:

14. As touching the drying up of this Fenny country, what discourse and arguing oftentimes there hath bene either by way of sound and holsome counsaile, or of a goodly pretence and shew of a common good, even in the High Court of Parliament, I list not to relate. But it is to be feared least (that which often hath happened to the Pontine Marishes of Italie) it would come againe to the former state. So that many think it the wisest and best course according to the sage admonition in like case of Apollo his Oracle, Not to intermeddle at all with that which God hath ordeined. 

Despite this wise admonition, in 1630 a group of ‘Gentlemen Adventurers’ headed by the Duke of Bedford, brought forth a project for draining the Fenland. They employed the Dutchman, Cornelius Vermuyden, to oversee the project. They were backed by Charles I, who briefly envisaged moving his capital to a new city erected in the drained Fenland named, with typical modesty, Charlesville. The Adventurers would stump up the cash for the project and the Crown would guarantee lands in recompense once the drainage was complete. The fact that the land was inhabited (let alone that it was what we might think of now as a balanced ecosystem) was no part of the discussion. An act of enclosure and environmental despoliation on the grandest scale was envisaged.

 

However, there were opponents. For instance, the colleges of Cambridge disliked the idea because the Fenland provided the High Tables with a plentiful supply of waterfowl and game. Much more vociferous were those ‘rude, uncivill, and envious’ Fen dwellers. The drainage project began with initial digging of ditches to allow the waters to be voided from the land, but each night the works were sabotaged so that no progress could be made. A folk song of the time interestingly mingles the human-social distress caused by the project with a nascent environmental concern. The song is voiced by a ‘powte’, that is an eel:

‘The Powte’s Complaint’

Come, Brethren of the water and let us all assemble

To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble;

For we shall rue, if it be true, that the Fens be undertaken,

And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they’ll feed both Beef and Bacon.

They’ll sow both beans and oats where never man yet thought it,

Where men did row in boat, ere the undertakers bought it:

But, Ceres, thou behold us now, let wild oats be their venture,

Oh let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.

Behold the great design, which they do now determine,

Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine:

For they do mean all Fens to drain, and waters overmaster,

All will be dry, and we must die, ’cause Essex calves want pasture.

Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches,

No need of one nor th’other, men now make better matches;

Stilt-makers all and tanners shall complain of this distaster;

For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture.

The feather’d fowls have wings, to fly to other nations;

But we have no such things, to aid our transportations;

We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned beasts and cattle,

Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle.

Wherefore let us intreat our ancient water nurses,

To shew their power so great as t’ help to drain their purses;

And send us good old Captain Flood to lead us out to battle,

Then two-penny Jack, with skales on’s back, will drive out all the cattle.

This noble Captain yet was never know to fail us,

But did the conquest get of all that did assail us;

His furious rage none could assuage; but, to the world’s great wonder,

He bears down banks, and breaks their cranks and whirlygigs asunder.

God Eolus, we do pray, that thou wilt not be wanting,

Thou never said’st us nay, now listen to our canting:

Do thou deride their hope and pride, that purpose our confusion;

And send a blast, that they in haste may work no good conclusion.

Great Neptune (God of seas), this work must needs provoke thee;

They mean thee to disease, and with Fen water choke thee:

But, with thy mace, do thou deface, and quite confound this matter;

And send thy sands, to make dry lands, when they shall want fresh water.

And eke we pray thee Moon, that thou wilt be propitious,

To see that nought be done to prosper the malicious;

Though summer’s heat hath wrought a feat, whereby themselves they flatter,

Yet be so good as send a flood, lest Essex calves want water.

 

Another great opponent of the project was none other than Oliver Cromwell, (member of Parliament in Ely – the Isle of Eels) who briefly won the title ‘King of the Fens’. He opposed the Adventurers in Parliament and thus progressively gained a name for himself.

 

The first Bedford River was completed, despite the opposition, but did not work. In the winter the Ouse flooded and the Bedford River was not nearly broad enough to carry away the excess. Before new works could commence to build the second river, in parallel to the first with a floodable area of hundred feet between, the Civil War broke out. It seems that, once in power, Cromwell had a change of heart. He supplied the necessary ingredient that allowed the project its final success: slave labour. Thousands of Scottish soldiers captured at the battle of Dunbar were forcibly marched to the Fens. There they were dressed in white wool suits and hats and set to work digging the channel. Hundreds died of malaria and suffered trench foot. But the New Bedford River was completed and the Hundred Foot drain functioned as intended. If you look at an Ordnance Survey map of the area much of it is still named ‘The Adventurers’ Lands’. It is now a landscape of lines, a place of uncanny silence, beneath which the turmoil of violent history can be felt to rumble.

 

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‘Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of [the Fens]’. Slave labour, venture capitalism, environmental destruction… and psychotherapy?

 

Interestingly Stephen Frosh is alive to the implications of Freud’s metaphor when he criticises psychoanalysis from a postmodern and feminist angle:

The Freudian challenge, to take over the ‘id’ and colonise it, organising its energy so that it flows in the channels granted it by the ego – so that it works in the service of what might be termed ‘civilization’ – has now become problematic and tentative.

Many writers over the years have challenged Freud’s approach. Nevertheless, a pedagogic strain remains in psychoanalytic literature. What are the dangers and what damage is caused if we are to follow Freud’s intention to ‘secure the best possible conditions for the functioning of the ego’ as he puts it in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’? The analytic mode, not only in its original Freudian form, often recognises irrationality as a problem to be overcome, a regular flood that must be stemmed.

 

However, the ‘colonising’ instinct is not the whole story. Frosh is influenced here by Toril Moi who argues that unlike Charcot,

who chose to exhibit his hysterical patients in a gesture of dominance, Freud decided to listen to them: psychoanalysis is born in the encounter between the hysterical woman and the positivist man of science […] But the psychoanalytical situation is shot through with paradoxes […] .  Grasping the logic of the unconscious they want to make it accessible to reason. … there is at once a colonizing rational impulse and a revolutionary impulse to let female madness  speak to male science. 

In Moi’s argument, the analytical situation, which involves listening, and the web of transferential relationships between analyst and analysand, has the potential to undo the very subject-object split which lies at the heart of the classically male colonising scientific method. While analysis will always be haunted by the desire to drain the wetland, it needn’t be so; in fact, if it is true to its fundamental process of listening, it cannot be so.

 

In the same collection Jane Gallop investigates similar dilemmas:

I find myself playing with models of another relation to the unconscious which would not be this kind of split, fundamental-division model. There are certain moments in Freud (for example in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life) where he sees the unconscious as a wondrous ally, as one of our great resources. The split, the division model is always fundamentally defensive, always an adversarial position. I think there are other models … . 

In another work, Gallop discusses Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born:

For Rich, thinking through the body is not primarily a happy reunion, an idyllic picnic in nature’s warm embrace. The phrase ‘mind-body split’ … if we think through the body becomes an image of shocking violence. 

I want Gallop’s highlighting of the violence of metaphysics to sit alongside what follows to avoid a sense of harmony won too easily and too quickly. Freud reaches for the image of the draining of wetlands to flesh out his understanding of the purpose of psychotherapy precisely because psychoanalysis as he conceived it is in part tainted with the patriarchal science that also is at the heart of our current environmental crisis. At the fundamental level, there is nothing which is not nature. Self-consciousness gives the illusion of a separateness, a mind-body split. What we need is to tune into our nature, think through the body. To this end we might turn to the ecological poet Gary Snyder who offers one way of conceiving the task of psychotherapy, although that is not his intention in the passage that follows:

I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so “enlightened mind” is to daily ego-mind [...] When we deepen and enrich ourselves, looking within, under-standing ourselves, we come closer to being like a climax system. Turning away from grazing on the “immediate biomass” of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory, internalized perception, blocks of inner energies, dreams, the leaf fall of day to day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own sense detritus.

He takes the idea of ‘enlightened mind’ from Buddhism, but we might try to swap it for the mind as conceived as part of the psychotherapeutic process.

 

As a final thought, we might want to ask what the political implications of such a therapeutic stance might be:

Contrary to some popular representations of therapy, learning to live with the world does not have to be the same thing as tolerating its violence; becoming more aware of its impact on oneself and of the patterns of confusion and strength in one’s own psychic response may make one more sure of how damage is perpetrated. It may even allow one to become more unambiguously angry and upset.