The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Vol. 40, #1, Spring 2002

The Apocalyptic Imagination
First in the Creative Writers & Psychoanalysts Series
A new form of outreach begins in New York City
by Sandra S. Leong, M.D.

Outside Farkas Auditorium at NYU Medical Center, on February 23, the purple table-skirting, the meticulous arrangements of brochures and signs at the registration tables, the book displays, all seemed the familiar iconography of the psychoanalytic conference. "The Psychoanalytic Association of New York," a sign-board proudly proclaimed. Yet, some elements were askew. There was a preponderance of best-selling and award-winning novels at the book-tables. One attendee stood pointing in frustration at the empty box that had been filled with the current issue of Playboy Magazine. A sign indicated that Jim Shepard's latest short story was to be found within its covers.

At a table at the nearby coffee-stand, novelists Robert Stone, Jim Shepard, and Denis Johnson sat around chatting with psychoanalysts Shelley Orgel, Jane Kite, and Salman Akhtar, who'd soon be analyzing their work. Shepard wore a tie of color and stripe seldom seen at any type of psychoanalytic gathering. Johnson who was about to give a reading of his masterpiece of short fiction, "Emergency", whose protagonists are drug-crazed emergency room orderlies, looked around warily and confessed that he hadn't realized that the reading would take place in a medical setting.

"Y'all know that you have to let us out of here when this is over," he reminded the three psychoanalysts at the table.

He continued, "My wife says you guys should just use the word narcissism a lot!"

"I don't think the word came up once," I say, going over the parts of the discussions I'd seen, in my mind.

"I did use it once," Shelley Orgel, who was prepared to discuss Bob Stone's reading, interjected.

Stone turned to him questioningly. Dennis Haseley, the moderator, sat silently, ruminating about the spontaneous choices that might arise during the live interaction onstage.

At the registration desk the size of the queue that had developed made clear how much the advertising in periodicals like The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker had drawn attention. There was the sense of cultural worlds coming together: playwright and actor Wally Shawn and fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg stood arm-in-arm in the middle of the line. In the sound booth, NPR had arrived and plugged in.

The event was the kickoff of a pilot project, The Creative Writers and Psychoanalysts Series, that I had initiated with the financial backing of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) and the academic and institutional resources of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. The elements had come together with a great deal of passion in late September, 2001. The sense of urgency and public need gave impetus to the wish I'd had for many years to bring psychoanalysts and writers together publicly, and a title for the program "Daydreaming in an Era of Nightmares: The Apocalyptic Imagination" had soon coalesced.

After just a few weeks work, I'd been astounded at the caliber of the writers I had engaged, and I'd come to realize that a public event in which literary stars appeared trustingly with psychoanalysts—in which words of consummate artistry were read and responded to with the analysts' depth of insight, sensitivity, and wisdom—might be the sort of public demonstration that would be of benefit to the entire profession: combining aesthetic pleasure with a rare opportunity for the public to understand what the clinical psychoanalyst is about. The American Psychoanalytic Foundation agreed and provided additional funding.

Meanwhile, the psychoanalytic panelists, each in their own way, agonized about their presentations, which, though a relatively brief 15 minutes, carried the pressures, unusual for applied psychoanalysis, of having the artist not only alive but present and ready to respond to what was said, while an audience—of uncertain orientation towards psychoanalysis—looked on..

On schedule, I began my welcoming remarks. As I looked out over a full auditorium, it struck me again how diverse a crowd was in attendance: journalists, creative writers, editors, book agents, retirees, academics, students of every kind.

Dennis Haseley, the moderator, oriented the audience to the notion of apocalypse and introduced the first writer/analyst pairing.

Robert Stone, with white beard and sunburned cheeks, looking every bit the Great American Novelist/sea captain in the tradition of Hemingway and Melville in spite of his black leather jacket, announced that he was reading Chapter 34 of Outerbridge Reach, and launched into what Orgel would characterize as "the dreamlike poem" that is the central chapter of Stone's novel, a chapter involving the protagonist's lonely struggle with nature, his craft, and his own psyche as he solo pilots his yacht in a race to circumnavigate the Earth. When the chapter came to a close and the applause died down, Shelley Orgel recounted how much he loved Outerbridge Reach, and discussed the recurrent psychological themes in Stone's novels and short stories: creativity, madness, death. He gave an overview of the novel's most important themes, positing that in the conflict between the characters Strickland and Browne—whose combined names were pronounced "Stowne"—hated elements of the self were projected by each character onto the other. He then presented a close and empathic description of the character Browne's conflicts as expressed in the chapter, his struggle—identified with the artist's struggle—to express pre-Oedipal, non-verbal experiences with mother, and his yearning to overcome self-destructive impulses. His complex discussion seemed to leave no paragraph unattended to, and concluded with "the quest of the artist who seeks to move and dream in and between both worlds, sometimes with the 'aid' of drugs and alcohol, who risks his life, at the edge of vision, who rebelliously asks the God who protects sanity to turn His face away for awhile, but who "prays" ambivalently to be shown a path that will allow a periodic return to the 'real' world inhabited by other people."

Stone teared visibly at points in Orgel's talk. The crowd burst into applause. Unscripted, Stone seemed moved to reply. A suspenseful silence descended. Stone spoke haltingly:

"I can't tell you how moving it is to have written something and then to have a response to it in such detail, with such insight … it isn't the experience writers often have. … But we are after all in the business of writing if we believe—and we have to believe—that beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and this is all we know and all we need to know. That is all we're doing. That is all that art is about. Insight is the beginning and end of the art of fiction, and a response to one's work in terms of insight is the most that one can possibly ask for. …"

Then it was Shepard's turn to read "Love and Hydrogen", his highly acclaimed tale of apocalyptic love on board the Hindenberg. Again, the audience was rapt as they were asked to imagine life on the grandiose airship and a forbidden love between two male crewmembers.

Jane Kite began her discussion praising the language in Shepard's "truly radiant" story. She took the audience on an excursion through the meanings of "apocalyptic," then discussed the themes of childhood innocence and phallic pleasures in Shepard's work. Shepard himself had drawn in his other fiction the link between his obsession with apocalyptic themes and the real-life eruption of his brother's mental illness in childhood. She traced the complex themes of external and intrapsychic causality raised by Shepard's work. "Closest to the Shepard hypothesis (of the Hindenberg disaster)," she stated, "is a young boy of my acquaintance … who once asked while intently observing himself pee after an incredibly exciting roadrunner cartoon: 'Do you think I could kill somebody with this?' In the world of fantasy, it could work that way. An excited penis could explode the world."

After the talk ended, Shepard responded. "You know I don't think the paradigm in my personality has ever been so comprehensively encapsulated as in the figure of that little boy peeing," he quipped, sounding truly pleased. "That says so much about me in so many different ways that I'm just going to be mutely grateful pretty much for the rest of the afternoon."

Denis Johnson's quiet, Western-inflected reading of "Emergency" followed, punctuated by the audience's laugh-out-loud appreciation of his dead-pan yet over–the-top humor. Salman Akhtar leaning forward like a proselytizer, then gave an impassioned formulation, identifying the signs of "dehumanization" in the characters in his story, redeemed by the move towards hope, and the attempt to contain aggression and save symbolic "remnants of human goodness."

"Sometimes looking in the belfry illuminates the center," concluded Akhtar. "When we read and learn about dehumanization we also learn about humanity."

"I enjoyed that quite a bit. I wasn't liking it at first," said Johnson. "But I liked the end. It sounded like the story was breaking through beyond dehumanization. And I feel honored that that kind of reading came out of it."

After some questions and conversation with the audience, the program ended, and a pleased and stimulated group entered the reception hall for wine and cheese, and book-signing. Numerous audience members inquired when the next installment of the Creative Writers and Psychoanalysts Series would take place and asked to be included on the mailing list. Others provided more descriptive lay public responses: "It was transcendent, uplifting, like an afternoon of the best theater!" And, "The panel was like tour de force performance followed by tour de force performance!"

At this writing, we are anticipating the results of the NPR and NY Times coverage of the event. The success of the panel itself has proven that there is a dramatic and untapped cultural niche for psychoanalysis, and that there's yet another way in which the skills of the clinical psychoanalyst can be displayed to best advantage in a public forum.