ON THE INSIDE, LOOKING OUT
REFERENCES
Coetzee, J. M. (1983). The Life and Times of Michael K. London: Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (2009). Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone Press.
Gordimer, Nadine (1984). “The Idea of Gardening”. New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984, accessed online here.
Kurtz, Arabella and Keith Turner (2007). “An exploratory study of the needs of staff who care for offenders with a diagnosis of personality disorder”. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 80: 3, 421–35.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Nitsun, Morris (2015). Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and Transformation. Hove, East Sussex: Routledge.
First published in the newsletter of the Group Analytic Society International, no. 70, December 2015, pp. 101–5.
J. M. Coetzee is the contemporary of another South African émigré with a new book out, Morris Nitsun. Nitsun’s Beyond the Anti-Group rethinks the relationship between individuals and groups, an issue that vexes Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz over many pages. “I have written of my interest in what we are loosely calling group psychology,” the novelist admits, “but I continue to struggle to say anything constructive about it. I have looked at Bion’s Experiences in Groups, but got nothing from it” (p. 143). Gustave Le Bon, the Afrikaner polymath Eugène Marais and Isabel Menzies Lyth are also discussed, but there is no mention of S. H. Foulkes or other group-analytic theorists. It is a pity because concepts such as the matrix or the anti-group would have helped Coetzee and Kurtz a great deal.
The omission probably stems from the rift between the school of Bion at the Tavistock Centre and that of Foulkes at the Institute of Group Analysis. Foulkes supported Anna Freud during the British psychoanalytic ructions of 1942–44, while Bion was an ally of her rival Melanie Klein. The Tavistock Centre became a Kleinian stronghold and the institutional influence upon Kurtz is obvious to me. Apart from passing references to Sigmund Freud and D. W. Winnicott, all the psychoanalysts Kurtz names are Tavistock Kleinians or fellow travellers: Anne Alvarez, Bion, Ronald Britton, Paula Heimann, Menzies Lyth, Hanna Segal and Neville Symington. Kurtz, however, never reflects on her angle. On the contrary, the socially deferential version of psychoanalysis she has learnt—“we actively, if unconsciously, invite others to know something about us that we do not know about ourselves” (p. 140)—is presented as “the psychoanalytic theory of human relations” (p. 137), as though there is only one. Theories that count the cost of social compliance and therapies that help people to break its grip certainly don’t get cited. When Kurtz writes of education that “I have an image … of pupils … as blinkered horses” (p. 158), it seems to be without awareness that her image relates also to sectarian psychoanalysis. Institutionalisation—blinkering, conformism—is this book’s blind spot.
When Coetzee criticises nationalism, Kurtz comes to its defence. She loyally regards her own professional realm as a paragon of human achievement: “The collective endeavour I had in mind [to praise] was not a cathedral or a pyramid, but socialised medicine in the form of the NHS” (p. 123). And she responds like an ethical watchdog to Coetzee’s comparison between pedagogy and therapy: “it isn’t right to interpret transference reactions without explicit permission to do so” (p. 171). He replies: “You are very strict, very professional (in the sense of guarding the integrity of the profession), in your condemnation of the teacher who practises amateur psychotherapy in the classroom” (pp. 179–80). It is fair comment but doesn’t go far enough. Kurtz is too strict with the rulebook. It isn’t always applied in forensic psychotherapy, for instance, as her own research on attitudes in a secure hospital found: public-safety and medical agendas clashed, and staff had concerns that the coercive environment was unsuitable for therapy (Kurtz and Turner, 2007). The authority of Kurtz’s psychoanalytic position is overstated, but nonspecialist readers of The Good Story won’t realise because Coetzee doesn’t question it.
The authors are strangely preoccupied with criminals and delinquents. Coetzee worries at first that psychotherapeutic unearthing of the past jeopardises fanciful but comforting life stories. But then he ponders torturers who don’t feel guilt, imagines a three-year-old who secretly kills a sibling, disapproves of the smug villain of Dostoevsky’s Demons and finally claims that many prisoners pretend to accept sentences that they privately regard to be unjust. Kurtz adds solemnly that “the patient-offender” needs a “robust therapeutic response” in order to feel “real remorse” (p. 48). These initial exchanges veer towards scapegoating, and it is only when Coetzee starts discussing the shadiness of law-abiding people—specifically descendants of white settlers who wash their hands of colonial genocides—that the book exits a moralistic cul-de-sac.
Coetzee was a university professor for decades and some of the book’s most interesting passages deal with teaching. Unlike Kurtz, he isn’t an enthusiast for his profession. He is bothered by the makeup of his classes: “The ones who have made it to the tertiary level are the sober ones, the ones who accept authority easily, who have not found it hard to adapt to the system. The naughty ones are elsewhere, creating a different kind of life for themselves” (p. 164). And, with a repetition that becomes melancholy, he keeps wanting to discuss gangs: “The antithesis of the school class, the group constituted from above by the rational criteria of age, scholastic ability, and so forth, is the gang, the group that constitutes itself, from within, on grounds that are hard for the outsider to penetrate” (p. 123). The difficulty doesn’t deter him: four more times he comes back to gangs, commenting on childhood friendships, the instinct to have enemies, the plight of surplus young males and the awkward situation of loners. The earlier move from criminal to citizen is retraced, minus the scapegoating and with curiosity about precarious ways of life that dispense with both rulebooks and textbooks. A semi-fictional image gradually emerges from Coetzee’s contributions to The Good Story of an apathetic professional, an unhappy academic whose mind can’t stop drifting out of the lecture hall he nevertheless returns to year after year. This picture fits the characterisation of “John Coetzee” in the novel Summertime: “He was a misfit. He was also a cautious soul. He liked the security of a monthly salary cheque” (Coetzee, 2009). Caution and endless compromise destroy morale eventually. Accepting disillusionment instead of attempting independence may be even more soul-destroying than being devoted to an institution. It makes life an alibi, a good story that conceals hopelessness.
R. D. Laing, a Tavistock renegade, wrote more about groups than most psychoanalysts. He wished to assist getaways: “If the [social] formation is itself off course, then the man who is really to get ‘on course’ must leave the formation. But it is possible to do so, if one desires, without screeches and screams, and without terrorizing the already terrified formation that one has to leave” (Laing, 1967, p. 99, italics suppressed). The idea of escape from an oppressive society is taken to the limit in Coetzee’s novel The Life and Times of Michael K. The quiet, mysterious protagonist is interned in a labour camp. Another inmate warns that if he is caught trying to abscond he will be sent to a more brutal camp. Still Michael takes the risk and finds eerie freedom in the wilderness: “Now surely I have come as far as a man can come … surely now that in all the world only I know where I am, I can think of myself as lost” (Coetzee, 1983, p. 91). Nadine Gordimer, who like Coetzee would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature, objected to this portrayal: Michael should have fought the tyrannical system from within (Gordimer, 1984). Yet in an ordinary stifled life quitting is a more serious act than subversion, which often peters out into apathy. “Courage consists,” the philosopher Maurice Blanchot once said, “in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges” (Blanchot, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, p. 341). Coetzee has written powerfully in fiction about this bravery, yet the idea of escape is all but forgotten in The Good Story. It only comes through indirectly, in the poignant and fragmentary references to gangs.
Some people have fulfilling and prosperous careers. Many more experience work and other conditions of life as imprisoning. There may be, or seem to be, no way out. Despair sets in. Sad to say, sometimes therapy makes matters worse. Morris Nitsun remembers dropping out of a sensitivity group in his student days: “I left because I felt I could hardly survive in the group, the splitting and hostility was so intense, and I felt so lost and threatened” (Nitsun, 2015, p. 147). The Good Story reminded me how important it is to keep the politics of psychotherapy in view. For example, what about Nitsun’s description of worthwhile group-analytic therapy: “the group functions as a refuge—a refuge from the madness of the outside world and a refuge from … inner distress” (p. 132)? Perhaps I romanticise escape or underestimate what it entails. Economic and psychosocial constraints are formidable. These days there is the digital institution of social networking to reckon with too. Nevertheless, recalling Blanchot’s remark, I wonder whether the refuge as a metaphor for therapy gives up on what Coetzee in his dejected way calls “a different kind of life”, whether it is another admission of defeat.