Wool-gathering or How I Ended Analysis

Rating:
Summary: On and off the couch
Review: "Wool-Gathering, or How I Ended Analysis" is a remarkable book, in which a patient describes the process of undergoing psychoanalysis over a six year period. Dan Gunn, a highly literate, deeply thoughtful Scot living in Paris, combines a diary of his sessions on the couch in the presence of an infuriatingly silent analyst with brilliant and often riotous meditations on them, along with a running account of a complex love relation during much of this time. The reluctance of the analyst--whom Gunn gives the improbable name of "Renato [re-birth] Sergeant," a name he takes from a poster advertising an Italian Faith-Healer!--to offer any enlightening commentary on or direction to his patient, leads Gunn to find his own way, and this fascinating memoir represents the poignant and often witty eruptions of Gunn's word-playful unconscious as well as his own profound analysis. It's as if Gunn were forced to become the teller and interpreter of his own story: "The nearer I came to the end of the analysis, the more frequently I received the presentiment of an underlying or overarching story, which would, could I tell it, start to tell me in turn." It's also an account of his need to end the formal analysis, and his difficulties in bringing this heady torture to a satisfactory conclusion. Gunn's generous and extraordinarily candid revelations--never self-indulgent or sentimental but always the result of clear-eyed and incisive self-understanding--are set against the backdrop of his Parisian life in the mid- 90s. This work is filled with marvelous dreams, sexual fiascos, Gunn's fantasies of challenging and even destroying his taciturn analytic tormenter, and fears he'll end up as a case in his shrink's next book. It's something like a combination of a schlemiel's tale combined with Proust, and the very improbability of that pairing suggests the dazzling contrasts in the book. The writing is crisp and powerful, and it takes your breath away with its home truths and its sheer intelligence. Entertaining and mesmerizing at the same time.

Rating:
Summary: A Big Swindle!
Review: Anyone who pays money for this book gets as ripped off as the poor guy who wrote it. Slogging through this incredibly dull and trite blather, all I could think was how pathetic that this guy went through 6 years believing he was "in analysis." While this is supposed to be an account of an analysis, it was nothing but pretentious, narcissistic self-delusion from beginning to end.

Rating:
Summary: A psychoanalytic thriller
Review: Straightforwardly and simply, it's a wonderful book: witty, engaging, honest (sometimes indecently so!), highly insightful and intelligent, and full of momentum as the author hurtles round Paris, is impelled through his dreams' associations and unexpected understandings, and careers full-speed to the end of his analysis to be shot out the other end and land with a bump in Bologna.

It is also a rare and refreshing take on the world of psychoanalysis, portraying it as something serious but not deadly, and placing it in a properly lively context as an intensely lived and living experience. One of the great pleasures in the book is the constant interweaving of external and internal narratives and events. In the author's account, psychoanalysis, the unconscious, insight and endings, don't take place in some sepulchral vacuum but are irrevocably caught up in the warp and woof of daily life - there's no escape from it.

Moreover, Dan Gunn conveys how exciting such an intermingling of outside and inside living can be. I first read it like a thriller - one of those "our hero has to get to his destination" chase-type thrillers. Would the author get to the end of his analysis? Would he know it when he did? Would his analyst ever say anything and would he ever really want him to? Would he lose all his symptoms, tell his lover he loved her? Would he dare to work out how much money he had spent on the analysis, and what would he do with that knowing?

On this level the book is a tremendous success, with the suspense, the pace, the excitements kept up right to the end. I relished the opportunity of reading Wool-Gathering in this way as it was such a refreshing alternative to / ejection of all those serious unremitting psychoanalytic or other tomes on self-help / self-discovery / self-understanding with their emphases on depth-analysis, the hidden powers and mysteries of the mind and body, and the puritan exercise of rigorous and wholesome introspection and insight. Dan Gunn gets none of this and has no truck with it either. What he gets through his analysis is a continuous living; and what he gets from it is what he is and the capacity to speak from and of it.

And the same is true of his portrayal (and use) of psychoanalysis, and, especially, the psychoanalyst. Both resolutely refuse to be more (or less) than what they are, however much the author-patient on the one side and the culture on the other demand that they should be. This really is an account of the "sujet supposé savoir", with the "supposé" stripped away and the "savoir" returned to where it belongs - with the speaking subject.

And this leads to the most important point of all, that this is an account of a live and a lived analysis that you can trust. It is written, thankfully but alas unusually, not from the point of view of the psychoanalyst showing his/her mastery, insight, or Keatsian negative capability, but from the position of the poor bloody patient who uncovers an overwhelming urge to live fully and speak freely.

The author certainly doesn't tell you "how to do it", but he does show what it can mean to want to do it and what's wanted in order to do it. I can't recommend this book too highly to anyone - general reader, anxious, garrulous or self-satisfied psychoanalyst or analysand, lover of racy thrillers, or connoisseurs of odd and unexpected literary, cultural and intellectual conjugations and conjunctions.

Rating:
Summary: ending the endless analysis
Review: There is no shortage of po-faced writing about psycho-analysis. This short, funny, book, by contrast, combines a series of parallel stories which dovetail to give us a sense of the ways that external and internal discoveries coincide, multiply, and enrich each other. Outside, strike-bound Paris requires 'Dan Gunn' to cycle around the city, revealing its surface geography to the habitual Métro-rider; inside, he is beginning a new relationship. Externally, water from the flat above floods his, driving him from home; he is leaving, in any case, on sabbatical from his teaching post. Internally, he is wrestling with his unbearably unforthcoming analyst, from whom he craves knowledge, wisdom, or--at least--a sentence or two of interpretation. Will analysis end with the bang of revelation, anagnoresis, cartharsis, even; or will it whimper away into a last descent of the analyst's stairs? Above all, will the Silence, finally, speak, Tiresias revealing, at last, the secret? Is the finale to be the tragic despair of endlessness, or the recognitions of comedy?
At thirty-one, 'Gunn' feels stymied, haunted by the death of his father, when he was a wee laddie of five. One might think he had done rather well: from Scotland, to university in England, to a teaching post in France. But analysis is about discontent, and this one is even distanced linguistically--some insights arrive in French, to be interpreted into English. 'Fuite', for example, a leak (water pouring from his ceiling, illness leeching out of his body), but also an escape, a flight. Hence, a book of two voices: a journal-voice (in sans serif type) and a reflective, commenting, after-the-act voice in ordinary book type. Both the experiencing and the remembering voices speak well and wittily of the analytic process, and the process as part of the messy complications of a busy life. Gunn is the author of an academic book on Fiction and Psychoanalysis, but 'Gunn' finds that work jejune, the exterior work of one whose knowledge came from reading alone.
Yet reading is part of both Gunn's and 'Gunn's' existence, and part of the pleasure of his writing. Can he, now an insider, send us a journal of his plague years which, because it is informed by writerly pleasures, gives us the feel of being there? He can. The multiple themes parallel his physical movements: from the unreal city and the day job (his death-defying two-wheeled adventures offer parallel, visual planes to his subterranean geographies), to childhood and memory, to sexuality and the desire for multiplicity. The elements of suspense are bounded by the day of departure:will his flat ever again be habitable? Has he discovered, on the eve of parting, an Eve who will allow him to come home at last? If love is to triumph, what would 'triumph' or 'love' be? Will he succeed in achieving ordinary unhappiness?
Without sententiousness, with an unusual lightness of touch, Gunn dramatizes 'Gunn's' experience, and gives us a book about analysis which acts out its own case history. Without making his answers explicit, 'Gunn' offers us, in the structure of play, possible interpretations. How much Gunn understands, he, like the silent analyst, does not say.