Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

There was, of course, the “new” kind of shopping. Where my mother would make a list and return with the items on it (perhaps bringing home a treat like chocolate or biscuits), Karen would spend every Saturday shopping because she liked being in shop “environments,” returning with numerous artfully packaged objects she didn’t know she needed. People were beginning to buy “names”-brands-rather than things.

In the evenings there were other parties and new restaurants-with desirable names-where Karen drank ferociously until she staggered. She liked me to be there to help her out the door, into the cab, and into bed, where I’d sit beside her with a bowl awaiting the inevitable upchuck and the sleep which would follow it.

“Tender is the night,” she’d moan, quoting neither Keats nor F. Scott Fitzgerald but the pop song. She may have been out drinking until two in the morning, but she’d be up for work early the next day, arriving at her desk at eight and staying there for twelve hours. Women had to “prove” themselves then.

She didn’t have a boyfriend, though I think she had quite a lot of bad sex with older men-the bosses-or with cameramen or others in the crew, as she was often travelling, spending about three nights a week out of London. I can see her now, idly throwing her legs open and looking away, out of the window or across the room, biting her nails and thinking of what she’d wear the next day. When she was away, she worried that I was missing her, or lonely. If I spent the evening with someone else, she’d ask if I’d had sex with them. If she and I were at a party, she’d tell me who was attractive and who was a likely conquest, and she’d even chat them up for me.

Although Karen and I were together as some sort of couple, it soon became a more or less celibate relationship. Like many people, she didn’t really like sex but would go through with it if she thought the other person badly wanted it. I find it odd now, but I did believe then-without, I admit, having much considered it-that the ideal of the exclusive couple was one which still compelled me, that this unchosen template suited everyone. Even when I was unfaithful to Karen, it seemed right I should experience the correct sum of guilt.

But perhaps our relationship was without passion because, after Ajita, I had no desire to suffer sexual jealousy again. I asked for no power over Karen; her life and body were her own. I wanted to be with a woman I didn’t want. If love is the only intensity in town, what sort of love was that?

We did spend many nights together. In bed it would be me, her and an ashtray, the TV always on and her eating ice cream from the tub. We’d read the same magazines, both being interested in the same thing, women and how they became themselves. And we talked simultaneously, because she liked coke. With Karen there was no vulgar chopping with credit cards or snorting through rolled-up fivers from toilet seats. The gear she bought came in cute little bottles with a tiny spoon at the top. It was expensive, but she and the other girls who went to her flat in Chelsea Manor Street had lived in a world-quite different to mine and Miriam’s-in which there had always been money, and always would be.

I say we didn’t touch or kiss. Maybe we were trying to forget about sex because there was too much of it around. As well as studying psychology, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I was developing into a pornographer.

I had left Mother and replaced her with books. At least in my work, I had discovered something I wanted. Whatever I did in life, I was usually bored, always feeling insufficiently used or stretched. At this time I liked to study, I loved to read and I enjoyed my training, but it was expensive.

I was still seeing Tahir, as well as attending lectures on dreams, the Oedipus complex and the unconscious. I was reading Freud’s early disciples, Ferenczi, Adler, Jung, Theodor Reik, and the later analysts, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan. It wasn’t a long tradition, about a hundred years’ worth, but there was a ton of it, and almost every word in abominable prose. This discourse, saturated in talk of pleasure, provided no enjoyment in itself. If the best thing to be said for reading is that you can do it lying down, Karen would lie with me, watching videos and reading fat, shiny paperbacks about people shopping, waiting for her own face to appear on TV.

Then it started: I began to see my first patients, and I soon learned that listening to another person was almost the hardest task you could attempt. Tahir had taught me that the truth wasn’t hidden behind a locked door in a dungeon called “the unconscious,” but that it was right there, in front of the patient and analyst, waiting to be heard. The lost object was the key to the language. Freud said one should attend to the unconscious with “evenly suspended attention.” The therapist’s unconscious was the useful tool here, along with the free play of his associations and fantasy. The interpretation, when it came, had to be like a surgeon’s incision, in the right place at the right time.

Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love. But, sitting with my first analysands, trying to bear the anxiety of hearing someone unknown, whose dreams and ramblings I could not comprehend, I felt, at times, as though I were trying to decode The Waste Land at a first reading. I’d even hate the patients and my own clumsiness, as I became dragged into the vortex of their passion, of the spume and irruption of their unconscious. I’d want to flee the room, wondering who was more afraid, analysand or analyst. I was having to learn that this fear-on both sides-was part of the anxiety of hearing the new. It was patient work, learning patience, developing my analytic instinct, creating the time and space so the analysand could hear, or meet, herself. This was how, in the end, I trained myself.

I would go and talk to Tahir about it, and although he was drinking then, and often argumentative-he could be infuriated by the theories of other analysts, particularly Lacan, Freud’s most significant heir-he had important and urgent things to pass on. Unintentionally, during a recent session, because I was tired, I’d found myself in more of a reverie than I was used to. Yet this hadn’t made anything worse. Tahir said I’d hit on something useful: my unconscious was more closely in touch with that of the other if I didn’t try too hard to understand. I had a tendency, he said, to overtheorise, and to decide too quickly what was going on.

He made me aware, too, that I was part of a tradition of listening. As Schoenberg had gone to Mahler for instruction and guidance, as T. S. Eliot had turned to Pound, so the analysts had handed down learning and procedure. Tahir had been trained by the great child-analyst Winnicott, who in his turn had been analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, both of whom had been analysed by Freud. Having so little knowledge of my sub-continental family history-the Indian threads being severed by Father’s death-I had little sense of my connection to the past. Being an analyst joined me to another tradition, to another family, which would “hold” me during the insecurity of my training.

As my career started, Karen’s faltered. It was a bad day for her when it became obvious she was no good on television, being too nervy. Her big eyes made her look homicidal. Even when she wasn’t on cocaine, she was like someone on cocaine, about to burst out of the screen and bite into your windpipe. She was quick enough to know that power in the media rested with the producers, not the presenters, and began to work as an associate producer on a youth programme. I even went along to the studio a few times. What was happening to the world? Young presenters virtually naked, teenage bands, puerile jokes, pranks, interviews with idiots.