I’ve been living in the UK for a little over a month now. There are now five of us in the houseshare, and we all get along very well. Our newest member arrived this week, a young woman who is a Loughton local. Her presence here has brought something out in the house; she has a very friendly and open energy that positively affects everything else.

Conversations are a bit more intimate generally; people are more open about their lives—overprotective Mums, frustrations around menstrual cycles, family troubles, worries about long distance relationships. There’s a safety developing that makes all of us more inclined to converse and share about more than rubbish collection and mealtimes.

The skies have been wonderfully clear, which made me notice the filthy windows downstairs; I took an afternoon to wash all of them, an effort well worth it to bring full light into the house. Autumn weather is turning chilly, and the wind tossing the trees outside puts me in a state of mind that is hard to describe. It’s a mixture of contentedness, coziness, and a desire to explore hidden things. Halloween is typically associated with the dead, ghosts, the supernatural and the terrifying. The unease of the season makes me feel cozy, if that makes any sense at all.

During the past week, our course theory focused on object relations a la Melanie Klein. Object is a very clinical word, it distances us from intimacy and emotion in its normal usage. No one wants to be thought of as an object. The psychoanalytic definition of an object is just the opposite; it is about things that evoke an emotional response, and those experiences that we introject. Our external experiences become internalized—swallowed, if you will—and they become “objects” within our ego. It is naturally connected to what Freud calls the oral phase, when everything gets put in the mouth. It also sheds a different light on the mythology of cannibalism—Kronos swallowing his children, Zeus swallowing Metis, among other examples. This ingestion imbues the swallower with the characteristics of the “swallow-ee”. By swallowing Metis, Zeus gains divine Wisdom. When a Catholic ingests a transubstantiated Host, they gain the essence of Christ. Freud’s Totem and Taboo talks extensively about primitive societies and totem animals, and how the ingestion implants the power of the sacrificial victim that is eaten. Even eating birthday cake has this implication; we cut and share a cake to share symbolically in the vitality of the person who has lived another year.

Some negative examples of this psychological phenomenon include the terrible things people say about us that we unconsciously make part of ourselves. The middle school bully who calls you ugly, or weak, or stupid—it sticks with you, even if the conscious intellect knows better. If we are met with hostility, we either try to avoid it, or we lean into it and fight back—flight or fight. Either way, the experience ends up becoming part of the ego, and because it is preconscious and uncomfortable, it’s hard to resolve it. The preconscious goes out of its way to censor material that it believes is harmful to the conscious mind. Hence we have to look for it in disguised forms—in dreams, slips of the tongue, omissions in speech. What is it that you are not saying?

Transference is the other way to get at this material, and it is the heart of psychodynamic psychoanalytic practice. The therapist (to quote my own therapist) is neither your friend nor your family, yet the relationship is intimate in its own way. Freud brought everything unconscious back to the parents, and in therapy those aspects of relationship that one might not be able to solve with their own parents get transferred onto the therapist. The patient knows little about the therapist, and the less the better. Mystery is the mirror of the unconscious. What we imagine is true about someone else tells us something about ourselves.

This type of therapy never took off in America, but is standard in Europe. American therapy is more behaviouristic, focused on cognitive therapies and psychiatry rather than the unconscious. When I was an administrator and later a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I had faculty and students alike who disdained the methods of Freud and Jung. We now have evidence based models, they would tell me. We don’t need this unconscious nonsense. But evidence of what?

“Evidence-based” means demonstrated quantitatively rather than qualitatively, or at least it leans more heavily on the former. Clinical trials of drugs that are meant to alter chemical brain responses are “evidence based.” Anti-anxiety meds like Xanax for an overactive amygdala, serotonin inhibitors for depression. Et cetera. Clinical studies showing that a statistically significant group of participants were helped in their symptoms by the drug.

The problem is that these studies don’t really show that. When it comes to the brain, studies are often conflicting; one day we know the “cause” of something, the next study debunks it. Studies that try to find the source of consciousness are the most amusing; evidence put forward in one paper is contradicted by very different results in the next. You still don’t have evidence—only hypothesized models.

The Journal of Clinical Psychology published a study about fifteen years ago that examined bias in scientific fields. These evidence-based psychology papers were the most biased, with a whopping 80% of those included in the study having a non-scientific bias of some sort. As you might imagine, this bias frequently comes from the pharmaceutical industry. It is common for these corporations to fund studies of newly developed medicines, and if the researcher wants funding to continue, they will be biased toward a certain result, even if they strive to maintain a level of objectivity.

The other aspect of evidence-based therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is diagnosis and labeling. You go into a mental health practitioner to learn the name of your suffering—ADHD, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizoid behaviour, the approved list of terms goes on and on. Psychodynamic therapists working in hospital settings always get an assessment and diagnosis, and they generally set it aside. Psychodynamic therapy is not about diagnoses, it’s about models of the mind. This is unsettling for many patients. You mean you aren’t going to tell me what is wrong with me? Labels make us feel in control—if we have a name for something, we feel we have power over it. But psychodynamic therapy is designed to help the patient arrive at their own truth, and that truth is hard to objectify (no pun intended). The other side of this is that the patient can be free of labels, and get to their own truth without pre-judgment.

Psychoanalytic truth is actually the subject of my term essay. No one is objective; everyone sees the world through the lens of their own experience and perception, which has many variables. The therapist also lacks that objectivity, and they have to be aware of that through their own therapy and supervision. Our course lead talked about the “third space” where a person’s truth might be found. It is in conversation that the truth emerges; the therapist isn’t omnipotent, and isn’t going to “fix” you. The to and fro dynamics are part of the process.

My own therapist has been in practice for many years, and is very good at this. She managed to cut right to the chase. When you get on the clinical couch, you begin to talk about anything, even things that seem unimportant. In my last session, she observed that I talk around emotional material by bringing in facts, or turning things into facts, as though I have no emotion about them at all. But, as I told her, the opposite is actually true; I am an extremely emotional and vulnerable person. And I can already feel my own discomfort; I’ve repressed and diluted that part of myself. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have emotions, but I tend to take a distance from them to avoid getting hurt. I use humour to make things more comfortable for others. That’s not always a bad thing, but it can leave you isolated in some ways. As Vashti Bunyan says in her song “Winter is Blue”: “If my heart freezes I won’t feel the breaking.”

This frequently gets interpreted in my interactions as a formidable independence; it was once said to me very directly—“No need to include you, because you already know how to do this yourself.” You don’t need anyone, you don’t need help, you don’t need connection. You’re fine alone. But the ability to be in one’s own company doesn’t mean that others are excluded from intimacy, or even that exclusion is wanted; being self-sufficient is important, but it doesn’t make one an island. The more one has to “suck it up” and accept rejection, obstacles, isolation, miscommunication, the more this brand of Stoicism takes over that is interpreted as a desire to “do it alone”. In the Masculine/Feminine paradigm, this is a very Masculine way of dealing with emotions. Let’s be sober and sensible, and not let that get the best of us. I don’t control the feelings of others, and they have a right to reject me as I do them. This tends to be good for making friends and setting boundaries, but not for long-term love. For those of you who do Tarot, it’s a Queen of Swords energy—straight to the point, intellectual, and non-emotional. This is also the card of the widow and the divorcee—the experienced woman who doesn’t romanticize the world, and who is alone. My mind still holds onto the romance; I would like to fall into such a state, to leave logic and reason behind. But very likely the right ingredients for long term connection are the integration of independence and vulnerability, among other things.

Thus, emotional material deemed unacceptable to the conscious mind goes back to the unconscious unsatisfied. This is called repression. It will eventually come out, but in an acceptable form, one that doesn’t make anyone else uncomfortable. That is of course the reason for the repression—being too emotional made people angry and uncomfortable. Emotional expression of any type is translated as “drama”. When you’re told that such vulnerability is unacceptable, it becomes an ingested object, then your own ego believes it’s bad. Your own censorship will get in the way of disgorging the poison you ingested; like toxic waste, it gets buried in a supposedly safe place. I think this is one of the reasons that I like to write novels and short stories; it is a place to put that material without it really being about me personally. And I can’t help but think about Dr. Dell, my undergraduate literature professor who referred to such writing as a “cop out.” He was talking about the poetry form called dramatic monologue, in which another narrator speaks for the poet. And he’s right, it is a bit of a cop out. But that internal censorship isn’t easily overcome by aggressive thought or action. It needs to be tricked into coming out. This is why visual arts and other creative modalities are so important to mental health; they are a way to work on bridging the split.

Joseph Campbell told the story of one of Carl Jung’s patients who suffered from depression. She painted a picture of gray rocks, with veins of gold trapped inside. This was an expression of her emotional state—the treasure was “trapped” inside the rocks. Farther along in her therapy, she painted another picture of the rocks—but now the gold was on top, accessible. She had felt trapped because she thought she was alone; now the gold on top represented her friends. She could see that she was not alone.

In spite of our boundaries, none of us are really alone. That’s not a cure-all for depression, or feelings of isolation. What it might be, though, is the perspective shift that we need to start healing. We assume that we have to carry everything ourselves, but we don’t. We have more people in our corner than we might imagine.

Everyone in my house is awake now, after the extra hour of sleep afforded by the end of British Summer Time. Time for me to emerge and see what awaits in the house today.