Jacqueline
Rose is an elegant, intelligent writer and thinker, who links ideas and pulls
in references from many and varied sources in a way that creates rich and
absorbing work. She is Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary and Westfield College at the University of London, and has written
several books, including The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.

In On
Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, Rose writes
about shame and shaming, ‘how to understand the link between public and private
worlds’ and the task of psychoanalysis as ‘not so much to undo forgetting, but
to put poetry back into the mind’. This is what Rose does in her own work,
infuses it with a poetic sense. Sometimes I did find the prose serpentine and a
little entangled, and the jumps between ideas could be challenging.

The title
relates to that of another book by an artist, Marion Milner, a memoir, written
in 1950, called On Not Being Able to Paint. From it, Rose sees the two
possible pathways that psychoanalysis can take: either the ‘primary madness’ or
‘uncommon sense’ that lies at the heart of painting (and art generally), and
which is displayed by the writers she discusses (for example, Virginia Woolf);
or the ‘fossilising into a set of transmissable rules’. She makes it clear
which is the preferable pathway.

The central
essay, ‘On Not Being Able to Sleep’, is subtitled as a re-reading of Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams. Rose is particularly struck by chapter seven
of this work, the ‘psychic boundaries’ that it crossed, its bizarre nature. She
notes that it was the most difficult chapter for Freud to write, and is the
most difficult to read: he ‘shifted uneasily from dream to reason, from inside
to outside his topic’. Rose writes that Freud’s uncertainty about the unknownableness
of dreams was like a ‘night-terror’, that he was building a bridge into the
dark. She postulates that this was the fear of the psychoanalyst going
backwards or regressing, turning into the frightened child. She brings the
writings of Proust into this discussion, and shows that his thoughts on sleep
and dreams challenge those of Freud, and take him ‘beyond the point he is
willing to travel’. I gained an intense feeling for Freud as an imaginative
writer and thinker, and one relevant for us today.

Rose has
divided the collection into three sections, in the first of which she includes
essays on women writers: Sylvia Plath, Mary Butts and Elizabeth Bowen, Anne
Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Natalie Angier, Christina Rossetti, and Virginia Woolf.
Her review of Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton points out
that, although the poet seemed to be exposing her life through her work, she
was really hiding behind her poetry (‘I fake it up with the truth’). Rose makes
a perceptive observation about the trance states that Sexton experienced in her
therapy sessions, that they defied the purpose of the tapes used to record the
sessions as a memory tool; a case of the ‘canny wiles of the unconscious
driving the process of recording to some kind of defeat’. The tapes were handed
over by the therapist to the biographer, in a violation of confidentiality, an
act which no amount of defending convinces Rose was ethical.

The works
of Christina Rossetti and Sylvia Plath have also been obsessively pored over
for links with their lives, and Rose comments (in the first essay on Plath, but
it applies generally) that to read all of a body of work as biographical denies
the ‘transformative potential of [the] art’. This is at the core of the dispute
between Rose (and anyone who attempts to write about Plath) and Ted Hughes over
her book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, which she discusses. Her review
of Hughes’ poetry, Birthday Letters, is the epitome of what reviews
should be: an examination of the work, not the person, despite her own
disagreements with
him.          

She
presents some of the ideas of Christopher Bollas in the second section, a
psychoanalyst for whom the mother is central. This is challenging and requires
hard work to understand. There is a chapter on the teaching of psychoanalysis
and its problems before the book finishes with two essays in the third section,
one on celebrity and one on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

In
discussing what makes us so uncomfortable about celebrity, Rose refers to Gitta
Sereny’s work with Mary Bell and the book produced from her time with her,
Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell. She believes that Sereny becomes
somewhat entangled in the ethical complexity of forcing Mary Bell to remember
what happened when she killed a little boy when she was only a child herself,
and then having to pull back when Bell starts to live the scene in the present
tense. Rose has raised the point of how difficult it is to approach this area
of human behavior, but I disagree that Sereny was somehow morally wrong in
interviewing her so persistently and toughly. In all of Sereny’s work, there is
a sense of justice, of human complexity, of truth-seeking, and these things are
not easily acquired or held. In the case of Mary Bell, Sereny was truly
attempting to make those ‘cries unheard’ audible.

Jacqueline
Rose ends her collection discussing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in
South Africa and raises important points about apathy, the decontextualisation
and depoliticization of human rights abuses, and the desperate need for that
often talked about but not so practiced dictum of ‘putting oneself in another’s
shoes’, or the Zulu concept of ‘ubuntu‘, or ‘humaneness’.

This is a
fine collection of intelligent, thought-provoking writings, intensely relevant
to the times.

© 2004 Sue Bond

Sue Bond has degrees in medicine and
literature and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Reviews for online and
print publications. She lives in Queensland,  Australia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis