So... during a time of relative quiet – home a lot, mulling around various work, making lists, and doing bits of it – last night a novel caught me: Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie; and caught me so definitely that I read it from about midnight to ten a.m. And then was of course groggy and headachey all day, but all right; it is good – lots of 'untrustworthy narrator' stuff, plus the immediate experience of wartime, which does give me pause (I've written at points about what some modernist composers did during the Second World War, and been quite judgmental about it – the Kristof reminds me that a generalized madness infects everything, and everyone does things that seem unforgiveable under such chaotic circumstances).
But that wasn't what I was going to, briefly, write about tonight... having been groggy/tired, got some things done, the sofa moved/replaced, etc., I found myself picking up Robertson Davies The Manticore as I went to bed tonight.
As the middle of his most famous trilogy (he's got about five or six), the Deptford Trilogy, this may be one of his most famous works. It is the record of a Jungian analysis undergone by a character in a tangled web of relationships – it is thus a way of working through the crises and changes of the entire trilogy, at least from the point of view of one part of it.
And it is wonderful: dense, rich, tough to the point of being painful, but heartening – I'm a bit curious as to whether I had read this before I did my Jungian analysis 1987-92; I think (though I'm always pretty bad at remembering sequences of events) that I tripped over it while I was actually in analysis.
In any case: although there are passages that literally make me think: oh, I really have to remember that for my fundamentals exam this summer (and no, I promise I won't use the book as a study aid...), it reminds me of why I want to become an analyst – the complex battle with the self, the density of memory and understanding between analyst and analysand, the richness of technique, and the importance and difficulty of feeling.
As well as the fact that, every time Dr Joh. Haller points out that her patient is primitive in relating to his feelings about what has happened to him, it reminds me: that's exactly what my analyst John keeps pointing out about me in the last few months...
... sigh. It's always easier to see this when somebody else is doing it.
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