In our studies at the Jung-Institut, there is one apparently archaic procedure we have to run through – the Association Experiment (or Association Test). It's basically the thing that got Freud interested in Jung in 1906 (as The Interpretation of Dreams is the thing that made Jung, along with everyone else, interested in Freud). Stopwatch, list of 100 words, spreadsheet – structurally simple; but with many intricate details – how long was the pause before each response, did the person tested raise their eyes, repeat the word, respond unusually? Cross their legs? Respond with a word that seems to make no sense?...
I'd been told, by other students and teachers and even by my own analyst, that it is a surprisingly resonant test – it's based on Jung's idea that exact associations and their relationships to words and memories are important, and in fact that exact associations are more useful than Freud's 'free' associations. Basically, it looks for complexes – groups of ideas that are very charged; it can't of course locate all of them (that would require an infinite number of words, which would exhaust any listener in any case, whereupon the test would become worthless); but it can, as it were, 'bump into' the bigger clusters of concerns.
It's a bit like creating a relief map of the mind – resulting in a picture of relatively flat, reasonably organised areas, contrasted with hills and mountain ranges of more emotional tangles of meaning and memory... except that you are creating that relief map by chance, so it's sort of like creating such a map by scattering things that can show variation, then filling in some of the empty spaces.
My own analyst said that it can revive an analysis that has become repetitive or predictable, and is in any case it is a useful thing to do... so I gratefully accepted his offer to run the 'experiment' (test) on me, as it would (and did) help me understand how to administer it.
So, while I was running the test this week for one of my analysands, with the spreadsheet and the stopwatch (correction: the iPhone stopwatch app – yay, much easier! – so, who wants to buy an unused stopwatch?...) and all the intricate tangle of little details, it was framed by... doing the test myself.
•••
This, at a time of feeling intermittently overwhelmed and exasperated – though not disastrously so: a trip to Barcelona that shifted from an enjoyable change of habits to a cancelled flight, mild chaos, changed appointments and a class; many emails, many demands –
I suddenly recognised one thing that was making me (rationally) frustrated: that working with students, academics, analysands, analysts, teaching, and the HIV+ patient group was just too many different kinds of interaction –
current university policy pushes us to take care of student concerns, even petty ones (though I have to admit, my own music students tend to be pretty reasonable the past two or three years – my big problems are generally students from other departments who Want Things Exactly Their Way). So: students, fussier support, more expectation that we smooth their way in everything.
Analysands, with whom we are not supposed to be too helpful: nor confrontative – we are supposed to wait, and watch; with an implied patience that still eludes me at times.
And the HIV+ patient group, which is (successfully) more energetic, making things happen very rapidly these days – but also kind of chaotic: unlike, for instance, one of my department's meetings, there is a tendency for everyone in the group to jump in to every project and have concerns and opinions; and for some of those opinions to become demands, disagreements – healthy and predictable, but exhausting among all the other stuff.
And I realised I was feeling buffeted by all these people, by all these overly varied systems of expectation –
•••
So, my own association test, with my own analyst, seemed to go unexpectedly wrong on the day: I had put myself together, dashed around town and gotten things done with some success; then, during the two-hour train ride, plus about an hour of other travel, there appeared on my phone a burst of emails from the patient group – including from a well-meaning someone who suddenly made plans to design our new web page himself (I've been communicating with the designer for two months). And my wifi connection is erratic on the train, I'm trying to write emails to stop a mess from being created – on the telephone while scrambling to be on time to catch Sheffield trams and trains –
Aargh. Exasperated, confused, frazzled.
And I arrive to do the test, but I am distracted, my attention elsewhere. My analyst is cautious and skilful about administering the test (he's a psychiatrist – I assume he's done a lot of other testing procedures in his training and career), but I am not present, my mind is elsewhere, I don't know... is this nonsense? Have I made a silly mess of this, are my reactions distorted by my preoccupations?
My analyst's only comment, toward the end of the test: 'Yes, well, you seem very – defended today.' So I assume that I've just wasted his time and mine, all because of those damned emails.
A bad day... I think, at the time.
•••
With my own analysand, responses to the material are plentiful and forthcoming – I'm a bit worried about ticking all the boxes for the experiment procedures (I have to pass, after all, and I'm not quite getting to the ends of all of the lists).
But he is very interested in the test, very imaginative – connections arise, we talk about them – and in the second session a number of things start to fall into place: it's clear that I haven't done the cleanest administration of the test in its history, but it has succeeded anyway – we both recognise powerful clusters of ideas, things we have already repeatedly talked about – but they are linked up in ways that hadn't been clear to either of us:
the map of what we are working on becomes more visible to both of us –
•••
Then, the followup session for my own test.
At the front of my mind: a busy day, a list of Things to Do, and in addition a lunch with Laurie, up from the south to examine one of our doctoral candidates, suddenly appears out of nowhere. Yes, the lunch is pleasant, but... still just too much stuff.
And I am sure that all my preoccupations have already botched the test – I'll just tell him, well let's do the charts and such, but I know that I made this all kind of meaningless.
My analyst gently disagrees, and says, let's just go through the procedure...
At first I continue the previous patterns, rather simply – my associations are either direct ('red' elicits 'blue') or... well... a few are nearly incomprehensible.
But the discussion starts to grow: we seem to hit veins, old memories and tangles, things I hadn't put together –
And, somewhat as my own analysand did, I find myself, toward the end of the session, linking up multiple personal histories, things where I'd never noticed my recurrent responses to situations that have similar elements: an early event is at some level similar to a later event, or is really connected to something that always makes me angry, or is...
•••
Without all the various fragments: here are the biggest, and for me most interesting, chains of results. What the various parts have in common is their shape – that is, the way I organise and respond to a set of occurrences, and the way I bring them into focus in a particular way that imposes on them a family resemblance.
A recurrent experience of being betrayed, confused, while in the midst of big decisions –
the first minister at our suburban church was a kindly, trustworthy man, someone who seemed utterly dependable. But he left with his family to move to Arizona when I was, what – ten, eleven? My mother was on the church committee to choose someone new, and they chose... a well-meaning but painfully pretentious man: someone whose sermons brought a teeth-aching costume-jewelry falsity into every Sunday morning.
My mother was very embarrassed about it in later years – she and her best friend, who had both been on that committee, couldn't imagine how they had chosen the guy. But he was there, and he wasn't going anywhere.
And we continued to go to church; because that is what you do... but every week, at least for me, it was a gruelling experience of wrongness, of a weird tawdriness, an atmosphere of being trapped in a sort of manipulative nonsense – his wife, embarrassingly enough, danced a form of worship one week... a combination of ineptitude and vanity that foreshadows the worst of my own performing career.
And that then became continuous with the experience of a Christian youth group in my high school. Some of the most socially successful students, a couple of years ahead of me, decided in the early 70s that they had Found Jesus; and they included the handsomest men in the school.
So, when they sat and talked to me earnestly about belief, I was caught – uncertain, but wanting to belong, wanting to connect with them somehow, in any case... anxiously going over and over the meaning and epistemology of belief, taking it all terribly, terribly seriously.
All of which even, absurdly enough, led to me studying the bassoon – because of the guy who was the bassoonist, who could not have been more heterosexual – which was incidentally a fairly expensive error in judgment for my parents. Because bassoons aren't cheap; and I was never any good at it anyway....
•••
The third stanza of this rather sour song is, weirdly enough, choosing to join a fraternity at college in my sophomore year. A week of hazing – rather classy hazing, to be frank: not much sleep, suit coats but no showers, long, detailed tests that had both interesting aspects (meaning and connection) and ridiculous ones (memorising lists of brothers who had been president).
(This is all somewhat embarrassing to explain. I will try not to retreat into defensive irony – it was after all a long time ago... and, let's face it, these are aspects of social relations in which I am still not incredibly skilled.)
I left the hermetically sealed hazing environment, not once, but twice – Chris W. will remember all this, I think. He, and others, could see that I was gay, that I was disoriented by being hopelessly (literally hopelessly) in love with a brother who was about to graduate anyway – some of them thought it would be best if I simply was allowed to leave.
But, with painful and clueless earnestness, I would have long discussions with brothers about returning, about meaning, about the reality of what we were doing – which wasn't entirely bogus; but probably I should have been imposing all that anxious commitment into something a bit more connected to myself.
It was a sort of like those people who end up agonising over becoming a priest, or a nun, or some such: when that wasn't actually something that they should be doing....
So, once again, the intense anxiety over commitment, the group and its safeties and dangers, my own overly serious demand for an existential meaning to the whole situation.
And a certain recurrent failure, a certain betrayal: the following two years in the fraternity included the grotesque Jack, whose aggressive reconstruction of the fraternity into a southern old boys' club dovetailed with the behaviour of the (gay) snotty ex-president who told me once, on the carved central staircase of the fraternity house, that there had never been a member of the board with a vowel at the end of his name....
•••
I can look back on that particular period and mock it, quite easily: but what is important in seeing these complexes is the desperate wish to do the right thing, to belong; but also to critique what it was all about, on the most intense existential and philosophical terms.
Now, it seems as though this all represents a young man who is investing a naïve passion for commitment and meaning into a lot of places where it they don't really belong – at least not with so much soul-searching seriousness.
(An idle thought occurs to me now: can you imagine how much more awful it would have been had I, for instance, bumped into some kind of religious or radical-political community that wanted my allegiance? Or had had a guru/teacher who demanded utter devotion to an ideal... Perhaps becoming entangled in these odd and scattered situations was actually luckier than it might have been. Think of what I could have fallen into.)
•••
Later links in this chain of complexes/stories show me becoming more distant, more rebellious – accustomed to failure and betrayal, and to a repeated experience of group ideals that makes them seem always slightly false, slightly fake... and all of the far-too-much anxiety that resulted from it.
Undergraduate degree: badly botched, but somehow passed, a four-year degree done in three years, with lousy marks. But I didn't care: I wasn't their creature; and I Showed Them that they failed me as much as I have them.
(I still occasionally take students aside, especially the ones who are rebelling into a self-dug hole in the ground, and point out that institutions are rarely harmed by our rebellious participation in them.)
Eight years of performing, writing, scraping along: I knew I'd failed at the big things, so repeatedly tried less realistic, shakier commitments – singing in bars, on stages?...
AIDS: and see, the pleasures of San Francisco are cursed, and it can be proven: I have entered paradise just in time for the whole system to collapse into death and chaos. Then the Reagan 1980s are a grander betrayal of all of us.
Graduate degree: I go my own way, spikily defensive to any push to be more tractable, more obedient – and when the music professors at UCLA decide to split the department in three, as a result of their own admittedly pathetic personal squabble, I will react with grand indignation, co-organising a meeting of the entire department's students to insist on a realistic response to our anxieties. I am heroic, angry, and above all resentful: systems have failed me again... and, of course, my entire degree is suffused with a lot of Adorno, giving me intellectual backing for raging against the machine.
Hong Kong: well-paid and well-cared-for, I will be adjacent to an explosion of vindictiveness between my colleagues – and I see that this place, also, is tainted. You can't trust organisations; you need to make your own way, be vigilant to manipulation, critical to every false note in the ideology of the institution.
Australia: a return to paradise! But I am kicked out by a conservative government. At this point it is clear to me: governments, especially conservative governments, are evil, the central expressions of the greedy betrayal of the individual by the structure.
Newcastle: I am tired and confused, after a life of colliding with structures –
(or, as we can see from this alternate way of telling the story: a life determined by the complexes attendant on early experiences, and my own anxious paranoia about structures –)
I settle into low expectations: grey weather, loneliness... sad and often bravely pathetic blog entries....
oops. Ah. Ah, yes, I see your point exactly.
•••
Well, you can see the machinery that continues to work within me: finding or projecting patterns onto my life, onto my experiences – and yes, of course, real disasters do happen, and systems do tend to recreate themselves, and Adorno was (often, not always) right:
but this is about my own ability to focus on certain disasters, and to use them to then recreate myself as the angry victim of the same kind of thing, over and over.
As, for instance: last week's UK elections – at the level of national governments, my usual response is one of depressed anger. Perhaps because I have viewed so many smaller systems with so much fear and resentment that, at the national level, I experience the threat as too large to be fought.
Perhaps it is good that I become more aware of all this now – at so many points, in relation to the Jung-Institut, to my supervisors, to the international Jung societies and conferences, I can suddenly see ways that I can move towards the same problems:
if I like to view Jungian thought as relatively flexible and experimental, how much will I collide with people who are more set in their ways –
and could I, at some point, construct myself as betrayed by this system, too?...
•••
The structure of these stories becomes clear: and there are many more bits of my personal history that can be inserted into this system.
And I realise – as I teach classes and have discussions with students, manage spreadsheets, organise posters for the HIV group, listen to analysands, write down my own dreams – buy groceries – go for a walk – that...
I could, quite easily, do all these things again.
But also that I now have much, much more of a choice: that I could, perhaps for the first time in my life, not do all these things again.
•••
And so, the association experiment, after a substantial amount of analysis, suddenly reveals to me my own repeated patterns:
like little devils that reappear in many guises –
but that always seem to yell the same yells; to tell the same stories....