The first of these exams was the longest – Dr Weskamp, Dr Lüscher and a third woman I don't know go over one of my case reports, with dreams. The case is their selection, not mine – they are obviously curious about my patient who has a vast range of cinematic dreams; discussion is pleasant but searching, they cross from point to point to point in great detail....
But after ninety minutes they relax, send me briefly out of the room, and when I come back they are pleased to give me a good mark – I have to watch out for the countertransference issues I've already noted in my report, but they are reassured that I am self-critical about such things, and they all shake my hand, smiling.
•••
Ten days later, an hour after the interview, I am still a bit wound up: sunny streets, but not as hot as last week – people are wandering in a summer-weekend-afternoon kind of way, and a young man with a tightly wound runner's body walks rapidly towards me from the Zürichsee, wet, with a surfboard.
•••
The second exam is... well, not quite so pleasant. First of all it begins at 8 am – which means leaving my top-floor Zürich flat at 7 am; which means getting up at... oh, never mind.
Psychiatry: I am confident, and I have chosen a good case. I know that I am supposed to avoid psychoanalytic language – stick to psychiatric terminology, this is where you show that you can communicate in a hospital emergency room without sounding like a useless dingbat.
Unfortunately, I fall into deep water: I am focusing on problems of dissociation – a respectable psychiatric term, I think – my examiner, usually a friendly man, frowns: he doesn't like that word. Tell me about it in another way.
(He doesn't like the word? Can he do that?....)
I have a good, but admittedly rather complex, diagnosis, and it really hangs on aspects of dissociation, so... I flail, with increasingly large arm movements and in deeper waves: it's even more exasperating that my own analyst – who is himself a psychiatrist – has been reading, and talking, about dissociation for three months now....
Roth is not pleased – he is extremely not pleased. He makes hand gestures, which I cannot interpret for the life of me, to suggest the words he wants me to use instead (what does it mean when you curl your fingers and wave your hands in little semicircular motions?) – if my analysand sees people on a commuter train and they don't seem entirely real, isn't that a hallucination?... well I wouldn't exactly... I shut up, seeing that I'm not helping myself.
I go into the hall to wait. This wait is very long: and I suspect that Maxwell, my second examiner, who was quiet during most of the exam, may be trying to save me –
She evidently succeeds. Roth still looks a bit thunderous, but I have been given a Three, which means: that was lousy but you passed. We all shake hands, with not quite as much pleasure as on the previous day.
(I do note with some internal interest that this is, of course, disappointing: but I don't shake with emotion, as I did three years ago at the midpoint exams, when I got a Two – this is merely a thing, as it were.
Which tells you how far my own analysis has come.
And even Roth will, I think, get over it....)
•••
I want something to eat... ignoring Giovanni's texts (he wants to meet for dinner and go to the gay bar that has my favourite bartender, but he also wants help with a translation, which is a very Giovanni approach to social meetings – I'm not avoiding him exactly, but not rushing to help either), I walk along and dig into my backpack for the trendy magazine guide with its pictures of galleries and graffiti and roof gardens.
An interview with a food critic: what are your favourite places in each neighbourhood?... after a long list of hideously expensive and rather heartless-sounding two-star hotel restaurants he mentions Gamper, a small, blithely unusual-yet-natural Swiss restaurant in the suburbs. It sounds perfect.
•••
The third exam will be at 4 pm that same day. I try to get some rest, but don't go back to the city – I don't do many days that are this long, not for the past couple of years – I wander around the garden of the Institut; it is fairly hot. I eat my lunch from a black bento box, but at an odd time of day, a bit early, when the other students aren't out of class yet – in the little boat house, next to the lake – small waves, when a speedboat goes by larger ones, and a cool breeze that appears from time to time...
So. Third exam of three, this time, or of five, or depending on how you count of six, in total. Individuation, with Strubel, and Miyake.
(My students must love knowing that I'm sweating these exams....)
Was there ever such a broad topic for an exam as individuation!
This is of course a kind of meta-discourse – and fortunately I'm good at meta-discourses. I talk about my new analysand, the one who has been seeing me since I handed my reports in, and her rapid changes; I talk about a world of politics and chaos, and how dismantling complexes, anxieties and projections becomes more difficult when the world is a mess.
I talk about myself: and he moves in on parts of my own story – and I am telling my life story, yet again: in a somewhat different form, of course. I do this story a lot, don't I? for medical students, for my own students, for interviews – not to mention while boring my friends...
But fortunately this not an exam on narcissism, it's about individuation. They are very pleased, and I've got another good mark to balance the miserable one....
Of course, as Stuart pointed out, by tomorrow no one will remember the marks. Just that you passed.
•••
I walk through town slowly... it is getting more crowded. As I recover from the interview, I sit at a lakeside café to have a drink: white wine mixed with mineral water.
It is Saturday; there are many people walking, local and tourist and shopper and people enjoying the summer afternoon. A brass band blares out as part of some festival – and a lot of things rapidly begin to come into focus: there are trumpet fanfares, an amplified announcer, boats – people stop and watch on both sides of the lake, along the bridge, and they gather to look down from the high plaza in front of the cathedral...
But through it all, down the Zurichsee, glides a single swan, royally unconcerned.
•••
After exams, a week of classes – I attend a few, not many. I am drifting in time somehow – not, as it happens, dissociating (ha!) but sort of present, without feeling any enormous need to be involved.
It is easy to look at notes for the thesis. It is easy to talk to people. It is hot, but only a little bit miserable for a couple of days.
Hinshaw's city office, full of books, for a couple of hours of supervision – we mostly wrap things up and check in. Meister-Notter – I catch her to talk about the picture interpretation exam next February (yes, there are two exams left, plus thesis) – she is reassuring, and her main instruction is: don't worry about it.
The Institut office contacts me – there is another interview (what? another one?) where an analyst not known to me, but who has read all of my case reports, talks to me about all of them at once.
Don't worry, they say.
Almost everyone passes.
•••
I leave the café and walk to the Paradeplatz, to find the tram to cross the town to this restaurant... I realise as I follow the map on my phone that I am actually walking into Giovanni's neighbourhood. But he isn't here, he's at the Institut, so... no pressure to translate anything tonight.
•••
Saturday: I lie around all morning, disinclined to go anywhere. I finally take a shower around one, get dressed carefully, and walk down into the city, to find the building where this interview will take place.
•••
After walking along a street with some varied storefronts – a corner café with women at the tables who appear to be prostitutes, who look at me directly and also calculatingly; a small yellow shop selling African food, with a large man out front on his phone, who gives me a different but also direct look... and I turn the corner to see the small, fine restaurant with a pleasant quiet storefront, and what look like the local crowd sitting at tables out front, greeting each other, drinking, talking.
•••
At the apartment building's entrance is a tired-looking elderly woman, sitting on a shopping cart – with cataracts so thick she can hardly see. Could this be my examiner? – no; a thin dark-haired woman comes to stand next to me and talk to her. I ask, can I get in, I am looking for Fr. Dr. Bachmann? (Because my reports have been read by an analyst named Ingeborg Bachmann – which is slightly disorienting; she has the same name as a famous Austrian writer who also wrote opera libretti, so it's sort of like being told that Joyce Carol Oates has your patient reports and will get back to you about them.)
After some discussion, they decide I am okay; the elderly woman has locked herself out and has been waiting, exhausted, with her shopping – so we help her in slowly, and I finally follow to go up the steps to my appointment.
•••
The waiter is charming, funny – a big, tall, lanky young man with stubble, sort of loosely handsome and jokey and friendly. He tells me food will be available in twenty minutes; would I like champagne? The champagne is light gold in colour, and really – I mean really – good. I think: I'll be taken care of, here....
•••
Fr. Dr. Bachmann introduces herself, and transitions smoothly from pleasant to professional. I open my iPad with my patient reports, but she tells me to close it – we are just talking, you won't need to refer to them. We sit, and I look attentive – and then I try not to look too attentive, because that might seem weird – and so on....
•••
It is pleasant when a waiter decides that you are amusing and, after he does the Usual Thing with the large group at the next table, comes more quietly over to you to joke and tell stories about tonight's specials... we have fun, and I realise I don't want to make my own decisions tonight – especially not at a place like this, where so much subtle attention is obviously being paid to what matters. Because this restaurant has almost nothing in the way of self-conscious hauteur: all energy is focused on, really devoted to, the food.
He tells me about the menu – the main is an easy choice, but the appetisers all have weird short knotty Swiss names, and I have no idea what to choose. What do you think is best? He nods, and brings a flat dry local salami, oven-roasted bread, and a sharp little knife.
•••
Fr. Bachmann says that she is generally pleased with my reports, but she has some questions. Why is there not more on my countertransference in these reports, why do I not explain what is going on with me? She becomes more searching, watching me closely.
•••
An intensely rich potage of mushrooms, made by someone who loves mushrooms, with shavings of something – vegetable – and an egg in its depths.
•••
Several of your analysands are friends with each other – what do you plan to do about containment issues? And Fr. Kast told you that you are too sympathetic with one analysand – what have you done about that?
The questions are making me sweat a bit... if I fail this one I assume I will be able to take it again.
•••
A small, round, deep tart of red onions in pastry, garnished with white sheep's cheese and mint leaves.
•••
What are you going to do about the patient whose life changed and she stopped coming to you – what do you see for future concerns? Have you planned what to do in case things start to go wrong again?
I am waving my hands expansively as I talk, even closing my eyes to remember what I want to say...
•••
A big but fragile juicy meringue, with whipped cream, topped with a large dollop of fig jam. The elderly woman next to me asks if it is good, and I give her a heartfelt yes.
•••
At the end of an hour of questions, she relaxes a bit – and then the corners of her mouth twitch up, slightly. She looks at me with the warmth she had at the beginning, and says, unexpectedly:
You are a good analyst.
I catch my breath, look at her in amazement –
•••
And so, to finish: a small glass of Marc, warm and incredibly sharp – like a drinkable flame....
I had a small lunch break in the little boathouse yesterday - watching a swan who didn't take care about anything but the wind and the waves... just had this in my mind again while reading your text. You are a good writer.
Posted by: ulrike | July 02, 2017 at 02:59 PM