REMINISCENCE
Treasures of the Well
Memory is a funny thing. It flows in waves that reverberate in their own small universes of echo. And echo is the stuff of which mind and meaning, Lacan’s Imaginary, are built. Along with the hall of mirrors, we have the realm of echo, the aesthetic residue of embodied, sensory, affective prosodies through which unconscious threads travel and link, forming patterns that call us forward to uncover their mysteries. My earliest memory is of sitting outside my attic bedroom – which my grandmother had co-opted – anxiously waiting for her to be released from behind the door she could not open. At around the same age, 5, I remember being shamed by my mother for having picked the neighbor’s flowers to present to her when she arrived home after the birth of my younger sister. I remember thinking that this sister was extraneous and expendable but then bonding with her, adopting her in a way that sustained us both for many decades. I had recurrent dreams as a child, dreams of labyrinths and spaces narrowing and becoming impassable even as I tried to traverse them. In retrospect, I see how they marked aspects of my life story I had no way of consciously knowing at the time. Some dreams mark my mother and older sister as points of danger, opposing my family role of intruder breaking into the symbiotic entanglement of parents with their first child. In one dream, I was being chased by the big bad wolf. I ran into our shared bedroom, hiding under the vanity table at my older sister’s urging. When the wolf came to the door, my sister opened it and silently pointed
Marilyn CHARLES
to my hiding place. My unconscious mind recognized a treachery that lurked within the sister I so longed to be close to but who seemed repelled by me, whose own childhood dreams were of killing me and of watching my mother disappear. Looking back at the ways my unconscious mind was always working at the enigmas life had left me, it is hardly surprising that psychoanalysis called to me. Where else can we find such a receptive recognition of truths that otherwise emerge only as symptoms to be managed or eradicated? I also had recurrent stomach aches as a child, symptoms that seemed quite real at the time and often kept me home from school, a relieving respite from the demands of daily living. When I went to summer camp, my sense of time faltered. No longer marked by the daily routine of the school day, I was faced with the enormity of time stretching out before me with its unfamiliar demands, and presented myself at the nurse’s station several times a day. It was only later that I could see myself through the nurse’s eyes, this pattern repeating itself when I was sent away to boarding school at age 13 and desperately needed to return home. The symptoms were never sufficient to invite the type of attention I yearned for. Instead, I incurred my parents’ frustration and rage, attenuated only by the earnest, loving voice of my younger sister. Psychoanalytic folklore suggests we marry our parents but, however lost I was in my conscious mind, I had the intuitive sense to marry someone like my sister; the only person in my family whose love shot true and 24
DIVISION | R E V I E W
WINTER
2024
unwaveringly loyal, who loved me for all the right reasons. My relationship with my older sister was much more entangled. It was years before we could navigate past the impasse structured by the conditions of our births. In adulthood, it was my older sister I emulated as I found my way into the realm of scholarship through which I learned to translate the aesthetics of experience into forms that could be communicated to others and played with. I felt, bizarrely, as though I were channeling my sister in order to meet these challenges, much as her creative efforts were inhibited by the sense that she was trespassing into territory that had been vouchsafed as mine. When I left home for college, I sought assistance for the somatic maladies that plagued me. Being sent repeatedly to psychologists for somatic complaints was disturbing. Looking backward, I see how these individuals align with the nurse from summer camp but, at the time, all I could register was the refrain from childhood, saying accusingly: ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Everyone seemed to already have answers that were not mine and, afraid of disappearing even further under the weight of others’ indictments, I steered clear until the psychologist my mother was seeing—in her attempt to emotionally distance from her very trying daughter—asked to meet me. This man (who I later discovered was blind) seemed to really see me, saying only: ‘You seem to be here and trying to get there.’ Finding someone seemingly interested in tracking me in relation to my own desires, without the accusing glare that too often accompanied such interactions, was both refreshing and relieving. I still find it traumatic when I encounter that look from frustrated parents towards my patients. I try to help the accused recognize that it is suffering that drives the assault, not the denigrating hatred that seems to obscure the love underneath. Recognizing the hatred, of course, carries its own truth. Psychic reality has to be contended with. Lacan talks about the move from the symptom to the sinthome, that creative—I would say reparative—shift from being subjugated by the experiences borne by our historical self to being able to liberate ourselves from the oppression and more freely be. For me, that position is the stuff of Kundera’s incredible lightness of being—when we snatch our soul back from the dark dungeons of despair towards the possibility of being. In this shift, it matters who is reading the signs. Those who read my symptoms as signs of a deeper disturbance in me seemed dangerous and, I think, they were. I needed space to figure out who I was, in my own terms, a project that, paradoxically, was fed when my