Starting over?

At the beginning of Richard Wollheim’s memoir, Germs, he writes, “For many years, and all of them before I set out, with Dr S as my pilot, to sail back up the stream of my life—an image I clung to for those strained, pipe-filled sessions in which the unity that I longed to find in my life seemed to slip further and further away into incoherent anxieties . . .” I think that what Wollheim refers to here is that his sessions with Dr. S produced not a cohesive, coherent self but rather, an awareness of a self beset by and even governed by vague and formless dangers to which he had organized defenses though he was never quite certain what the danger actually was. Such is the nature of anxiety: Freud refers to anxiety as a particular state of the individual expecting danger or preparing for it, even though that danger may be an unknown one. Freud distinguishes between anxiety and fear, the latter requiring a definite object; anxiety is unstructured and formless, spreading out like The Blob, in amoeba-like spreading movements. I have spent many years in pipe-filled sessions with my choice of a Dr. S, and I suppose I sought in these sessions some thread that would singularly and definitively explain the shape of my life, my character. Instead, and throughout the years and sessions I discovered an array of disjointed defenses for a multiplicity of innumerable and imagined dangers. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Freud acknowledges that though analysis might assuage one anxiety/neurosis and that might even suggest the cessation of treatment, the erasure of the one leaves room for another to rise in its place. Alas, I am familiar with anxiety. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s inner circle, called character traits ‘secret psychoses.’ Perhaps he meant that what I take to be ‘normal’ are manifestation of anxieties. Laurence Sterne, on Tristram Shandy, referred to character traits as hobby horses, and asserted that as long upon his particular hobby horse a person did not hurt anybody then why should anybody care. I have throughout my life maintained an ever-increasing stable. But Ferenczi suggests that we are all a bit mad.
           In March 2022, I published my memoir, Anxious Am I: A Pseudo-memoir with Some Fiction and a Bit of Truth. Over the past seventeen years I had kept a blog, Of Clay and Wattles Made, in which I have continued to document my psychic comings and goings. In a moment of dubious lucidity, I decided to use my blog entries as the skeleton of a memoir over which I would stretch a somewhat porous covering and give some character and bulk to the bones. I proceeded to compile the entries from the past seventeen years, organize them into various subject headings, placed them into different colored, labeled binders and began to write a story of my life through the lens of my well-documented anxieties. I suppose I sought out in the writing to document how my anxieties had given a disordered shape to my existence. But in that search I discovered just the opposite, and came to see that the failure to discover coherence was, in fact, the only coherence. Walt Whitman said it years ago: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.”) Though I doubt that Whitman referred here to the incoherence of his self. 

            I wonder if what I am doing at present is constructing another skeleton over which I will stretch some skin and breathe life into what I have created. I’m thinking of Dr. Frankenstein whose unnamed monster desired a companion: one good anxiety deserves another. But the good doctor declined to create another. I proceed anxiously but contentedly on. Come Watson, the game’s afoot.