The Uninvited Guest

Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage

James V. Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429922626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together a deep thoughtfulness about the insights of psychoanalysis and its application to work with troubled couples with an original and closely argued reading of some classic plays about marriage. It will be of use to readers interested in psychoanalysis and literature.

Chapter One
The Winter's Tale: marriage and re-marriage

Let's begin with a tale, a tale of hateful jealousy and suspicion, as well as, one might say, a tale of remarriage. But why begin there? Not all of the couples who seek therapy by any means suffer the kind of jealousy and doubts that plague Leontes in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Nor would I suggest that the experience of couples in therapy can always be described as a process of "emerging from narcissism towards marriage", to reiterate the subtitle of this book. Juxtaposing these states, narcissism and marriage, in polar opposition may seem puzzling. And yet that is just what I mean to do throughout this book, to set in opposition narcissism and marriage, in ways perhaps familiar and unfamiliar. Adapting Bion's notation, we could then picture "narcissism ↔ marriage" as a fundamental human tension.

By marriage, I mean to emphasize the passion for and dependence on the intimate other. By narcissism, on the other hand, I do not mean a preoccupation with the self, a kind of self-love. Rather, I mean to point to a kind of object relating in which there is an intolerance for the reality, the independent existence of the other. Narcissism in this sense is in fact a longing for an other, but a longing for an other who is perfectly attuned arid responsive, and thus not a genuine other at all.

But why then a tale of re-marriage? Couples seeking therapy are not usually literally exploring the issue of remarriage—although a number of couples I have in mind do describe their therapy as a quest to discover whether re-marriage is desirable, even possible. In that, I think they make explicit what I believe can in a sense be said of all couples who engage in the psychoanalytic process as a couple. That is, "re-marriage" is the issue. And this is true whether or not the couple is married in the eyes of the state, engaged to be married, or separated after many years. And it is true even when the aim is to separate. There is no good divorce that is not at the same time a marriage in the sense of a relationship that is not completely distorted by the narcissism of each partner, especially when there are children.

But, finally, why the telling of a tale? Because—and this is perhaps the most important observation about the book that you have in your hands—it is not meant as an explanation, either of marriage or of therapy, even though it may sometimes, despite my best efforts, sound as if it were. Even if it were possible, I think there would be no value in trying to reduce the complexities of the painful conflicts and dilemmas that couples bring to therapy to some formula. Rather, my intent is to offer a point of view, an understanding of narcissism, defined not as a preoccupation and investment in the self as opposed to others, but as states of mind in which the reality of the other is attacked, undermined, and denied. I have chosen The Winter's Tale as a beginning because it is a tale of narcissistic rage and jealousy. At least that is one way of reading Shakespeare's play—just as it can, plausibly I think, be read as a romance of remarriage. At the end, a husband and a wife are reunited (as are two childhood friends alienated by jealousy) by the "falling-in-love-towards-marriage" of just those two children who at times occasioned their respective fathers' jealous rage and rejection.

In this opening chapter, I want briefly to recount Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Perhaps because its chilling narcissistic rage reminded me of so many sessions with so many couples trapped in something they felt they could neither comprehend, nor escape, nor endure. Recounting this tale will allow me to introduce this theme of emergence from narcissism towards "re-marriage". Hopefully it will become clearer in subsequent chapters why I view the enterprise of psychoanalytic therapy with couples as an exploration of the possibility of remarriage, even, as I said, when the couple seek and hope finally to separate in the end. Separation and marriage are, paradoxically, inseparable.

Interestingly, although it was not in my mind when I selected T. S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party as the illustrative story for the central portion of this book, it too is a tale of "re-marriage". Not only does this theme resonate autobiographically throughout the play, it is also the case, as Eliot himself suggested, that The Cocktail Party was based on Euripides' play Alcestis, a drama that turns on the reunion of the king Admetus with Alcestis his wife after she had been brought back from the dead by Heracles. It only consciously dawned on me long after having written my commentaries on the Eliot and Shakespeare plays that this theme of the reunion of a husband and his lost wife— call it re-marriage—is central to both plays.

Finally, these opening comments would not be complete without a brief remark about the uninvited guest of the title of the book. When we turn to Eliot's play The Cocktail Party in chapter eight, the source of this image will come more clearly into view. Even in The Winter's Tale there is a role for someone who is both an ambiguous player in the drama, and yet stands in a unique position as one who is neither entirely welcome nor invited. This equivocal "insider" appears to choreograph what happens, making it possible for the other participants to see what they might otherwise never see. The unidentified guest, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, at the eponymous cocktail party of Eliot's play is indeed a "therapist" (of some sort). Paulina, Hermione's lady-in-waiting in The Winter's Tale, who progressively takes centre stage as the one who facilitates Leontes' facing the consequences of his narcissistic rage, is not, on any plausible reading of the play, a therapist. Nor am I saying that these plays are in any straightforward sense pictures of the analytic process. I am only, as I tried to say in the Acknowledgements, lighting a candle or two in the hope that they might lead to some illumination of a profoundly complex, dare I say, even mystical, process in our therapy with couples.

But now to our tale. What I hope to do in recounting this tale is to invite you to listen to it with a different accent. My retelling is not meant to be taken as a literary or a psychoanalytic analysis of this play. Those interested in psychoanalytic literary interpretations will find no shortage of interesting, and surprisingly varied expositions, (e.g. Williams & Waddell, 1991; and, for selective but helpful references, Adelman, 1992)

It would be my hope that this telling of The Winter's Tale might lead you back to the play itself. You might even want to go back to Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, published in 1588, which was the story Shakespeare transformed into The Winter's Tale. In that respect these literary sources have an advantage over the stories that I will tell from my experience with couples in therapy. For the fragmentary clinical accounts that I will share with you, you will just have to rely on my version, as any earlier version is now inaccessible. In some sense, I suppose I remain the "uninvited guest", interposing myself in the retelling of the stories of Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot— as well as the story of a couple seen by a previous generation of therapists and, of course, stories from couples I have seen. But I hope not always an unwelcome third.

Is whispering nothing?

We begin in Act II, as Hermione, Leontes' very pregnant queen, turns her attention back to her young son, Mamillius, from whatever had been distracting her—her husband's dark mood or, perhaps, the baby moving inside ready to emerge. She somewhat teasingly invites the boy to tell her a tale at a time that we, the audience, already know of the threatening jealous rage of a father who cannot believe that his children are his own:

Her. Come, sir, now

I am for you again: 'pray you, sit by us,

And tell's a tale.

Mam. Merry, or sad, shall't be?

Her. As merry as you will.

Mam. A sad tale's best for winter: I have one

Of sprites and goblins.

Her. Let's have that, good sir.

Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best

To fright me with your sprites: you're powerful at it

Mam. There was a man—

Her. Nay, come sit down: then on.

Mam. Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly,

Yond crickets shall riot hear it.

Her. Come on then,

And giv't me in mine ear.

[Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, II.i.21-32]

Shakespeare alerts us to the fact that this tale for winter, whispered by a precocious lad into his mother's ear, is to be a sad tale. Is that because this son Hermione invites to "fright her" is himself soon to die, or should we be anxious for her baby? It brings to mind Donald Meltzer's comment about the sense of "hostage-holding" in the world of the claustrum, where in the last resort the hostages turn out to be the children (Meltzer, 1992, p. 95). Although it is not a theme that I will explore in this book, it is all-too-often literally the case that it is the children who are hostage to the destructive narcissism of their parents. It hovers in the background of our work with many couples.

Here at the beginning of Act II, we the audience already know what Hermione does not yet know, that she has reason to be frightened, that Leontes, her husband is disturbed by something; perhaps it is that he is convinced that she has been unfaithful to him with Polixenes, their present guest and his closest childhood friend. Their world appears suddenly about to collapse as Leontes gradually gives voice to the only feeling he can identify, the feeling that he has been betrayed. He becomes quickly certain that his friend, whom he calls his brother and who has visited with them for the past nine months, is the true father of the child his wife is about to deliver. Early in the opening scene we had already heard rumblings of suspicion as Leontes repeatedly questions, in what appears less light-hearted and humorous with each repetition, whether his young son Mamillius, on whom he appears to dote, is really his. Well, how can any father really know? What is proof enough?

I want to call attention to the fact that Shakespeare positions the scene of Mamillius whispering his winter's tale in mother's ear immediately following the end of the scene dominated by the shock of the sudden viciousness of the father's suspicion of the mother. Why? On the face of it, there is no question whom he suspects of betrayal. Is there something about Leontes' feeling betrayed, some unconscious resonance with dread, which makes it inevitable that we too feel some unease, that perhaps the father has indeed been betrayed? We must, I think, feel its weight, what makes it feel like truth. And yet there is also something about it that makes it clearly incredible, that makes us feel that it is mad to believe there has been such a betrayal. Shakespeare creates a mood of apprehension for which the clear sense of betrayal is almost a relief to this husband.

We are not surprised when, as with the rest of Leontes' Court, Camillo, his loyal confidant, finds these slanders unbelievable and challenges the King. Nor do we feel surprised that Camillo is met with a barrage of abuse from the King which makes us feel just how hopeless it is to try to reason with him. He is a man whose world is falling apart, a man who "knows" all he needs to know of his wife's unfaithfulness:

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot?
Is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

[I.ii.284-288, 292-296]

Were I listening to this in my consulting-room—and who has not endured similar barrages of certainties posing as questions from outraged wives and husbands—I would find myself wondering about the sequence of things. Why immediately after this outburst do I find myself listening to a description of the son's whisperings, leaning cheek to cheek with mother. Is the teller of this tale of horror trying to let us know that the betrayal is real, but, because quite unbearable, it has been re-located? These questions are reinforced when in this latter scene we see Mamillius playing the seductive young lord, quite capable in his, or even in his father's, unconscious imagination to be a plausible rival. When one of his mother's ladies-in-waiting asks if she should be the son's play-fellow, he responds: "No, I'll none of you." When asked why, he says: "You'll kiss me hard, arid speak to me as if / I were a baby still." He then engages in a spirited, precocious repartee with the other lady-in-waiting about women's make-up. "Who taught' this!" she replies in mock horror.

Rejecting anyone but mother, the young prince is teased by the Queen's ladies-in-waiting that as his mother "rounds apace", there is soon to be a "fine new prince". Again, in a bit of repartee we encounter the pain of triangular tensions as the first lady-in-waiting torments the young prince: "and then you'd wanton with us / If we would have you." Mamillius seems to do his best to ignore this suggestion of what could be seen as an invitation to an identification with his jealous father.

This is no straightforward story of a husband's horror believing that his wife has been seduced by his best friend—is there ever a "straightforward" story! We shall take a closer look at it in a moment. However, there is no doubt as to the consequences. The son dies as his imprisoned mother gives birth to her second child, a daughter, who herself is saved from certain death only by a father's relenting, ordering instead that she be abandoned in some remote place. Shades of Oedipus—but here the motive of this father seems quite different from that of the father in that tragedy. Is this a different story, or is it the same story, but told from another's perspective, perhaps another generation's point of view? One thing is clear in both stories: all this leads to the death of the mother/wife. Leontes' world has indeed fallen apart, a tragic tale, would we say, of hubris of some kind which manifests itself as the hubris of jealous rage?

What we the audience do not know until the very last scene is that this is also a romantic tale of re-marriage. We are led to believe with Leontes that his imprisoned wife died in shock at the news that, not only had her baby daughter been exiled to almost certain death, but now her young son has died, apparently of grief. Leontes attributes the son's grief to his shame at his mother's betrayal, but it is grief that we the audience are more likely to feel comes in the wake of his father's disloyal accusations and loss of faith in his wife's love. In the last scene, presented as under Paulina's direction, Hermione is portrayed as a stone statue who slowly comes to life. It is a scene of reunion, a wife with her repentant husband, a mother with her lost daughter, a young couple who thought their union doomed, an old friend with his oldest friend—even the two whose faithfulness sustains the possibility of this re-union, Paulina and Camillo, are (re-) united. As the curtain falls they all depart to what Stanley Cavell convincingly pictures as a celebration of re-marriage (Cavell, 1987, pp. 193-221).

Marriage and re-marriage

Alerted by Cavell to this theme of remarriage in The Winter's Tale, I want to use this play to introduce the image of re-marriage as a way of picturing the process of psychoanalytic therapy with couples. It will be obvious that what I have in mind is not some socio–legal notion of marriage, but rather I am inviting the thought that couples who engage in the psychoanalytic process as couples are in the nature of things in some important psychological sense married. In that sense what they seek in therapy is to find out whether re-marriage is possible, or even desirable, and what it might entail.

In the picture I am portraying of the centrality of marriage, I mean to suggest that marriage, in the sense of a capacity for what we in our psychoanalytic language term object relating, is not a once-and-for-all achievement. As with Bion's description of the oscillation between the paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions, which he images as Ps ↔ D, can we imagine a similar oscillation between narcissistic and object-relating states of mind? I want to invite you throughout this book to entertain a picture of it as an oscillating tension between narcissism and marriage. More than sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD
• 1 The Winter's Tale: marriage and re-marriage
• 2 The false-self couple: seeking truth and being true
• 3 The gathering of the transference
• 4 Duet for one? Two people or a couple?
• 5 Separations and the capacity to mourn
• 6 That which couples bring to therapy
• 7 Couple stories and couple dreams
• 8 The uninvited guest
• 9 Hell is oneself, the others merely projections
• 10 Making the best of a bad job
• 11 A sado-masochistic folie à deux
• 12 Termination: Othello's version of Eliot's "two ways"
• REFERENCES
• INDEX