Katherine Angel Adventures into the Unknown
Enya Ettershank talks to writer and psychoanalyst in training Katherine Angel about her upcoming book Poor Freud, the mythology and uncertainty of understanding the self through both writing and analysis and meeting our most vulnerable parts.
INTERVIEW BY ENYA ETTERSHANK
Katherine Angel is never one to shy away from the nuances and complexities of our desires, relationships and understanding of ourselves. She manages to shed a clear and crisp light on issues that are hard to grasp and ever truly know, to open up conversations and sit in the uncomfortable and murky. In an age where ‘self-knowledge’ is lauded and constantly required of us in order to be safe, to be well, to make money or supposedly excel, Angel's work is a breath of fresh air. This isn’t to say that her work or practice rejects the quest for knowledge or truth, the quest and drive is the vehicle that powers her work and writing, leading us down deeper rabbit holes and pathways that trouble the status-quo in the hopes of a better and more liberated world. It was a pleasure to speak with Angel while she was in the midst of writing her upcoming book, Poor Freud, and to hear her eloquently grapple with complicated issues regarding writing, self-mythologising and psychoanalysis and the relationships that unfold both personally and politically within these spheres.
Enya Ettershank: You’re writing a book at the moment, Poor Freud, how’s the process been?
Katherine Angel: I work in weird timescales. I’m writing in the present and responding, whether consciously or not, to things that are going on at the moment. But then I also have my own internal archive of thoughts and half written books and semi-written papers, and it's both really slow and quite fast when I write.
So much of your thinking is wary of certainty and of language being certain. I can't imagine you being someone who's like: here, this is my book plan. Your writing tends to show a working-through as you go; aware that some conventional frame of thinking or language, the language we inherit, is failing us.
I feel like there are so many stages in my writing where I could theoretically be writing and finishing a book, because I sort of know. I know roughly what I'm going to say but there is something that stops me. It's a feeling that I haven't quite gotten the language right, the tone right, the voice right and I haven't got the rhythm of it right. It's a bit agonising because I have to wait. With this book it feels different. With my previous books it wasn't really clear what the subject matter was until I'd finished them. This one is really different because I wrote a proposal and I gave it a title before starting it, and it's a book about Freud. Freud is no mean feat to take on. If I start to think about it as a book about Freud, I become really incapacitated. It's too big a structure!
I think it's also important to find a way to be faithful to my kind of pleasure in writing, which is about sound and rhythm and the feel of something and the rhythm of something. But trying to do that in relation to an incredibly unwieldy, difficult structure is intimidating.
Freud is haunting and his writing loops around. Are there any things that loop around in your head that reoccur in Freud’s work?
Definitely. There are themes: the battle metaphors, the metaphors around conflict and difficulty (there’s a phrase I love from the Outline: ‘states of conflict and uproar’, states that Freud says are very useful for psychoanalytic theory). I'm very interested in that because I'm curious about whether analysis has something essentially combative to it and whether there is something intractable about a question of the power dynamics in psychoanalysis. Freud writes about the patient and analyst having to ‘band themselves into a party’, and forming a kind of pact; and it’s a very strange pact, I think. I’m very invested in retaining a sense of the strangeness of that pact, largely for ethical reasons. I think one of the things that's so interesting about Freud is that he very confidently says that we can't imagine that we're in the business of telling the patient what they need to understand. If you try to directly draw the patient’s attention to the mechanisms of repression, all that's going to happen is that the repression is going to double down and the defences are going to get activated all the more. But he himself goes against this insight, both in practice and theory; he can be very pedagogical and obtrusive! His ambivalence, and his constant revisions, create this incredibly rich terrain from which different traditions – often totally mutually incompatible! – emerge. You can see, not just across Freud’s writings, but within one text, sometimes within one paragraph, or within one sentence, the different inflections from which the distinct techniques of different analytic schools emerge. Everyone can claim a part of Freud! I'm really interested in the battle in himself that he was always struggling with, depending on who he was talking to, what audience he was speaking to and depending on which version of himself he wanted to be. And then there are recurrent images of surgery, of extraction (of a truth, of a secret), that have yielded a powerful cultural vision of analysis and therapy, for good and for ill; and images of things being upside down that I find really interesting. Yes is no and black is white and in dreams how the day is night. If everything can be its opposite, how can you believe anything anyone ever says about themselves? I think that is the fundamental question. Can we believe anything anyone ever says about themselves? Probably not. It's very, very fraught. It's very dangerous what Freud discovered.
It's very complicated. I wonder, do you ever feel like that? Do you question yourself as a writer in that way? Applying that Freudian question to yourself when you're writing?
Yes, I think so. I think that is one of the occupational hazards of analysis. I was talking about this recently with an analytic pal and we were talking about this conflict that we'd had with someone else. We were trying to unpick what was going on asking: what am I trying to gratify in myself? What's the transference to this person? Is it about them or is it about something else as well? I think those are all really important and valuable things to be asking oneself as much as possible in life. You can't take yourself at face value, but what does that mean? This is the political question around psychoanalysis. Is there something about it that inherently disempowers political critique and political action by psychologising everything? I don't know the answer to that question. But as me and my friend were talking, we were saying, yes, there are these things that we're doing in this situation with this other person, but that may not mean that we're wrong about the actual situation.
These two things can coexist. As Freud well knew, a certain hefty dose of repression and denial is exactly what you have to do in order to get through life. There is no way that you could live with the unconscious totally open all the time, you would be completely unable to function. That raises the question of, what's one aiming for in a commitment to psychoanalysis?
Does the constant scrutiny and attempt to get in touch with the unconscious make life more difficult or better?
I don't know.
The idea that you can't walk around having your unconscious laid bare all the time made me think about writing the self. Obviously you write a lot about yourself and, to me, it seems very honest. It's always this question as well, when you're writing about yourself, how much of yourself are you willing to expose? There's this Winnicott quote that I feel you might like. He says, “artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
I do think that lots of really powerful writing does go via the self. It doesn't have to, there’s lots of really powerful writing that doesn't do that. But there is something that’s really interesting about the attempt to kind of reckon with oneself for good and for ill that I really admire. It shares a close border with lots of other things that might be more difficult. For a lot of people, myself included, that urge to write about oneself can also be a source of concern and disturbance. Like, why do I feel the need to do this?
The thing about being in analysis and then training is that what you're trying to do is listen out for what somebody's trying to convince themselves of. You're listening out for the things that we insist on about ourselves and in ourselves that might be serving a particular function; and that function might be really useful and it might be protective.
And so I think if you're a writer adding on that psychoanalytic questioning of your own motives in writing, it can be really debilitating, and I certainly feel that.
There's a part of me that feels that I have to write: that it's part of who I am and I need to write. I need to express things through language, I need to make an object in the world in order to be able to move through certain experiences. There's also the part of me that thinks what the hell am I doing? Why do I need to think that somebody might want to read what I have to think? Not because I don't think my writing is good, I'm proud of my writing, but I think what is that impulse? What's a solution? What function, what role does it play in my life and what might it be enabling me not to do in other realms?
It is complicated being a writer and being a psychoanalyst because you're exposing something, and so much of psychoanalysis is understood as refraining from certain modes of speech and behaviour in order to enable the patient to do something with that neutrality. But then I also think people are who they are, they have their vocations. One of my vocations is being a writer, and that ship has sailed. [Laughter] There are books my patients can read and we have to just work with that if it becomes an issue.
Even if your patients don’t know there's always at some point going to be transference going on, they're always going to be projecting something onto you?
Exactly, that's the stuff of the work, the transference and their fantasies about everything in their life. You included, and it's not you that they have that relationship with. It's their fantasy of you and that's true whether they know stuff about your life or whether they don’t. They'll always know stuff about your life if they want to know. You can't help but notice things about your analyst, no matter how kind of impassive and inscrutable they are. There's nothing stopping the gears of fantasy. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have boundaries with patients, of course. But you can't stop the fantasy.
It’s hard to not be aware of an imagined reader’s fantasy when writing. Does it get to this point where you have to be like well, who's fantasies do I actually care about?
I think one of the things that's really interesting about working with patients is that it can help strengthen that muscle of not taking up the position that the other person puts you in. Not acting from that place, remembering that you are not their fantasy. That's something that I think everybody has to do in life, we all have experiences where we realise that somebody is interacting with us in a way that seems to be heavily weighted with something to do with their own history, their own family, their own sort of relationship to others and so on. It’s also something that emerges a lot in teaching, and I think my experiences teaching were also the ground for my wanting to train in analysis, And that is one of the things that I think is a really interesting and fraught question in psychoanalysis. Somebody is trying to do something to me, and it's their stuff, therefore I don't need to act on it. But also, when is it my responsibility to act? That is the thing that is potentially abusive within psychoanalysis. You can always throw it back to the other person and you see that time and time again in the history of psychoanalysis.
Everyone has that potential for abuse, it's a thing that everyone needs to reckon with, but I don't think many people do.
Yeah, we all have. We all, at least in principle, have the capacity to wield power over others and to abuse others, and there's nothing that can rule that out.
Culturally we are shifting away from more black and white discussions about who can and who cannot harm who. Do you feel that on the flip side, psychoanalysis can help in understanding that power is always there? It's not just based solely on an identity group or organisation or structure elsewhere.
That is one of the questions that's so complex and important. For me, one of the things that does worry me is if you really insist on seeing yourself as part of a group that can do no harm, I think you're very likely to do a lot of harm. Denial of your own sadism is dangerous. You have to be open to your own sadism in order to try and be ethical in the world. And that's really hard to do. Especially if you're at the receiving end of injustice and violence. That makes it very difficult to say in addition to all that shit that comes to me, yeah, it’s possible I do not always act ethically and it's possible that I am not confronting my own desire to punish others, and so on. Obviously the egregious injustices and violence of the world (Gaza of course springs to mind) makes those questions more or less possible or appropriate to ask in different contexts; it’s not always interesting or useful to think in these terms when such gross abuses of force and power are at work.
In Daddy Issues you write that you hate in order to love. How is love and hate connected or part of the same thing?
One of the things that Freud wrote about was ambivalence. The fact that love and hate are in coexistence. So much of human interaction is about the negotiation of those our needs, mutual needs. When we love something it's not all positive affect: it's fear, hatred, resentment, aggression and the desire to punish. The question is how those things interact and how they manifest. What Freud wrote about in Mourning and Melancholia was about this. Not reckoning with your fundamental ambivalence about the loved and lost object can be debilitating. It's sort of what Virginia Wolf said, you can't be honest about someone else until you can be honest about yourself and I think that's also true in life and in politics.
Do you think that Freud was good at seeing the darkness in himself?
I think the thing about Freud was that he was so concerned with his reputation and with the scientific standing of psychoanalysis. The context was also very anti-Semitic. He’s so preoccupied with all those things that sometimes it's hard to tell what he really thought. He's so aware of his audience and so much of his writing is addressed to a particular reader and is trying to preempt their critiques. The rhetoric of some of his writings is just so dazzling. I feel like I can feel so much in him, the kind of contortions he had to go through to be able to make his point in a way that might be able to be taken seriously. I think that there are moments in his writings that are just so powerful and so moving. There's something so careful and methodical about his explorations of the psyche and in all of that he was able to examine himself in a way that few people do, including people who think of themselves as writers who are good at examining themselves. He can go in one direction and then he has to pull back and he's really difficult. Janet Malcolm says in her amazing book The Impossible Profession that, “the unexamined life may not be worth living, but it's not possible to live the examined life for more than a few minutes at a time.” And that's as true of Freud as it was for anyone else. It’s really hard to reckon with oneself. Everything in us is designed to keep it all in place.
Do you feel like you can relate to Freud?
Yes, do you ask that because you sense that?
A bit. I wanted to know more about his appeal, why are you drawn to him?
I definitely have a very intense transference to Freud. I identify with parts of him. I don't identify with the part of him that was able to kind of do this incredible exploration and write these unbelievably complex, systematic works. When I think about Freud I feel a sense of awe, a kind of alien-ness, because that sort of writing and thinking is very alien to me. But the things that I do feel I identify with, is something in him that was really wrestling with something in perhaps a quite painful way. Something repetitive. He was wrestling with the same questions over the whole course of his life and it comes back as this kind of painful echo all the time in his writing. I suppose the thing that draws me to him, and that I identify with too, is the sense of being unable to stop going back to certain questions that are intractably difficult. Questions that there will be no answer to ultimately, but that he was so compelled by, and that's what I really admire in him. I just think he was a fucking genius and he was extremely flawed, of course, and he made all kinds of stupid mistakes. I think he's just one of the most fascinating people ever.
If you're a therapist or a writer or an artist there often is a question overarching the work, whether or not you even answer the question at the end. Maybe questions are actually what pulls more than answers.
Yeah and that is a really interesting way to think about Freud. In some ways he was really intent on finding answers but at the same time he was somebody really preoccupied by a certain set of repetitive questions. There are so many places in his writing where he says I don't know, I don't have the answer to this yet, I don't have enough evidence. There is something about him that is phenomenally curious and able to look at things that other people would think were completely beneath their notice. That's what I find really fascinating is that, for all his legacy we're still asking those same questions now. We're still asking what makes someone suffer? What is the status of something that is remembered? Is somebody's narrative about themselves something that can be questioned? What's the effect of early life and our parents on us? These are not questions that Freud answered. But, as with writing, if that question animates you and perplexes you, then you have no choice but to go into that space and try to answer it, even if you know you can't. [Laughter]
Is it scary to write about Freud then? He's written about everything and everything goes back to him and everyone's still asking the same questions.
I find it completely terrifying. What helps me is just reading Freud. Going back to the texts. There's lots of Freud that I can't quite connect with or get really stuck with, and I think that's fine. I’m not a scholar of Freud, I'm a writer. I read things and then I write things. That's all writers do [Laughter]. Just going back to him and trying to think about what it provokes in me is the most useful thing at the moment.
Maybe listening to the conflict that arises when you're reading him. As you’ve said you’re thinking about conflicts more broadly too.
Exactly. What does it arouse in me? What kind of difficulties does it bring to my mind? I think that's the only way I can really write this book, a really personal encounter with Freud. What I want to do is try to capture something about the fascination he has for me, that might hopefully connect with other people.
Is the book going to be personal then?
I think so. I haven't quite figured out how that's going to work. I’m not going to write about patients, I don't want to write about patients. There is some writing ready about my own relationship to analysis and my own kind of past therapies. And then some of the questions that have arisen in my life where I have found myself thinking alongside psychoanalysis. Whether that's to do with painful things or pleasure or sex or misogyny or divorce. I am hoping the book will find a contact point between Freud's actual writings and those questions as they kind of swirl in an extremely different world.
Yeah, like your companion. A ghost or something.
That's exactly it. I'm haunted. [Laughter]
