Reading Therapy: Talking to My Mother, a Psychotherapist
Jemima Skala reflects on a lifetime of shared books and conversations with a working psychotherapist, who also happens to be her mother.
I’m not sure where to start. At the beginning would be a good option, but which beginning? Birth? The way I used to cuddle up in my parents’ bed against my mum’s warmth while she read to me? The click of the recorder, then: the beginning of the interview.
My mum is a trained psychotherapist. She works in schools, teaches at a university and works with private clients. Her work is varied and copious. She cares about it a lot. She started training while my sister and I were still at school; I was doing my GCSEs at the same time as she was doing her final essays. All I knew of psychotherapy when she first started, as a teenager with limited references, was Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in Freaky Friday. Because light teasing is how we tell each other that we love each other, my sister and I mercilessly parroted the line that Lindsay Lohan’s character Anna grasps for when she gets swapped into her therapist mum’s body and has to take sessions with her mother’s clients: …and how do you feel about that?
My mum fostered my love of reading carefully when I was little. I received books at every Christmas and birthday, even instead of Easter eggs some years. She read to me, then as I have grown older, instead of reading to her, I have passed her along the books that I think she would like. We have conversations about the books that we have shared, Mum will text me when she reaches a particularly dramatic point. I will always tell her what I’m reading whenever we catch up; she does the same. Separately, holding another thread in my hand, as I have gotten older and experienced some of what therapy means as a patient, what access to therapy means, what it is like to think in such a self-reflexive, uncomfortable way, I have become more curious about Mum’s work. So as much as this is for you Worms, this is also for me.
We settle into our interview after I cook dinner for us one Friday evening; Mum has brought three notebooks that she has been writing in since 2011, collecting quotes from books and papers that she has been reading. The first is from David Copperfield; Mum was doing a mother-infant observation at the time, a core part of qualifying as a psychotherapist, and was struck by Betsey Trottwood’s expectations of the infant David, so desperately wanting a girl, and storming out of the narrative almost entirely when it transpires that he is not. It made her think of the expectations that we bring to parenting, how people are formed not always of themselves but of what other people expect them to be. How do you think of your child from your own sense of expectation? I had no idea that she kept these notebooks and feel something pleasantly warm rise up in me when she looks at me, slightly abashed, to bring them out of a tote bag. A flutter of active recognition—I do that too! A batting of wings between us: we really are of each other, I am of her just as she is of me now.
“It made me realise that psychoanalytic thinking exists in all aspects of our lives and culture, that people’s capacity to think about people’s minds is present.
What I’m trying to teach my foundation students now is to think more broadly. You can apply the theory to the world you’re in now, you don’t have to be a therapist to be doing that,” Mum says. I wonder then, is there a difference between thinking like a therapist and thinking like a reader? Mum takes my question and considers it with grace:
“maybe there isn’t a difference because I’m still a consumer, but I’m looking at it through my particular lens, shaped by my training, which now orders my way of thinking. It is a belief system, essentially. It’s a way of living, a bit like a religion is in some sense. It’s a code, a way of seeing everything in your life within this framework.”
Psychoanalysis as religion: I’m sure Freud would have a lot to say. But it’s true, or feels true. Once you open your eyes to theories and relationships; and what people actually mean when they say that; and what group dynamics are; and how we carry unconscious patterns with us into our everyday interactions, these things are impossible to un-see. Less dramatically impactful than an epiphany, maybe, but no less defining. The scales still fall from our eyes.
Tuned into psychoanalysis and tuned into reading. Isn’t that what a writer must do: turn down their frequencies, keep themselves a bit apart from their subject and turn up the volume on their characters, their voices? Mum and I brainstorm our favourite writers who do this: Elizabeth Strout, George Eliot, Arundhati Roy. Mum laughs and remembers going to tai chi lessons after a bad breakup in uni, from which the only thing she remembers is the 70-30 rule: you give 70 percent of your energy and reserve 30 percent for emergencies. I make a mental note; this is something all writers and readers ought to know. Give yourself to a book entirely and you either end up bleeding on the page or missing the world around you.
I will often pass Mum books that I think she will like. Recently, inadvertently, there have been a few about mothers and daughters. Because she is my mother and I am her daughter, this is obviously fraught.
I gave her Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi for Christmas with a heavy caveat: please don’t read too much into this, I just thought you’d like the writing. She nearly used a scrap of it in one of her classes to demonstrate the real-life feelings described in ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’, an influential paper by D.W. Winnicott which describes how mothers may feel hatred towards their babies. She didn’t in the end. I lent her Johanna Hedva’s Your Love Is Not Good without thinking; Mum went to art school to be a theatre designer and worked as a costume designer for years before she had children, so I thought she would appreciate its crass critique of art world success. I didn’t even think about the heinous mother-daughter relationship it contains. Maybe that is my fault; I imagine Mum freaked out, questioning what I’m trying to tell her. Nothing, really, honest—I truly did think you’d like the writing. But what am I hiding from her and from myself? Do I have something to say that Hedva is saying for me? I don’t think so. But I’m not in therapy at the moment.
We wrack our brains together for examples of a Good Enough Mother in literature, referencing Winnicott’s groundbreaking theory that mothers only have to be Good Enough in order for their baby to begin to understand itself as a separate being, not constantly pacified and tamed by its mother’s constant attention. Good Enough as in doing your best, but also Good Enough as in perfection, can be actively detrimental to the child’s development. We struggle to think of Good Enough mothers. Maybe mothers are only interesting when they’re bad. We continue thinking about this after our interview. Mum sends me a few voice notes and the only one we can think of is the mother figure in Max Porter’s Lanny. She juggles a career, childcaring, a less than comfortable marriage, all while negotiating her own personhood and sense of self. She’s a sympathetic character, written full of a quiet verve and grace.
Ponder with us the Madonna. Before Winnicott, mothers could only be perfect or abject. Motherhood was either beatified or torturous, and the implications for offspring were either absolute normality or absolute trauma. Before Winnicott, the idea of someone doing their best wasn’t to be tolerated in relation to motherhood. The example of the Madonna was held up for so long to keep mothers striving for perfection, the guilt of not achieving it serving as a thorned cat-o-nine-tails with which they should self-flagellate. Winnicott’s theory of the Good Enough Mother was revolutionary not only for allowing mothers to be less than perfect, but for highlighting that the repair of these less than perfect moments is what matters: it’s how you handle the mistakes, not the fact of the mistake itself. It’s new, therefore, for literature to take these Good Enough mothers into account. Before there was only Good or Bad mother, hence characters like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a flappy, distracted, self-absorbed mess of a mother. That she has somehow managed to raise several daughters, a fair proportion of whom have their heads screwed on by Regency standards, is not attributed to her mothering, but to Mr Bennet’s fathering. He, in all his distance and his time apart, cloistered from his feminine household in his study, is credited with forging the sensible Lizzie and eminently good Jane. Before Winnicott, it seems, mothers were doomed.
Mum remembers reading Rachel Cusk’s landmark book A Life’s Work after either me or my sister was born (she's not sure who); squalling helpless grasping creatures. She describes going to NCT classes and being surrounded by women falsely beaming with the beauty of motherhood; reading Cusk was heartening for her, proof that it wasn’t like that for everyone. A book can be a life raft, a boon, a beacon of hope that reminds you that you’re not mad. People do think like you.
On the flip side, books should also challenge and stretch. If you read only to play a game of Where’s Wally between the pages, searching for aspects of yourself in someone else, how will you ever know that something more is out there, that other worlds and possibilities exist? Reading can be a door opened up into someone else’s brain, and depending on what you find there, it can be like the relief of coming home or like the excitement of travelling far away.
Does reading make you a better therapist? Mum is quick off the mark: “I think it would be really weird if you didn't.” Definitive, decisive. Why? “Reading accesses and adds to a different, creative part of your brain. If you aren’t adding to yourself, what are you doing as a therapist? What are you doing as somebody who thinks? You’re not doing anything; you’re just treading water. You’d be bored and people would be bored of you.”
Let’s let the words rest on the page a moment. Of course, as a professional you should be reading new texts and theories and papers relevant to your profession, but also being a fiction reader makes you a better therapist. These windows into other lives, when they are good they move us to extremes of empathy, surprise us, keep us guessing, leave us wanting to know more.
Though not a therapeutic tool, fiction can help to contextualise something that a client says in a session, a lightbulb clicking on in the therapist’s unconscious:
ah, yes, so that is something of what they mean. More than that, books keep us alive to the possibilities of humans. Books, whatever their genre, help to decode the big stupid unknowable creatures that we are, bumbling through this life, acting out of deep anxieties formed when we were in our most malleable state as babies.
I click off the recorder and we breathe. We laugh—it’s a new perspective for both of us. Writing is so solitary that my mother doesn’t often get to see my process, and her therapeutic practice is so necessarily cordoned off from her daily life that I don’t get to see hers. We have each seen the cogs turning in the other’s brain in new ways. Apart from seeing and being seen, I am left with the comforting thought that psychoanalytic thinking permeates into everyday living, that anyone can think psychoanalytically, it just takes shifting the gears in your brain to get you there. Reading helps to get you there, engaging with mystery in your everyday. Look up from a book and observe the world around you with eyes freshly descaled and see what you might find.
Jemima Skala is a writer and editor currently based in London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Plaster, The Financial Times, Dazed, Pitchfork and more.
