"I underwent a four-and-a-half year five-day-a-week analysis with a traditional male Freudian psychoanalyst (or he tried to behave that way). The maternal aspects of the analysis were wonderfully gentle, but the paternal/fraternal aspects were horrendous. He came to hold an incredible amount of power over me and would not help me leave, terminate, be done with the process that was, from the beginning, highly sexualized and erotic... He refused to confront the "here and now" between us, always taking me back to my past; in so doing, he helped repeat/reenact a condition that brought me to analysis in the first place... In the end, I thought he would keep me there forever ... and so I left. Eventually I came back to the study of psychoanalysis which is, with all its faults, one of my intellectual homes; another is poetry." read Esther's Eating Pavlova Now the Day is Over Psychoanalysis as Place: Diary Entry |
At the Hospital I lock myself inside the space of poem just as I did the bathroom when I was three. Mother and father yell and beg and pound for me to come out, but I am steadfast. I watch the pee run over my thighs and into the space behind my knees and down the backs of my legs until the tops of my socks are sopping wet and my feet are sloshy in my shoes. My brother and sister demand news of our mother's condition as my pen scribbles sounds of ink along the edges of my paper until words come together on the page. I look from my shoes to the quivering door as firemen meander through the mind of dream and doctors continue on - even after the lock is broken. -Esther Altshul Helfgott copyright1993, 2005Esther Altshul Helfgott The poem first appeared in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review (Vancouver Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Society), vol 4, no 1, winter 1993 |
Esther Altshul Helfgott |
"I underwent a four-and-a-half year five-day-a-week analysis with a traditional male Freudian psychoanalyst (or he tried to behave that way). The maternal aspects of the analysis were wonderfully gentle, but the paternal/fraternal aspects were horrendous. He came to hold an incredible amount of power over me and would not help me leave, terminate, be done with the process that was, from the beginning, highly sexualized and erotic... He refused to confront the "here and now" between us, always taking me back to my past; in so doing, he helped repeat/reenact a condition that brought me to analysis in the first place... In the end, I thought he would keep me there forever ... and so I left. Eventually I came back to the study of psychoanalysis which is, with all its faults, one of my intellectual homes; another is poetry." read Esther's Eating Pavlova Now the Day is Over Psychoanalysis as Place: Diary Entry |
