Why
Literature Needs Psychology
The
risk of passionate love is this: it makes everything outside its immediate,
glowing orbit look dull and distant by comparison. What we love dims the rest
of the universe, whether we love a person, a drug, or an idea.
Or
even, I would venture, an art form. For the reader feels a lover’s protective
affection for her books—not books in general, but the few genres she has
settled into like old furniture: midlist literary fiction, say,
or historical memoirs. She reads what she knows she likes, until one day
she wakes up to find that what she likes no longer measures up to what she
needs.
When
I was 18, I did the same two things as a million other 18-year-olds: I went to
college, and I got depressed. To my naive surprise, depression changed what I
needed from my reading. It made the great realist novel, until then my deepest
pleasure, feel far away, like the events it described were happening to
characters living in a world a few feet to the left of mine. No longer for me
setups, marriages, intrigues, misunderstandings. I wanted writers who didn’t
take for granted the fact of getting out of bed in the morning, or putting on
clothes, or leaving the house.
I
embarked on what amounted to a research project that took as its object of
study my own emotional state. I started with Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday
Demon, William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and Kay Redfield Jamison’s
An Unquiet Mind, all hybrid memoir-studies in the shapes and shadows of
mental illness. Once I had a sense of the big themes in writing about mood
disorders, I moved on to nonfiction less grounded in personal narrative, like
Peter Kramer’s Against Depression, which asks us to see depression as a
biological disease process rather than a metaphysical affliction. My expanded
curiosity also led me to classics of popular psychology beyond the topic of
depression, like Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
a collection of case studies in psychopathology, and A General Theory of
Love (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon), which sketches neural structures in order
to show how our constant forming and severing of romantic attachments—otherwise
known as “dating”—causes literal brain damage. Ten years later, I still
consider these books foundational.
Though
my reading frenzy began as a search for comfort, the kind of comfort we
experience when we say we “relate” to a book, it changed once I realized I had
stumbled sideways into an entire genre of literature that deserved its own
reckoning. For these authors were writing literature of a kind; you could hear
it in the music of their prose and their command of figurative language. They
were telling stories of loneliness and connection not unlike those I’d read in
the bread-and-butter standards of my English education. And their concerns were
literary, which is to say they were interested in the same vital questions
about the human condition that philosophers and novelists have asked for
millennia.
I
discovered, in other words, that these two bodies of work—literature as I’d always
known it and the psychological writing I was coming to know—were secretly
twinned. The difference between the genres lay not in what stories they told,
but in how they told them, each according to the intellectual tradition from
which its authors had come. Despite their divergent frameworks, both traditions
were organized around that fact of human experience that summoned art and
philosophy into being: pain, the disharmony in the tune of all human endeavor.
An essential mission of literary and psychological writing is to construct a
taxonomy of pain in order to extract meaning from it—because if pain means
nothing, then it cannot be borne. Whereas literature gestures at this mission
obliquely, psychology features it front and center.
Which
is one reason it had previously escaped my notice. Depression forced me into a
critical intimacy with my pain, made up of traumas and anxieties that had
heretofore lain dormant. But now I peered into the well of my discomfort,
craning to see its dark recesses. As I dove deeper, my reading advanced from
the popular to the academic: theories of childhood development, subverbal
communication, integration and attachment. Each forced me, to greater and
lesser degrees, to remake my world in its image.
Depression
forced me into a critical intimacy with my pain, made up of traumas and
anxieties that had heretofore lain dormant.
I
felt exhilarated, newly awakened, yet also prickled by that annoyance you feel
when you discover on your own what smarter people should have made you read
long ago. Even years into my self-made course of study, I’d heard nary a
mention of the psychological sciences from the overwhelming majority of my
humanities professors and bookish friends, who were quick to incorporate other
social scientific texts—historicist, feminist, ecocritical—into their analysis
of life and literature. When I thought of introducing a psychological context
to these discussions, I balked, restrained by a sure premonition of pushback,
or worse, blank stares.
I
do not think this dread was unfounded. Present-day subjects tend to scowl at
the mention of the word “psychology.” They find themselves transported to 1890
Vienna, cradle of Freudian psychoanalysis, Oedipal complexes, penis envy, etc.
No matter that the psychoanalytic tradition was quick to outgrow Freudian
orthodoxy, beginning with Jung and Lacan and continuing into its present
incarnation, which ranges from Buddhist mindfulness to gestalt to feminist
analysis. And even the ideas of Freud himself were never confined to the
pinhole of the individual and his neuroses; he was always already writing
social theory on a grand scale.
Yet
this bias makes small beans compared to what I suspect is the real root of
psychology’s intellectual exile: the damnable, never-ending war between the
“two cultures,” the term coined in 1959 by C. P. Snow to describe the chasm in
Western intellectual life between the humanities and the sciences. The literary
arts are grouped among the former, psychology generally with the latter, in the
company of the so-called social sciences (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the
natural sciences).
Though
some have heard in the current vogue of multi- and interdisciplinary studies
the death knell of the culture war, we are everywhere surrounded by evidence of
its vigor. Take, for instance, Marco Roth’s 2009 article in n+1, “The Rise of the
Neuronovel.” Roth coins the term “neuronovel” to
decry a burgeoning genre: narratives that feature protagonists with psychiatric
disorders (Tourette’s syndrome, schizophrenia, etc.). These stories, he claims,
cede ground from the social/environmental theory of mind to the neurobiologic
study of the brain. Too much pathology, says Roth, which is too particular, too
strange to generalize in the way that literature ought to allow for.
As
though pathology were not universal. As though there were any difference
between mind and brain. And as though the scope of human knowledge were a
finite resource, to be doled out between disciplines like wartime rations.
Rather
than berate the neuronovelist for letting icky science into her writing, we
ought to commend her for broadening the purview of literature to include
insights gleaned from other territories. If we want literature to inhabit the
full measure of human experience, it must stretch to accommodate new ways of
knowing the world. And if we want to catch glimpses of the truths that govern
human culture and behavior, we must open ourselves to the wisdom, no matter how
surprising or counterintuitive, of strangers working in strange lands.
If we want
literature to inhabit the full measure of human experience, it must stretch to
accommodate new ways of knowing the world.
One
of the most successful cross-pollinators of literature and psychology has been
Dr. Irvin Yalom, a Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, clinical and academic
psychologist, and writer. Dr. Yalom has written scholarly texts, short stories,
and novels. His model of existential psychotherapy represents an approach to
science colored by a deep knowledge of literature; his literary writing is
similarly informed by his years of study and practice in psychology. He is
interested, above all, in how to cope with the meaninglessness and isolation of
existence, and so his writing is beloved by readers across disciplines and
preferences.
The
book of Yalom’s I love best is his first, a quasi-memoir called Every Day
Gets a Little Closer, which he co-wrote with a long-term patient, Ginny.
Ginny and Yalom each wrote logs of their therapy sessions together, which are
therein collected in chronological order. The accounts differ in style and
content, yet the reader can clearly trace the development of the therapeutic
relationship, its slow burn, its moments of spark and combustion. It is the
kind of book that enlarges your idea of what storytelling can do.
It
is also a reminder that the field of psychology is both a body of writing and a
practice, which two cannot be disentangled one from the other. The theory
exists in service of the praxis, which is ultimately a pursuit of wellness
through counseling, medication, and a variety of other treatments. Psychology,
that is to say, is about doing. Even its pure research arm, which, like all
scientific research, seeks knowledge partly for its own sake, harbors an
outsize focus on the pragmatic applications of its findings. Literature, as an
art, can and should not embrace such a functional aim. This is a core
distinction between the two. Psychology is oriented in the direction of health;
the artist’s fuel is sickness, strife. The artist dwells in his suffering in
order to make something from it; the clinical psychologist explores her
patient’s pain only to the extent necessary to move past it.
Which
is not to belittle the therapeutic value of reading. Beyond the immediate
pleasure of the text, good books kindle empathy, expand our sense of what is
possible, offer escape both out of and into the world. But does reading make us
happy? Can it heal the wounds of early life that dog us into adulthood?
Granted, happiness isn’t everything, but grasping in the direction of
something-like-happiness—satisfaction, meaning, relationality—comes pretty
close. Much if not most of the emotional work we do in this life is, in the
words of Edward St. Aubyn, “to get ready to be ready to be well”—to reach a
degree of health at which happiness, however hard-won and fleeting, is even a
possibility.
For
reading is a solitary endeavor, and wellness exists between people, like a
gift, or a secret. This is not to say that we should seek the key to our own
fulfillment in others—only that we won’t find it solely within ourselves.
This
is the founding premise of talk therapy, a cornerstone of psychological praxis.
Skeptics ridicule the notion of talking oneself out of depression—and they are
right to. That goes double for other, severer disorders of mind. But what
naysayers miss is that therapy, in its modern form, is not about cure, but
connection. It’s about cultivating a relationship within preset boundaries, and
then trying out healthier styles of connection within the safety of that
relationship. It’s an experiential approach to answering the question of how to
live. Talk therapy is the Big Questions of literature made flesh.
I
began therapy soon after my college downswing, and have been in and out since.
One reason I keep coming back is that I am a reader, and therapy, too,
generates a text, projected into the third dimension, suspended between
therapist and patient, which then dissipates, its residue hanging in the air
like an old scent. Each session makes a chapter in a book, infinitely
recursive, referring to its earlier, half-remembered antecedents. This book,
ever unfinished, may have much to teach the student of literature. It sits on a
shelf spine-to-spine with that other book which consists of everything we’ve
ever read that’s knocked us into a new ways of seeing, new ways of being—and
thereby taught us who we really are. Our task, as T. S. Eliot wrote, is not to
cease from exploration, so that we may arrive where we started and know the
place for the first time.
