Kind Windows, Ugly Psychoanalysis

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In April 2022, on the fifth anniversary of my psychoanalytic treatment, I constructed a dollhouse-sized, one-twelfth scale psychoanalytic consulting room (without a dollhouse frame—it’s not in a box) as a gift for my psychoanalyst. It included a miniature divan; a miniature box of tissues; a miniature telescope; a miniature hourglass; a miniature poster for the twelfth season of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, circa 1984; a miniature bookshelf with two miniature plants and three miniature books: Sheldon Bach’s Getting from Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process, Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, and Donna Orange’s Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics. I also ordered a miniature full-length mirror and a miniature copy of Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See for the dollhouse consulting room, but neither was to proper one-twelfth scale, so I kept both for myself. 

The image of a dollhouse-sized consulting room came to me during meditation. I felt intuitively moved to assemble a miniature office for my analyst, who has been mostly working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic, and who had to abruptly pack up her office without seeing it one last time in March 2020. For the past two years, I’ve added other objects to it: a miniature squeezable honey bear (2023); a miniature dollhouse for the dollhouse, a miniature Mason jar, and four additional miniature books: Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, Mark Baumer’s The One on Earth, Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind, and my most recent book—Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts—whose name came from psychoanalytic transference (2024). Early in my treatment, I told my analyst she would write a book called Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. 

“The Truth is unavailable to us, is not on a human scale,” poet Rosmarie Waldrop writes in her essay “Nothing to Say and Saying It.” So maybe this dollhouse consulting room is the office where my dream analysis takes place: a room where both analysand and analyst can look through a telescope at the stars, instead of orbiting the same neurosis over and over; where both can sit on the floor and read The Runaway Bunny to one another while drinking honey from a bear; and where Lacan and Freud’s books are replaced by books by provocative experimental fiction writers, children’s book authors, and lesser known analysts. Through this lens, it occurs to me that my twee phantasy dollhouse may embody a desire to completely annihilate everything that goes into a consulting room, and the analytic method itself. Per Waldrop, my dollhouse consulting room is at the scale of my truth, and is therefore the true room. 

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The Truth 

It is neither trapped inside you nor released. 

Nor is it waiting to happen or already happening. 

It is not an opportunity missed. 

Nor is it research you have yet to complete. 

It is not your poor work ethic, 

nor are you working too much. 

It is not because you don’t have time 

because you have some time. 

It is because you mismanage time 

that you micromanage it. 

Time is an hourglass, 1:12 scale. 

Have you ever lived in a dollhouse? 

An hour is 45 minutes 

and 45 minutes is 75% of an hour. 

It is not because I am good at math that 

I am telling you this. 

It is because the telescope next to the hourglass 

is next to a full-length mirror, and the full-length mirror 

is next to a copy of Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See. 

Woebegone, I constructed this room for you 

not because I want to possess it, but 

because it is the true room. 

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I originally wanted to begin this talk by asserting that I am neither a poet nor a psychoanalyst. This is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Yes, my formal academic background is in poetry—I have a BA and an MFA in poetry—and I teach poetics courses at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I have also published one full-length collection of poetry, as well as several chapbooks. And until a few weeks ago, I was an LP-qualifying candidate taking a Psychodiagnostics class at a new psychoanalytic training institute in midtown, where I had been enrolled for a year and a half. One Friday afternoon, following intense deliberation and months of ambivalence, I decided to stop attending class—to press pause on becoming a “psychoanalyst-in-formation” for the time being. The palimpsest of my seven-year analysis overlaid atop institutionalized training, in tandem with the feeling of psychoanalytic theory causing my head to cave in on itself, had become too psychically and physically excruciating to bear. During a Freud Seminar with David Lichtenstein in the autumn of 2023, I wrote down a note: “Too much overloads the equilibrium of the psyche. It suggests a quantification: how much? Too much! But what do we measure when we measure too muchness?” 

On the day I decided to stop attending Psychodiagnostics class, I went over to my friends’ Chris and Jo’s apartment for a champagne toast. Chris had just gotten a new job, but we joked that the champagne toast was also in honor of my decision. As I described to Jo, a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology, how psychoanalytic writing was making my ego hurt, she shimmered in the backlight of the late Friday afternoon sun, glowing with mutual disdain for psychoanalytic babble. We both connected about being the silent ones in all of our classes, while our peers excitedly discussed dense theoretical concepts using terms like “the double unconscious of the breast” and “the topology of a Borromean knot.” These terms did not make any sense to either of us, and we felt lighter making fun of them. I would recall a phrase like “THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP,” and the room would laugh. I had felt ashamed and troubled by what felt like my thwarted efforts to understand these terms and speak on this hyper-specialized level, and now felt gleefully done with all of it. But I was also full-body sobbing mere hours prior. I had quit one serious long-term romantic relationship and stopped attending a Zen monastery I felt was too cult-like. Pressing pause on analytic training was equally as painful as both of these decisions. It was just too much. 

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I just published a book—the aforementioned Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts—that people have contextualized as autofiction. I’ve often said writing this book would have been impossible without my experience as an analysand, and this is not a coincidence. Historically, autofiction is a genre coined by French author Serge Doubrovsky in a journal he kept alongside his personal analysis in the 1970s. Autofiction, Doubrovsky (trans. Logan Whalen and John Ireland) asserts in a 1988 essay titled “Autobiography/Truth/Psychoanalysis,” “[annexes] the analytical experience to the text itself; that is to say, by transforming into fiction the process by which the truth is revealed.” He adds: “The narration of analysis, detailed log-book, or posthumous reconstitution by the patient has become almost a literary genre […] Just as no analysis is ever ‘finished,’ no fiction is ever quite adequate.” In my understanding, Doubrovsky is saying that autofiction and psychoanalysis are necessarily twined. They mirror one another, but the former—autofiction—can never fully reflect the latter, psychoanalysis. I want these quotations to frame what comes next as autofiction, and to underscore the inadequacy and interminability of the form. 

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On Tuesday, February 20th, I went to see the 1491s’ play Between Two Knees at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, adjacent to the 9/11 Memorial and One World Trade Center. For those unfamiliar, the 1491s are a multi-tribal Indigenous sketch comedy troupe; Between Two Knees is their first play, which satirically remixes Native history through the lens of one family. 

I had not walked around the World Trade Center area since Occupy Wall Street. Navigating the Perelman Center—PAC for short—I was struck by the building’s architecture, how it recreates what I imagine the World Trade Center’s original architecture might have been. There’s a hotel-like ambience to the lobby, which includes a restaurant by celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson and a gift shop selling Perelman Arts Center swag. Narrow, Brutalist concrete staircases with no windows lead audience members from the orchestra to the mezzanine to the upper balcony. Laurence Fishburne was also in attendance. At the end of the show, all 500+ attendees filtered out of the Perelman Arts Center via a single revolving glass door whose quick continuous movement made me think of sheaths of paper loosening and fluttering. I recently read that many New Yorkers found out about the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks because office papers suddenly began raining down from New York City’s sky. I couldn’t help but call to mind this image as my body became a sheet moving through the door. 

I returned home from the play, called my boyfriend Nik, brewed a cup of tea. I pet Woebegone, AKA Woebe. Woebe is my cat; I named her after grief. Then I entered my living room, the room in my apartment where poetry books are kept on a mint green bookshelf. There, eerily and inexplicably, my copy of Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, was face down on the floor in front of the tightly packed bookshelf where it normally rests, from which it could not have randomly fallen, nor been pushed down by Woebe. This—a book falling from the mint green bookshelf—has never happened before. 

In case you’re unfamiliar with This Window Makes Me Feel, here is its back cover copy: 

Written in the long shadow of 9/11, This Window Makes Me Feel replaces the individual poet’s response to catastrophe with a collective, multi-vocal chorus of everyday articulations. 

Here is the book’s dedication, from the PDF version published on Fitterman’s website: “Dedicated to those who were lost in The World Trade Center bombing.” Bombing, in this case, is a parapraxis—the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993; in 2001, it was hit by planes. The Ugly Duckling Presse version of Fitterman’s book, published after the PDF, omits the dedication in lieu of leaving just the location, time and date of the 9/11 attacks: New York City – 8:35AM, September 11, 2001. 

The past academic year has been a year of endings for me. I attended Between Two Knees at the Perelman Center with two new friends. I met them because of the passing of my friend Ryan Carson, who was murdered on the street in Brooklyn four months prior. We met attending memorial services, funerals, and other gatherings to commemorate Ryan’s life. He graduated from the Writing Department at Pratt Institute, of which I am currently acting chair. In late November, I helped establish a small free-standing library in memory of Ryan, with a poem by him emblazoned on the wood. This is Ryan’s poem, “Anxiety”:

My whole life I’ve been anxious 

about my own death. Not that 

death itself is frightening, 

my best friend is there, 

but in its inconvenience 

That it could come 

while someone waits 

for me, 

that I couldn’t call 

to let them know 

I was held up 

There is a small window on the free-standing library through which passersby can look to see an array of books curated by Ryan’s friends and family: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend; Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me; Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything; Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. In juxtaposition with one another, the book titles comprise their own narrative haunting. Over the past few months, the books have begun to be taken away and replaced—the other day, a Vogue book about fashion called Always in Vogue appeared through the window, which made me feel my (possibly anxious?) attachment to the original books. 

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Here is an excerpt from Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel: 

This window makes me feel like I have been taking care of 

myself since I was 12 years old when I got the boot from mom and dad. This window makes me feel sad for many reasons, but I don’t want people to think I’m going to hell—that’s between 

me and God. This window makes me feel out-raged… after all, I don’t need the credit card… my track record has proved that 

I’m a poor manager of credit, okay? This window makes me 

feel nervous because he has been on medication lately but he

hasn’t been getting any professional help. […] This window 

makes me feel like a wrench has been shoved into my chest and turned around and around. 

In an elegant reading of This Window Makes Me Feel, poet Tony Tost posits that the poem’s windows may be “[screens] to the outer world of a city (one imagines a series of individuals gazing out of their windows towards the World Trade Center),” electronic windows (think of Windows computers), “a rotation of interfaces by which one may read the ‘lost’ as they communicate from the other side of a darkened glass,” or even a singular moment of time—the 9/11 attacks themselves. Today, I can’t help but imagine Fitterman’s windows as Zoom windows, or the window separating the books in the free-standing library from the world’s outside elements, or the floor to ceiling windows in the lobby of the Perelman Performing Arts Center. 

When I inexplicably discovered This Window Makes Me Feel on the floor, I wondered: Did a ghost knock this book onto the floor of my apartment? Was this ghost psychoanalysis or poetry? Was it Ryan? Was it my unconscious? Am I like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, who can move objects with her mind, but doesn’t understand her power? A psychoanalyst might call the fallen book a parapraxis, might posit I knocked it down myself and then forgot I did so. A poet might refer to this interruption as a caesura—a space between the thoughts—or maybe an enjambment: the book steps over from one line to the next without punctuation. I know what happened that evening was paranormal, not parapraxis. I know because my landlord, a practicing  psychic medium, asked me in email: What do you know? But what if I did knock over the book myself and obliterated the memory, and my belief in a haunting is a defensive position—a way to keep my dead friend alive in my apartment, my true room? 

Several weeks later, a 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck New York City, and I thought once again of the book, the ghosts. I was alone in my apartment, and once it dawned on me that an earthquake was happening, I momentarily thought I was going to die alone. I moved to the center of the room, toward the bookshelf from which This Window Makes Me Feel had fallen. Maybe the fallen book delivered a proleptic warning.

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The last time I saw Ryan was a couple of weeks before he was killed. We co-led a harm reduction training in collaboration with a few other colleagues. Ryan was very verbal, a big talker; people at his memorials repeatedly invoked this. On the last day I saw him, I was worried that he would talk so much about his work as a harm reduction activist—he loved this work—that we wouldn’t be able to complete the Narcan training. With this in mind, I imposed an eight-minute time constraint during which Ryan could talk to students about reigniting stalled negotiations with Governor Cuomo to help launch two overdose prevention centers in New York City. When he spoke, I strictly cut him off after eight minutes. Reflecting on this eight-minute constraint now, I feel guilty—if it weren’t for the time constraint I set up, we could have had more time to understand him, and to be together, and I could have paid more attention to what he was saying than to my iPhone’s timer. I also regret being micro-managerial and controlling over my own time (and therefore Ryan’s) during a busy day. I think too about psychoanalysts initiating endings in the 45-minute hour: I’m afraid we’re out of time; I have to stop us now; this seems like a good place to end. My analytic sessions often end when the church bells across from my bedroom resound, alleviating this pressure. I know analysts feel guilt about time, too, and about possibly being controlling and not permissive enough in their space. Still, I imagine how I would feel if a book by Jacques Lacan or Jean Laplanche or Wilfred Bion made its way into the free-standing library. I would want to protect Ryan’s ghost from these psychoanalysts—their babble and their endings. 

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In early March, I housesat for 10 days in New Jersey and contemplated terminating my seven-year analysis. This was not an emotionally elegant week for me. To my analyst, who gazed at me through a Zoom window, I said: I think I want to end my analysis. This window makes me feel like you don’t love me; this window makes me feel emotionally detached; this window makes me feel like I am neither a poet nor a psychoanalyst. My analyst had been on vacation for 10 days, and in this window of time, I had seen another care provider—not a psychoanalyst—to whom I felt more connected. Her office contained small press poetry books; I was invited to take off my shoes; and a single red balloon floated by the window as we talked.

The next day, I had a second Zoom conversation, this time with Robert Fitterman, who is for the first time in 20 years living in Florence, Italy, where he originally wrote This Window Makes Me Feel in the aftermath of 9/11. I emailed him after my ghostly encounter to ask if we could talk, and he agreed. During our conversation, Fitterman shared with me that he was playing tennis on the roof of the NYU gym when the planes struck the World Trade Center on 9/11. “I think of each of the sentences [in This Window Makes Me Feel] as a kind of ghost that didn’t make it through the day,” he said. In this moment, I imagined this is how it might feel to be Fitterman’s analyst, and transcribed this quotation into a Notes file that also included a list of questions for him; keywords I considered while crafting a promotional blurb for a poetry book; 2023 tax notes on how much I paid to National Grid, Optimum and my psychoanalyst throughout the year; and the title of psychoanalyst Donald Moss’s book I and You, which may be described as a collection of poems comprised solely of opening statements made by Moss’s patients. I recall a crush gifted me a copy of I and You, which I later gifted to another crush, who moved out of the country. I and You is now unavailable for purchase. If anyone has an extra copy, I would be grateful for it. 

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In my experience, it’s unusual to write an ending to a poem (or any piece of writing) that’s the ending I ultimately wind up with. Even when I think I’ve written a poem’s ending—and remember that fiction can contain poetry, and vice-versa—it is typically something I locate after-the-fact. Something rings within my heart; I cut a few lines from the original ending to reveal the true ending. This true ending may be an image, a question, a fragment, a provocation, an earlier moment from the writing I transpose. My analytic treatment is not a poem, so I’m not sure how to end it. Nor do I know that I ever want to, despite my stated desire. Nor do I know that I ever have to, despite the fact that psychoanalysis is a practice that leads to termination. I suppose someone—the analyst or the analysand—must die first, unless both die together in an earthquake. But my institutional training, perhaps, is a poem, and during a painful year of endings and death, it has often felt like the end of the world. 

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Last week, I dreamt I was in a lofted hair salon. In the dream, I received an awful haircut: no layers, tiny bangs. You chopped off my attachment, I wanted to say to my hair stylist. There were floor-to-ceiling windows in the attachment salon, and Woebegone was there, as was my homecoming date from high school, who is now gay. Outside, the sun began to wildly oscillate in the sky; it moved up and down and began to trace circles against the air. It’s an earthquake, someone shouted, and I dropped to the floor, clutched the legs of a long wooden table. I thought about the ceiling falling on me. I thought about dying in this attachment. Then the sun crashed into the earth, only the sun was now a second planet. This moment in the dream was obviously the final scene of Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia, only the sun was not the planet Melancholia. It was that week’s eclipse. 

Ash began falling from the sky, covering the ground like gray snow. It wassnowing ash, I later recounted in analysis. Then Woebegone stepped outside for the first time, and her little paws became covered in ash. My love Nik was there, and we stepped outside together, at which point a news report arrived: everyone on Earth has six days left to live! We’re going to die together, Nik and I realized and laughed. This realization, that we would die with one another, felt heartening. That being said, I had just read in Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession that “if the full experience of termination [in analysis] is a kind of existential rite of passage—a sojourn in the desert, a final stoical acceptance of the uncertainties of adulthood and the inevitability of death—then analysts never grow up and never have to die. The people who instruct others on serious and final things themselves remain Peter Pans, indefinitely staving off adulthood and extinction in the Never-Never Land of analytic practice”—in the psychoanalytic dollhouse—“and institutional politics.” In my actual sleep, as ash continued to fall like snow, it became harder and harder to breathe. 

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The closing poem I’m about to read, “The Oceanic Feeling,” was written as a song in January 2020. I wrote it as an expression of desire, but now it feels like a prescient epigraph to the COVID-19 lockdown, or an epitaph on a tombstone. The poem’s language is gleaned from letters exchanged circa 1923-1936 between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland, a French writer and mystic who coined “the oceanic feeling,” a term that left Freud with “no peace.” I love their epistolary correspondence’s mutual affection and chasm of experience; reading their letters, I can’t help but feel like these two men embody the difference between Psychoanalysis and Poetry. “How remote from me are the worlds in which you move!” Freud wrote to Rolland on July 29, 1929. “To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music.” In that same letter, Freud continues: “Approaching life’s inevitable end […] and aware that I am unlikely to see you again, I may confess to you that I have rarely experienced that mysterious attraction of one human being for another as vividly as I have with you; it is somehow bound up, perhaps, with the awareness of our being so different.” Farewell!, his closing salutation reads, and I think of the dead, and of the dread and envy and awe and anger stoked in me by psychoanalysis. 

The Oceanic Feeling 

Across all boundaries 

I would like to press your hand 

It is bound up 

with my final end 

This oceanic sentiment 

Like water flushing 

under bark 

I yearn for 

eternal rest 

But I am beset 

with doubts 

What I feel 

what I know

what I desire 

I await 

you again 

Best wishes from your faithful friend