The Waters & The Wild Quotes

“...there was one thing she would think about when she was high, one thing she would feel: that she was transparent, not invisible, but transparent. But this was the thing: she wasn’t see- through, she wasn’t transparent to light like glass or air, she was transparent to the dark. She said that’s what heroin did, it brought her down to the seafloor, the floor of an ocean trench. Relieved of the need to see, relieved of the need to breathe, she belonged to the darkness completely. It possessed her, moved through her unresisted, as though she herself were made of nothing more than water and darkness, as though she herself were nothing more than a place, a place where the current turned on itself a little and moved on...I said that was it, the big question she carried around in her, the question whether despair was the only way out, whether the only thing she could really make was her escape. That makes sense, she said, just as she said whenever she didn’t agree with my interpretation. But . . . there’s a frustration . . . I want to be clear, perfectly clear. You want to be free to stop hiding things. God, if that’s true, she said with sudden coldness, then all of this is just a load of shit. I knew then that I had overstepped and had ruined something, that I had spooked her and she would make her escape into an anodyne or trivial association. To my surprise, however, she countered and pushed ahead. You are wrong. It’s not that I want to stop hiding. It’s not that I want to come out and say the thing I have to say. Don’t you see? I want there to be nothing. Nothing to hide, and no place to put it. No things, no places. Do you see what I am saying? Can you understand that? Jesus, how could you?”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, “ruining her children.” ... “But you are so frustrating,” she said. “I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back.” And what, I asked, was that “something” she wanted to give away? “The pain. The crazy,” she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex- voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having rescued them from distress. “I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, ‘What is this “something” you want to give away?’ ” Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings. I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with a jumble of body parts. I think that in the soul of each psychoanalyst such a place must exist, in spite of what we profess about our neutrality, our professional detachment. Perhaps something of what we receive can be melted down and sold back as candlelight— our costly illuminations— but other elements remain just as they appeared, the dreams nailed to the walls, the abandoned hearts and limbs, the soot of inextinguishable longing.”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“As a younger man, I burned with enthusiasm for my work: I was to be a warrior, the champion of reviled or exiled passions. I would assail the forces marshaled to enslave these passions, the tyrannies imposed in the name of factitious moralities, the sadistic compulsions disguised as highest law. I would be, in my silent, expensive way, the apostle of a thrilling freedom. When did it abandon me, that faith? How often have I heard it repeated, nearly verbatim, that commonplace of every educated, sophisticated patient: I don’t believe in judgment, in divine judgment; I don’t believe that someone is sitting up in the sky frowning down at me. In the past I would have thought: Yes, you do— and that is your problem. In the fullness of time I would assist them in shaking free of this secret conviction. Now, though, my calling has deserted me. The premise wasn’t wrong: most patients suffer more than they know from obscure inner persecutions. What I did not realize, however, was how deeply I myself believed in such a judgment, how along with my patients I embraced with inalienable fidelity that very conviction. This conviction did not presume a personified judge— bearded, severe, enthroned. It presumed instead a law, inhuman, abstract, and implacable, the law to which we owed our lives, the law to which we owed our reckoning. Failure, worth, crisis, potential, fulfillment. Every patient returns to these words again and again. They are the words from which my profession is made, and each of these words presumes a judgment, a mark attained or missed. No one enters my office who does not believe in his very marrow that judgment, some judgment, is absolute and fixed. The person I am meant to be: that mythical creature, that being whom each patient longs and dreads to become, is itself a judgment, a standard one does not devise but to which one must account. What or who set the standard? What or who measured the body for its soul? What or who meant them to be the people they were meant to be? I am certain: belief in judgment is not what my patients reject or grow out of. The belief in judgment is what they cling to. Beneath their affections and afflictions, judgment is their one true love.”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“Before now, it has never occurred to me that someone might pray for me. An odd sensation all the odder because I no longer know what a soul is. One would have thought after a lifetime of listening to them, treating them, peering into them, I would understand better. I have said it to student analysts under my supervision, and I have said it to myself: that everything Freud wrote was an attempt to accord the soul a rational form, a credible image. Did he succeed? Did anyone believe him? Did I? I no longer know. Is the soul one of those necessary fictions we cannot, in the end, do without? I have thought God to be such a fiction too, as surely you must have, Father. Sometimes it is impossible to believe what we believe. I should confess that I have been praying, I who believe nothing.”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“Has my profession disfigured my mind, the endless hours of constant attentiveness, my ear for hire and open to all comers, my face painted with the glare of projected fantasies? The French have a term for it: deformation professionelle, the idea that all forms of work twist the mind away from reality. Hence a backfiring car sends the soldier diving for cover in a shrub. Litigators dart and cower in forests of imagined liabilities. For the detective and inspector, every testimony or confession is a network of lies and concealments. How could my work not have deformed me, all those long hours spent squinting into the soul's lightless recesses? How could I not have become some moon-eyed, cave-adapted creature, for whom ordinary daylight is an unendurable affliction?”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“Do you actually hear confessions in your church, Father, actual spoken confessions? For that matter, does any priest anymore, at least as the movies depict them, the little lattice between confessor and penitent, its delicate chiaroscuro screening the priest's profile and veiling the lips of the sinner? Surely Freud himself, when he positioned himself behind and out of sight of his recumbent patients, sought a similar partial anonymity. How we analysts must envy you, your belief in redress, in the promise of absolution and redemption. How clean the words sound compared to our own impure remedies: recollection, interpretation, speculation, suggestion. Strange, isn't it, how we have both sealed ourselves in small, half-lit chambers, both in the service of gods who share nothing but the name of Love.”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“What was she asking me? That was, I thought, all I needed to know. That was my profession, after all; if one could never know the answers, once could, at least, know the questions. There were so few to know. Among my patients, every quandary and confusion proceeded from one of the few, the elemental questions: What can I change and what must I accept? Of what, of where, of whom am I the issue? Can the past be touched? Can it be healed?

That, as I had understood it, was my task as an analyst: not to answer the unanswerable question, but to accompany my patient to the threshold of the mystery. It was not the answer that healed. Indeed (I thought), belief in answers was the root of all anguish. What healed was the articulation of desire, the act of setting it down, laying it out, offering it up. I believed that it was only in uttering its question - not in receiving the answer - that the soul came into being, released into longing, which is its native element. In such a way I believed myself to be the midwife of the new soul, a creature squalling and alive because hungry and exposed.

You see now how I have been repaid for such a belief, such a presumption. See with what new and terrible questions I have been repaid, questions demanding an answer: Who is the killer of Jessica Burke? Where is my daughter?”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild

“What was she asking me? That was, I thought, all I needed to know. That was my profession, after all; if one could never know the answers, once could, at least, know the questions. There were so few to know. Among my patients, every quandary and confusion proceeded from one of the few, the elemental questions: What can I change and what must I accept? Of what, of where, of whom am I the issue? Can the past be touched? Can it be healed?”
― DeSales Harrison, The Waters & The Wild