Dr. Z and I have been speaking for the last four years. Dr. Z is my psychoanalyst. For the first six months of my speaking with him, he said two things “I’m listening” and “Let us stop there.” These utterances were time signatures for the marking of analysis-time. The time of analysis felt uneventful, unremarkable as compared to the tumultuous self-revelation I have experienced during my bouts of psychosis over the past decade. These sessions felt like a banal videoblog with one person as audience. A bit more quotidian than my daily posts on Twitter noting this or that Kishore Kumar song or some sundry academic article. 

I usually narrated the happenings of the past week, and my general irritation at people I loved but routinely got annoyed with. My tendency for self-indulgence as thoroughly stoked in these sessions. It began thus with an indulgent video-blog modality of self-narration and slowly, as the year turned, Dr. Z spoke. My personal and professional lives unfolded in small and large events. But the time for Dr. Z remained undisturbed. Between event (as in life events), memory, and metaphor (as in linguistic devices I used to keep a contained narrative of the self, intact), I emerged as a naked person examining the contours of my consciousness before a mirror. Dr. Z remained for the most part silent. Slowly, he began to point out patterns in my language strategies and practices. My styles of speaking, my metaphors, my silences – all emerged as a progressive rock album, slowly revealing some inner story of me.

I have, in recent years, become obsessed with the notion of inwardness, interiority. My own interiority is completely unavailable to me, and I realized that I have been staging a supposed inwardness to please myself and the worlds that I care to please. In analysis, these faultlines slowly started showing. The ones that I had carefully dressed in language all these years. It revealed fracturedness, shards, and an obsession with collecting pieces of ruinous spaces in my psyche. My psychanalytic practice became like a museological exercise, a museum of broken pieces of my inwardly existence of which I had no conscious sense.

Freud sees the psyche as something like a city. I started wandering in my consciousness looking for potholes, traffic jams, gutters, broken glass shards, vacuums, warzones. I slowly found shrouds of many deaths that I had died. People that have left me, people I have left, unfinished poems and incomplete thoughts. Each a more violent death than the other. During my psychotic events, I have had vivid imaginations of warzones. It informs my intellectual interest in Foucault’s thesis that peace is a time of preparation between times of war. 

Times become apparent to me through jerky motions of breaks and ruptures through which I recognize the comfort and security of flow. I started walking feverishly, inwardly and outwardly with my feet on ground. I started becoming more and more interested int eh internal logics of musical time. Walking, talking at (not so much to, but at) Dr. Z, listening to music on headphones round the year shaped my discovery of buried selves – strange, uncanny selves. It became a kind of care of the self. But more so, a kind of archaeology of the self. I was looking for my inwardness, and I often found none. They were buried too far down in my psyche that I had to dig the surface of the city, to find layers of ancient, dead cities lying in ruin below the surface-city of my consciousness.

I write this diaristic note not just as confession, but also as a notation of times of the inward and the outward. The outward me is a rushed, restless busybody. Loud even, and overly performative.  The inward selves have started protesting the rush hour of the outward self. They need vilambit laya (slow rhythm) to sing their songs. The pekhawaj beats deeply and slowly through my headphones straight into the inner cities of me. I remember Teju Cole’s novel Open City of a restless Black man walking through New York City talking theory to himself. I talk poetry and music to myself, and return to Theory at night as I fall asleep, not so much through texts but as motifs that give shape to my travels between the inner and outer domains of being. Language discipline falls apart slowly, as I write in blank verse more and more. Colours appear as symbols of Krishna in my poems, shapes and textures recur in my writing just like the warzones I experienced so vividly in hallucination. Dr. Z begins to hold up a series of frames for these discoveries of strangeness. He doesn’t discipline my efforts, but subtly editorialises them from time to time. In the end of each session, I find no resolution, but a replenished energy to keep walking – inwardly and outwardly. 

…

Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist and writer based in Bangalore.