“The Portable Analyst” Part 3

Part 3 - How it feels to sit with another person as we turn a story from something toxic, to something healing.

Part 3 of 4: Nomads – refugees from the outside world, in which we reflect on the impact of external events on the room and the indivuals in it.
In Part 2 of the Portable Analyst we explored the extraordinary reflections of the Franco American artist, Louise Bourgeois. Every person who comes into a consulting room has a unique need and a unique histroy; yet we can all share similar emotions. For Bourgeois it was guilt, and her means of coming to terms with it can be shared by all of us in reflecting on therapeutic work.
One of the sources of Bourgeois’ guilt had roots in her leaving France, with her American husband in 1939. Staying behind were her father and brother Pierre. (Her mother had died in 1932). She thus became a nomad, while her family remained in the wreckage of World War II.
…I can complain and I find excuses to my failures as a woman of my femininity-I despise myself and vilify myself and I despise women. It is a pretext to be a man- at that time Jacques Bourgeois is a good student. I have to give up the piano and math… (Bourgeois, 2019)
It is perhaps no surprise that in the 1940’s she created among other sculptures in a series called Personnages, one called the Portable Pierre which she carried from room to room. (Nixon, 2012) Pierre was her brother, missing from her life as the consequence of war. So Bourgeois also gave us a portable personnage to represent a companion who comes with us from room to room.
The room in which I have been seeing patients for the past two years is an archetype of the containing rooms. And so far, only I have physically sat in it. It came into being during the first lockdown of the pandemic, in March 2020, so while many of my patients have seen it, it is only what can be seen in the frame of a video screen. It is a room in my house in Buckinghamshire, a rural county about an hour from London. I had been using another room two days a week to see local patients before lockdown. But that room had unsatisfactory network connections, so for a few weeks, my patients “saw” me in a study in a hut at the bottom of the garden, where the network periodically disappeared altogether. Finally we all came together in this room with the six-paned window and the M’ikimaw bowl. So, like nomads we wandered for a bit until finding a resting place, near the warmth of a local area network node.
I had to reimagine the safe space, and then enable it to function reliably. The first casualty was the shared material container. But time, and the therapist remained, along with a reimagined room, one end of which is the patient’s creation.
It is surprising to describe me and my patients since 2020 as nomads when physically wewere often only permitted out of our homes for half an hour, and not permitted to go farther than five miles. Even my Buckinghamshire patients had to adapt because they could not enter my house. In contrast to my countryside patients, some of my London patients had wandered with me through four moves I had made over 12 years. The first two of such moves I planned over several months, preparing the patients carefully for the shift, and allowing several weeks afterwards to find room for their anger or despair. More than once I heard the impatient variation on the theme “Well, you’re here” and an instant return to what mattered most, that is the communication of pain and a deep need to be heard.
Ideally, one does not want to spring a fundamental shift on patients. But sometimes it is unavoidable. A sudden lockdown means we must be prepared to move instantly and be able to travel instantly to another safe place. In this environment I heard variations on the theme, “But you are the constant.” I’ve come to wonder whether we infantilise our patients in all the careful wrapping and unwrapping of material space, as if they did not have the capacity to work their way into an alternative safe space.
Note:
“The portable analyst” - I borrowed the title from Mignon Nixon, describing a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. (Nixon, 2012)This is the second in a series of Clinical Memoirs. The first, Therapists and Patients at the Epicentre of a Pandemic of Not knowing can be found here www.therapyroute.com/article/therapists-and-patients-at-the-epicentre-of-a-pandemic--of-not-knowing-by-a-foster
Anne Foster, MA, FPC (Fellow), UKCP is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice in Buckinghamshire, UK, although one of the strange gifts of the pandemic is the ability to be present for people through technology that makes borders truly liminal. She is a writer and presenter. [email protected]
Works Cited - This bibliography refers to works consulted and cited in all four parts, and will be repeated in each part
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Akhtar, S. (2009). Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
Arquitectura-G. (2021). Leopold Banchini: Not Nomadic. apartamento(27), pp. 193-216.
Bourgeois, L. (2019). The Spider and the Tapestries. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Bronfen, E. (2012). Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation. In P. Larratt-Smith (Ed.), Return of the Repressed (Vol. 1, pp. 101-114). London: Violette Ltd.
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Who is Louise Bourgeois. (2022, March 18). Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/kibds: https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-louise-bourgeois
Zagajewski, A. (2021, May 14). Tart Cherries, Sweet Cherries. Times Literary Supplement, 11. (C. Cavanagh, Trans.)

Anne is a qualified Psychotherapist (Registered), based in Speen, United Kingdom.
With a commitment to mental health, Mrs Foster provides services in English and French, including Psychotherapy (Dynamic).
Mrs Foster has expertise in Anxiety Disorders, Bereavement and Loss and Depression.
Click here to schedule a session with Mrs Foster.
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