Epistemologies of the particular: psychoanalysis and Tessa Hadley’s An Abduction

Abstract

In Tessa Hadley’s (2012) short story An Abduction, a prototypical psychoanalytic primal scene is deployed to convey the main character’s emotional journey from naïveté to knowledge. Drawing on the Aristotelian notion of recognition and the work of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, I develop a reading of Hadley’s story that explores the notion of cataleptic knowledge, or knowledge that is acquired through emotional suffering. I suggest that Hadley’s story illuminates emotional experience by conveying vividly to the reader what Jane’s experience is ‘like’, and develop the discussion by drawing parallels with the epistemological challenges presented by the psychoanalytic case history that similarly aims to represent what psychoanalytic work is ‘like’.

Keywords:

• Anagnorisis
• case history
• epistemology
• Freud
• psychoanalysis
• short story

At the start of Tessa Hadley’s short story An Abduction,¹ we meet 15 year-old Jane Allsop. She has just returned from her expensive boarding school to spend the long summer holiday at home with her well-to-do parents in 1960s Surrey. In her art classes, she has come across a new word for the colour of the sky: ‘cerulean’. Jane, we learn, who ‘wasn’t clever or literary’, is ‘nervous of new words which seem to stick to her’ (p. 1); and indeed the sunny, cerulean sky prises its way ‘like a chisel’, says Hadley, ‘through the crack between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams’ (p. 1). From the outset, then, we are being told something about Jane’s relationship to knowledge. It makes her uneasy, and no wonder; for the new word she has acquired announces a new and different kind of knowledge that lies in wait for her in ‘the fated trek towards adulthood’ (p. 4). It will prise its way within, insisting that she see and recognise something however much she wants to close her eyes to it.

We could be forgiven for thinking that we are at the beginning of a good, old-fashioned coming-of-age story. It is a genre with a long tradition that might be said to stretch as far back as the Old Testament and the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. Its many other literary predecessors include Flaubert’s (1869) Sentimental Education, James’s (1897) What Maisie Knew, and L. P. Hartley’s (1953) The Go-Between. Hadley’s tale, rather like Hartley’s, is set in the context of a long, broiling hot summer holiday, when a bored, teenaged protagonist removed from the family home to a new, excitingly adult environment is changed forever by an act of sexual betrayal. But Hadley’s project extends well beyond portraying the emotional journey from innocence to experience. Rather, I think she wants us to engage with the epistemological implications of that journey: with the nature of what we can know, the means by which we come to know about it and the consequences that will accrue from such knowledge. Hadley makes it clear from the outset that she is not concerned with the kind of knowledge that relates to facts or theories. This is the kind of academic knowledge that leaves Jane’s brother Robin ‘blind on his bed with a headache’ (p. 3) in an effort to get into Oxford. Perhaps like Jane, he has closed his eyes to the existence of a rather different kind of knowledge: the kind that is hidden, unannounced, unnoticed; the sort of knowledge that is difficult or impossible to speak of, yet which may come to have momentous, even tragic effects on the course of a life.

The story revolves round three central scenes, each located in different places: Jane’s home in Surrey; a nearby house to which she is taken for 24 hours; and a counsellor’s office, some thirty years later. In the first central scene, Jane is standing in the driveway of her parents’ lush garden, listlessly playing Jokari in the blazing summer heat. Ticked off by her father, who secretly worries that she has inherited her mother’s troubling ‘flat, bland surface’ (p. 6), she is subsequently spotted by three boys. They are second-year university students driving by looking for girls to pick up on their way to an impromptu weekend house party. As Jane stands there, ‘[s]omething was revealed in her’, writes Hadley, ‘that was normally hidden: an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal […]She seemed not fake or stuck-up – and, just then in the dappled light, not a child either’ (p. 8). Jane’s incipient sexuality, camouflaged under her childish freckles, is plainly visible to Daniel, Paddy and Nigel. They are not fooled by Jane’s washed out dress with its Peter Pan collar, a sartorial clue pointing to Jane’s unspoken anxieties about growing up. With only a moment’s hesitation, Jane willingly assents to Daniel’s invitation to get in the car; and she subsequently takes a further step on the road towards adult desire by allowing herself to be initiated into shoplifting to get wine for the party later that evening. She is already fascinated by Daniel who is ‘crushingly beautiful’. ‘Below the surface of the moment’, writes Hadley, ‘she began to wait in secret – patiently, for her self-discoveries were very new – for Daniel’s hand to jostle her thigh when he changed gears’ (p. 11). And so, below the surface of the moment – and below the flat, bland surface of Jane, too, – we begin to see the first stirrings of a new kind of knowledge that Jane will, over the next 24 hours, come to reckon with.

As she settles down by the swimming pool in the garden of Nigel’s house, Jane becomes intensely and increasingly aware of something that appears to revolve round her feelings for Daniel. When he swears, Jane blushes violently ‘his word was so forbidden that she hardly knew how she knew it […] It was an entrance, glowering with darkness, into the cave of things unknown to her’ (p. 15). Just at this moment, where Jane is hesitating at the entrance of her own desire, Nigel’s 18 year-old sister, the sleek, sexy, sophisticated Fiona, arrives and creates a sensational and unwelcome distraction. In contrast to Jane’s obvious naïveté, here is someone who patently knows all too much. With her new-found knowledge only just beginning to filter through the drawn curtains of her mind, Jane becomes aware that Fiona, by positioning herself at the far end of the terrace to sip her stolen alcoholic drink, is showing off her legs to Daniel through the slit in her sarong.

Ignoring Fiona’s play for sexual attention, Daniel has his eye on Jane and seduces her once everyone has gone to the pub. Afterwards, Jane phones home to lie to her mother about where she is, telling her that she will spend the night with a school friend. ‘Meanwhile’, writes Hadley, ‘her own new knowledge filled her up, not in the form of thoughts but as sensations, overwhelming’ (p. 23). It is this overwhelming kind of knowledge that will be fully explicated in the second central scene that takes place after Jane and Daniel have fallen asleep together that night. The following morning, Jane wakes up only to find that Daniel has gone. She goes upstairs in search of him and pushes open the door to Nigel’s parents’ room. Confronting her is a room ‘like nothing she’d ever seen before’ (p. 24); it is a mise-en-scène replete, saturated, brimming over with knowledge that Jane cannot refuse, and to which she is finally unable to close her eyes. It is a room symbolically filled with light. Unlike her flowered bedroom curtains at home, these curtains are made of translucent linen, allowing the glare of the sun to pour in through the windows onto the huge, white bed, where Daniel and Fiona are lying naked and asleep. ‘Jane, who had done the Greeks in history, thought they looked like young warriors in a classical scene, fallen in the place where they had been wrestling. She withdrew from the room without waking them, as quietly as she had come in’ (p. 25). Going out into the garden, she stands with ‘dry, hot eyes’ by the swimming pool, watched by Nigel. After a while, he says quietly: ‘So now you know’ (p. 25).

Kinds of knowing

But what exactly does Jane know, and what is the nature of the knowledge that she has acquired? We might think of Hadley’s dense, highly compressed, dramatic image of the light-filled bedroom as the prototypical scene of knowledge. It portrays the familiar, classical psychoanalytic primal scene, the ‘other room’ of oedipal knowledge; it is pre-eminently a scene of recognition, of discovery, of what Aristotle, in his Poetics, terms anagnorisis. This is one of three constituent elements of ‘complex plots’, the other elements being peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, and pathos, or suffering. ‘Recognition’ writes Aristotle ‘as the very name shows, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing the characters into either a close bond, or enmity with one another, and concerning matters which bear on their prosperity or affliction’ (in Halliwell, 1987, p. 43). For Aristotle, then, the recognition scene is a dramatic device that marks the decisive shift from naïveté to knowledge, playing a crucial role in evoking fear and pity in the audience. It is the moment where something that was previously hidden is now revealed: a moment, writes Cave (1988) ‘at which characters understand their predicament fully for the first time […] it makes the world, and the text, intelligible (p. 2).

Implied within the etymology and definition of anagnorisis is, significantly, the very idea of knowledge itself. The Greek root word ana- means back, again or anew; and so anagnorisis seems to carry within it the sense of knowing something afresh, of knowledge that is not simply gained, but regained. To recognise is to know again, to recall or freshly perceive that which was formerly admitted or felt within. Whilst Aristotle leaves open the question of who or what is recognised, Cave’s (1988) literary history of the term tells us that in classical versions of anagnorisis, there is a focus on details such as ‘the birthmark, the scar, the casket, the handbag’ (p. 2): accidental or contingent features of a story on which the recognition of a person’s identity depends. In more recent literary use, Cave suggests its meaning extends beyond identification of kinship towards more psychological forms of recognition that emerge in revelatory moments of self-knowledge or self-awareness. In either case, there is a concern with the particulars of a situation: with the exact material, physical or psychological elements that determine exactly how and when the protagonist comes to confer meaning on the situation and through which the truth of him or herself comes to be known.

It is through the particulars of Jane’s experience and circumstances – her well-to-do Surrey background, her washed out dress with its Peter Pan collar and her growing, baffled and inarticulate awareness of her own sexual nature as well as the existence of a prior sexual relationship between Fiona and Daniel – that we, as readers, will come to understand the nature and significance of the knowledge that she acquires. For the kind of knowledge that recognition brings, as Aristotle says, ‘is what always had to be known because it was from the beginning inscribed in the heart of the tragic action’ (in Boitani, 2021, p. 417). Recognition is never really of an identity or an event. It is of suffering; and tragedy is set up in such a way that the protagonist is already implicated in his or her suffering before the reasons for this can be fully known. Jane, from the outset, has been repressing knowledge of her blossoming sexuality; but this is ultimately something that she will not be able to refuse. Hadley brings her quite literally face-to-face with its implications. Jane is forced to recognise something within herself that was always present, but to which she has previously closed her eyes. Significantly, the knowledge acquired here is not to be obtained through intellectual understanding. Jane’s biology lessons have not helped her to understand the mystery of sex any more than has doing the Greeks in history. Intellectual scrutiny merely gets in the way of recognising how the scene in the light-filled bedroom confers instantaneous and retrospective meaning on her newly-acquired sexual relationship with Daniel. Now she knows. At the same time, she recognises that her desire and pleasure are embedded within a complex adult world, a world of others in which it seems she will not fare well. The fallen warriors in the bed make it clear to Jane that her sexuality positions her within an adult contest for life which is new and full of potential for suffering. Indeed, Jane’s is the kind of knowing that is constituted not only by or through sexual experience, but is braided into the suffering this now entails. Hadley implies such knowledge can never be the object of scientific or historical learning, for it cannot be known apart from the pain through which it is delivered. We might say that the shift from innocence to experience here brings about emotional suffering in Jane that constitutes knowing herself in a way that rational, intellectual, systematised forms of knowing do not.

But why should suffering be central to self-awareness? In her essay Love’s Knowledge, the moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1990) makes a distinction between two different means by which we try to achieve self-knowledge. The first is based on a perspective going back to Plato’s quarrel between philosophy and poetry and his determination to expel the poets from the Republic. Self-knowledge acquired within the Platonic tradition, Nussbaum suggests, is concerned with trying to understand the self through via a ‘detached, unemotional, exact intellectual scrutiny of one’s condition, conducted in the way a scientist would conduct a piece of research’ (p. 262). Plato proposes separating out reason from emotion, arguing that feelings are an unnecessary distraction from intellectual inquiry. Indeed, he sees feelings as antithetical to any quest for knowledge, misleading reason, derailing and distorting the process by which we seek to know the object of our inquiry. Nussbaum contrasts the idea of knowledge based on the isolation of the intellect with a second kind that is conveyed by the emotions, drawing on the Stoic philosophers’ notion of ‘cataleptic knowledge’. Cataleptike is a Greek term that means ‘apprehend’ or ‘grasp’; and catalepsis refers to certain class of perceptual impressions that, by virtue of their vividness, intensity and quality, allow us to grasp or know something with a sense of conviction or certainty. A cataleptic impression, says Nussbaum, ‘is said to have the power, just through its own felt quality to drag us to assent, to convince us that things could not be otherwise. It is defined’, she continues, ‘as a mark or impress in the soul’ (p. 265) and makes its appearance in a ‘blind, unbidden surge of painful affect’ (p. 269).

Nussbaum goes on to argue that the kind of knowledge that is based on intellectual self-scrutiny in fact distorts self-knowledge because of the comforting distance it establishes in the effort to be subtle or clever. We protect ourselves, she argues, by engaging in intellectual games that deter us from deeper or more profound efforts at self-understanding. This becomes evident in the evening after Jane’s seduction when Daniel, who has been taking drugs and is now stoned, sits by the pool trying to explain to everyone the idea of a soul as understood in Hindu Vedanta. ‘What he wanted to describe’, writes Hadley, ‘was how the soul’s origins were in wholeness and light, but on its entry into the world it took on the filth of violence and corruption […] He believed as he spoke that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently’ (pp. 22–3). Daniel’s clever philosophical attempt to discuss the ‘fall’ implied by sexual knowledge is, in fact, a rather ostentatious parade of ‘brilliant eloquence’ that constitutes a refusal of self-knowledge. He imagines he can reach a place of ‘wholeness and light’, yet in doing so fails to acknowledge the corruption of his own emotions and behaviour. Hadley seems to imply here that the kind of knowledge accruing from an intellect that is so disconnected from emotion will inevitably turn out to be meaningless, even ridiculous; it is merely incoherent rambling.

If the self-deceptions of intellectualisation constitute an obstacle to self-knowledge, it is only the strength of the cataleptic impression that is sufficient to break through our defences, our distancing strategies and our self-deceiving. And this is because the very essence of the cataleptic impression is its pain: sudden, unanticipated, unannounced pain that acts to cut through the comforting distance conferred by the intellect ‘as if’, says Nussbaum (1990), ‘by a surgeon’s knife’ (p. 269). As we can see when Jane enters that fateful bedroom, anagnorisis, recognition, is that dramatic element that most decisively delivers the cataleptic blow. Suddenly and brutally, she is brought face-to-face with the reality of her position in the world. The object of her love and desire, Daniel, has utterly betrayed her; he is now so evidently beyond her reach and comprehension that Jane has no option other than to silently withdraw and return back home. Significantly, this is not the kind of knowledge that could be obtained in any other way. ‘[T]he cataleptic impression is not simply a route to knowing’ writes Nussbaum; ‘it is knowing. It doesn’t point beyond itself to knowledge; it goes to constitute knowledge’ (p. 267). It is Jane’s mute suffering, an anguish that speaks only in her ‘dry, hot eyes’, that itself exposes and constitutes knowledge of her own thwarted desire as well as realisation of her position in the sexual pecking order. The living knowledge embodied in that moment comes, and can only come, from the felt reality of the situation itself: it is, as it were, its own criterion of validity.

After Nigel drops her back at the foot of her garden at home, Jane looks around her ‘as if she’d never seen the place before’ (p. 26). Everything is as it was when she left, yet nothing is the same. Her footprints remain intact in the dust of the driveway – even the Jokari bat is where she dropped it – yet Hadley ensures the reader is made aware that Jane’s safe return home only serves to mask the disappearance of the girl she was the day before. This disappearance remains unnoticed in the family; and it is clear that Jane herself is anxious to conceal the implications of the weekend’s events as much from herself as from her mother. Reverting to her beloved childhood Chalet School story books, she is not even relieved at the early arrival of her menstrual period ‘because it hadn’t occurred to her until then […] that she could be pregnant’ (p. 26). This inability to link her hard-won emotional knowledge with other kinds of knowledge – her newly acquired sexual experience with what she has learned from her biology lessons, for example – does not augur well for Jane’s future life and relationships. In a coda of barely three pages, we learn that Jane’s silence about what has happened to her will follow her into adulthood; she is never to confide in anyone, not even her husband. Yet we hear too that she will become fearful for her own daughters ‘without connecting her fears to anything that had happened to her’. ‘[I]n a way’, writes Hadley, ‘she never assimilated the experience, though she didn’t forget it either […] Her early initiation stayed in a sealed compartment in her thoughts and seemed to have no effects, no consequences’ (p. 27).

In the highly condensed few lines of a third central scene, however, Jane, by now in her fifties and divorced, visits a counsellor to complain of feeling cut off ‘from the real life she was meant to be living’ (p. 27). The counsellor, privately irritated by Jane’s ‘girlish’ manner and ‘heavy, patient sorrows’ (p. 27), asks her what this ‘real life’ is like. Jane haltingly begins to describe a summer day by the swimming pool and a sun-filled room with a bed on which a naked girl and boy are sleeping. ‘I am curled up on the rug beside them’, she says, ‘The boy turns over, flings out his arm and his hand dangles to the floor […] I move so that his hand is touching me’ (p. 28). In this image, a reworking of the pivotal scene of recognition experienced by the 15-year-old Jane, we witness the moment where the adult Jane’s ‘flat, bland surface’, the ‘sealed compartment in her thoughts’ (p. 27) at last breaks open. It reveals a fantasy that speaks of unconscious desire that is only just beginning to be voiced and explored. ‘That’s more like it’, thinks the counsellor, ‘that’s something’ (p. 26). In the counsellor’s office, Jane is once again on the verge of entering ‘the cave of things unknown to her’. It is another scene of recognition, this time a potentially therapeutic one through which the events of her adolescence – which we, as readers, can see have shaped the contours of her life – may come to acquire retrospective meaning, force and significance for her.

What do imaginative writers know?

In his Studies in Hysteria, Freud (1895/2004)is famously concerned by the way his psychoanalytic case histories appear to lack ‘the serious stamp of science’. ‘[L]ocal diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the history of hysteria’, he writes, going on to propose that ‘a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affliction. Case histories of this kind are intended to be judged like psychiatric ones’ (p. 160). For Freud, then, it seems that imaginative writers have access to a particular kind of knowledge that is lacking in the more scientific practice of ‘local diagnosis’. More puzzlingly, however, is how the kind of ‘detailed description’ of psychological processes Freud offers in his case histories – detail akin to that offered by ‘imaginative writers’ – seems to be dismayingly at odds with the kind of detail he thinks is characteristic of a scientific treatise or academic paper. By telling us that his case histories should be evaluated in the same way as a standard scientific report, Freud exposes the competing epistemologies at stake here. There is the kind of knowledge conveyed by the traditional psychiatric or medical article: typically, for Freud, the valid, reliable and replicable kind that bears ‘the serious stamp of science’; and there is the kind of knowledge that is conveyed by a gripping story: typically the kind that is capable of illuminating something of a particular person’s unique experience and manner of psychological suffering. For Freud, then, the psychoanalytic case history emerges as a contested narrative genre, one in which he is always trying to work out where his loyalties lie.

Hadley’s short story belongs to a narrative genre that is no less contested than that of the case history; haggling over ‘what makes a short story short’ (Friedman, 1958) has been an intermittent topic of debate within literary theory for some time now. Rather than attempting to resolve these long-standing taxonomic disputes, I want to suggest it might be more fruitful to sustain them; not the least because I suspect Hadley’s dense, highly-wrought and artful tale of Jane has much to tell us about the kind of knowledge that Freud thought imaginative writers might bring to bear on his psychoanalytic case histories. We might want to remember that literary fiction, as much as psychoanalysis, is intimately concerned with the nature of the self, the nature of human experience. It is interested as much with the subject-matter or content of particular events or experiences, as with the self who undergoes such experiences. But what exactly do we mean by experience? What is the difference between experience and awareness, say, or mere sentience? Walsh (1969) draws on Dewey’s Art as Experience to make a distinction between the general flow of experience in life, something that we might think of simply as awareness of what is happening to us, and that which seems to stand out as ‘an experience’. When we have ‘an experience’, we are not simply aware, for example, of being lonely or sad; we are aware of being aware. There is a self-reflexive quality to our awareness, allowing us to reflect, think about and know that we are experiencing loneliness or sadness. The duality of a self that both experiences something and is also aware of its own experiencing is what allows us to notice and reflect on the quality and character of our experience: to realise what our experience is like. Nussbaum (1990) goes on to propose reflection as an important counterweight to the pain and suffering evoked by the cataleptic impression. ‘Reflection’, she writes, ‘permits the critical assessment of impressions, their linking into an overall pattern, their classification and reclassification’ (p. 273). So mere experience is not enough; we cannot subsist on cataleptic impressions alone. Like the adult Jane, we will need to assimilate our experience by reflecting on our suffering, by getting to grips not only with what it is like, its phenomenology as it were, but also by bearing witness to its effects and consequences in our lives.

Jane, as we have seen, has certainly been made aware of something. She has experienced, recognised, been brought face-to-face with her sexual desire and its betrayal. But could we say that she has had ‘an experience’? What could we say she knows? As we have seen, without reflection mere experience, however powerful, cannot come to anything. In the last troubling few lines of Hadley’s story, we learn that Daniel, by now a successful lawyer as well as a good husband and father, has no memory at all of Jane. ‘Even if by some miracle he ever met her, and she recognized him and told him the whole story (which she would never do), it wouldn’t bring anything back. […]He’s had too much happiness in his life since then, too much experience; […] It’s all just gone’ (pp. 28–9). Paradoxically, then, a life like Daniel’s in which there is ‘too much happiness […] too much experience’ appears to incur as little reflection as does Jane’s life of ‘heavy, patient sorrows’. Yet it is only suffering that can incur reflection; for, as Nussbaum (1990) reminds us, suffering is constituted by a ‘mark or impress’ engraved upon the soul. In the absence of suffering there is no ‘mark or impress’ to reflect upon: ‘it’s all just gone’. As Hadley tells us, Daniel ‘lost that fine tuning’ that would have enabled him, in adulthood, to reflect on his memories and come to know the meaning of his brief encounter with Jane.

Let us return to the question of why Freud seems to oppose the ‘work of imaginative writers’ with the work of those who write scientific reports or theoretical treatises. In reading fiction, says Walsh (1969), we acquire ‘knowledge in the form of realization; the realization of what anything might come to as a form of lived experience’ (p. 136). To ‘realize’ of course, means to make something real, to bring it into existence; and so ‘the realization of what anything might come to as a form of lived experience’ might suggest not only that reading fiction is itself a form of ‘lived experience’, but that this ‘lived experience’ has the capacity to bring into existence a kind of knowing that is more real, more immediate, more vivid and more personal than cognitive or propositional knowing. This is not the kind of knowledge, implies Hadley, that we any more than Jane can acquire in biology, history or art lessons; nor is it the kind of knowledge that will get us, or Jane’s brother Robin, into university. It is the kind of knowledge that accrues from living through an experience: it shows us, not what something is, or what something does, but rather what something is like.

We might think of psychoanalysis, like fiction, as pre-eminently a practice through which we acquire knowledge of what suffering is like ‘in the form of realization’. But like Jane, we cannot ‘realize’ this kind of knowledge by ourselves, by sitting alone to reflect on our pain. Our knowledge will not arrive by way of isolated thought, by ‘detached, unemotional, exact intellectual scrutiny’; we need someone else to help us make this kind of knowing real: to bring it into existence. It is surely no coincidence, then, that Hadley introduces a counsellor into her tale for this latter purpose. For if we take the liberty of substituting a psychoanalyst for Hadley’s counsellor, we can see that psychoanalytic work does not only enable us to reflect on our experiences; rather, within the fiction that is the transference, something becomes real ‘as a form of lived experience’. Unconscious feelings that are derived from our early childhood relationships come to be located within the therapeutic relationship where they are permitted their fullest emotional expression and impact. Both patient and analyst can get to know what they are like. What was felt ‘there and then’ early on in life comes to be experienced and recognised ‘here and now’ with the analyst, often accompanied by considerable pain and suffering. In time, such feelings and the therapeutic relationship within which they emerge will become available for shared reflection and interpretation: something that permits the ‘fine-tuning’ of experience or, to return to Nussbaum (1990), ‘the critical assessment of impressions, their linking into an overall pattern, their classification and reclassification’ (p. 273). In this way, psychoanalysis can be understood as a method aimed principally at evoking – and subsequently reflecting on – cataleptic impressions: powerful emotional experiences which, through their painfully intense immediacy, are capable of cutting through our defensive intellectual habits to promote knowledge of unconscious feelings, motives and wishes.

Of course, psychoanalysis, like fiction, also has the capacity to amplify emotional experience, slowing it down to capture, illuminate and reflect on it in ways that are not, or not easily, available in the hurly-burly of real life. This allows us to imagine, describe and become aware of things with far more precision, detail and nuance than we might otherwise be capable of. At the same time, psychoanalysis, like fiction, has the potential considerably to expand on the possibilities in experience that might become available for realisation. By evoking complex unconscious material such as dreams, fantasies and associations in our patients, we as therapists, like readers of fiction, may come to vastly extend, amplify and elaborate our capacity to know what something is like through imaginative participation and review. Like Jane, our new knowledge – we might call it countertransference – may even on occasion fill us up, ‘not in the form of thoughts but as sensations, overwhelming’. But significantly, our knowledge tends not to be obtained through the ‘detached, unemotional, exact intellectual scrutiny of one’s condition’, but rather will accrue within and through a relationship of trust in which intense emotional experiences together with their effects and consequences can be fully felt, acknowledged, reflected on and assimilated.

Perhaps, we are in a slightly better position now to understand why Freud hoped this kind of knowledge might best be elucidated via his psychoanalytic case histories rather than via presentation of a scientific report. Getting to know what something is like appears to require a medium that itself evokes the phenomenology of the subject’s unique experience. Through the tragedy of Jane, Hadley not only tells us about the importance of coming to know ‘what something is like’, she recruits us, as readers, into this form of knowing as well. When we become active participants in the story by engaging in an empathic relationship with Jane, we not only come to know what her suffering is ‘like’ through vicarious identification, we come to know something about our own suffering. And by reflecting on the possible consequences and effects of Jane’s suffering along with her counsellor, we also come to reflect on the possible consequences and effects of our own. The capacity of a story to mime the unfolding of experience, as well as to reflect on its effects, permits the reader to know ‘what something is like’ in a way that is simply unavailable to non-narrative, scientific or academic texts.

But how does the story that is a case study recruit its reader into this particular form of knowing? With what confidence can we claim that the account presented via the medium of a psychoanalytic case history helps us to know what the subject’s experience is really ‘like’? We would be wise to hesitate before too readily making any such assumption, particularly when we observe the epistemological tensions emerging from the case history’s commitment to the texture and particularity of the individual alongside its loyalty to the generalisability and replicability of the knowledge that is thereby obtained. So, I want to develop the discussion here by deploying Hadley’s tale to help us understand the particular mode of inquiry that Freud uses in psychoanalytic work; for as we shall see, this has implications for understanding the limitations of the case study as a medium that aims to represent the subject in its totality.

An abduction

Let us recall that the kind of knowledge we accrue by living through an experience is not, as Hadley implies, the kind that can be reduced to a proposition or an argument. It is not universal and generalisable, but rather unique and specific. It is clear that the counsellor, secretly bored by Jane’s ‘lack of imagination’ (p. 27), only starts to prick up her ears when she hears about her fantasy: one that connects Jane to a particular set of feelings tied to a specific memory in the context of a unique set of circumstances. Jane’s suffering, Hadley tells us, is ‘not like anyone else’s’ (p. 25). It is distinctive, singular, never to be repeated. It is rooted in what we might call an epistemology of the particular.

Drawing on the work of the cultural historian Carlo Ginzberg, Cave (1988) argues that the classic recognition scene is linked to a method of inquiry that can be traced back to the ancient practices of hunters and diviners. It is a method based on the analysis of particular signs or individual traces such as animal tracks, marks and droppings, by which means hunters were able to reconstruct the likely presence of prey from a sequence of apparently unconnected signs and traces. Linking this early form of knowledge acquisition to the work of professionals as disparate as palaeontologists, historians, detectives and doctors, Cave (1988) goes on to argue that ‘the sign of recognition in drama and narrative fiction belongs to the same mode of knowledge as the signature, the clue, the fingerprint or footprint and all other tracks and traces that enable an individual to be identified, a criminal to be caught, a hidden event or state of affairs to be reconstructed’ (p. 250). This method of inquiry proceeds, like the fairy tale trail of breadcrumbs, by a logic of association. It weaves together a number of puzzlingly disparate pieces of information via an initial, explanatory hypothesis that provides a possible narrative thread. Perhaps, this is a mode of knowledge that belongs to psychoanalysis too, as Ginzberg himself suggests, since psychoanalysis is concerned with identifying unconscious or repressed knowledge via disconnected signs or hints concealed within the patient’s symptoms, slips of the tongue, dreams and forgotten memories. Freud’s logic of (free) association is one that patiently tracks the patient’s words, the ‘detailed descriptions of mental processes’ within which lie fragments of a lost personal experience.

This is a method of inquiry that lies very close to the initial, creative stages of scientific inquiry that the American philosopher of science Charles Peirce called abduction. This kind of abduction – not quite the one we might at first understand from the title of Hadley’s story – is a form of inference that Peirce argues is different from either induction or deduction. Induction involves inferring an explanation or theory from a series of observations, whilst deduction involves predicting the consequences of a particular theory or hypothesis through further testing. Abduction, however, is rather different. It is concerned with only the very preliminary stages of an hypothesis: with finding the simplest and most likely explanation for an incomplete set of observations. It is constituted by ‘studying the facts and devising a theory to explain them’ (Peirce, 1903, p. 145). Significantly, it is concerned with theorising about unexpected events whose hidden causes may be remote in time and which can be accessed only through their effects; and it may involve an ‘instant of surprise’, says Peirce (p. 154), as old assumptions and expectations are ruptured by the introduction of something new and different. In the same way, Freud (1915) argues for the interruptive force of an unconscious whose existence can only be presupposed on the basis of actions that cannot be explained in any other way. ‘[O]ur most personal daily experience’, he writes, ‘acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know where from, and intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how. All these conscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be experienced us through consciousness; on the other hand, they fall into a demonstrable connection if we interpolate between them the unconscious acts that we have inferred’ (p. 167).

This is not the place and nor am I qualified to develop a philosophical treatise on abductive reasoning. But it seems an unlikely coincidence that Hadley has named her story An Abduction; and as readers we are surely justified in holding her to a particular and, I suspect, distinctly playful choice of title. After all, Jane’s tale could as well have been called A Seduction; but Hadley seems less concerned with the fact of fifteen-year old Jane’s sexual initiation than with wanting us to be alive to the kind of knowledge that fiction delivers: sensitive to a scene of recognition or anagnorisis that constitutes the very paradigm of narrative and, I want to suggest, of psychoanalysis too. For like the psychoanalyst, the reader of Hadley’s tale proceeds by following the hidden signs, the unique mark or impress of cataleptic suffering that lies concealed under the ‘flat, bland surface’ of the text. If we read these signs carefully, we may come to know something of what Jane’s particular, unique experience is like; and if we are interested, as was Freud (1895/2004), in a ‘detailed description of mental processes’ (p. 165), we may also be able to infer along with her counsellor how the events of a lost weekend one hot summer holiday long ago have come unconsciously to shape and perhaps limit Jane’s life. In accompanying Jane on her journey from innocence to experience, we too may come to infer, know and understand something about the unconscious currents tugging beneath the surface of our own lives.

The kind of knowledge that emerges from both fiction and psychoanalysis is, I suggest, a particular and intimate form of knowing that may deeply in-form, or shape, our experience of life. It is the kind of knowledge that we are unlikely to acquire in the classroom; and even a professional clinical training does not guarantee it for it is ineluctably bound up with suffering. It is characterised by a commitment to the particularity, distinctiveness and idiosyncrasy of individual experience that is irreducible to universal principles or generalisable laws. Like the patient’s free-associations in psychoanalysis, like the fantasy that Jane recounts to her counsellor, this kind of knowledge is contingent and unrepeatable, emerging from causes that are utterly singular, deeply individual and often unconscious. How then, can we judge its significance? Certainly, what Jane knows – what she has learned from her brief encounter – appears to come to nothing. Hadley makes it clear that Jane’s adult life is simple, bland and rather unfulfilled and that the lessons so painfully acquired as a naïve 15-year-old are not put to use in any explicit way; but perhaps as readers we might allow for the possibility that Jane’s knowledge will remain hidden away within her as a superbly charged, concentrated nugget of life, a kind of radioactive treasure that accrues significance, force and intensity over time, privately nourishing her dreams and imagination.

To return to the contested epistemological status of the psychoanalytic case history, we can see how this focus on particularity creates an uncomfortable dilemma for Freud: as if there is some kind of stand-off between his desire as an imaginative writer-analyst to provide vivid ‘detailed descriptions’ of a life in all its privacy, specificity and idiosyncrasy and his ambition as a scientist to situate the telling of that life within the public domain. To thicken the problem a little further, we can see that the scientific knowledge claims made on behalf of the psychoanalytic case history are significantly undermined by its concern not simply with the unique experience of the patient, but with an experience that emerges as a consequence of the muddle of transferential and countertransferential cross-currents swirling between both the patient and the analyst working together at a particular time: ‘a picture of the exposed and entangled state’, as Henry James (1934/2011) puts it, that interrupts and vexes any attempt to place individual patients into universal categories or classes, to render them into generalisable ‘cases’. If we further attempt to distinguish between the psychoanalyst-writer who presents herself as author of the case history and the psychoanalyst-writer who stories herself and her patient as characters within the narrative (Ogden, 2005), we can also see how these entanglements and identifications only tend to proliferate. Indeed, by now it is clear the supposed uniqueness of the case history has given way to a paradoxical and dizzying multiplicity entailing considerable ambiguity about exactly what or who is the subject of the case in question. It is hardly surprising, then, that Freud’s story-telling skills should inevitably prompt awkward questions for him – and us – about whether and to what extent the narrative appeal and ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of his psychoanalytic case histories could ever be raised to the level of a scientifically valid and replicable generalisation.

Unlike Freud, Hadley does not need to establish any evidence that might confirm a theory, a general law or an abstract principle. She is not making any claims to scientific validity; nor does she have to be concerned, at least in the way that Freud (1895/2004) was to become concerned, with issues of confidentiality and anonymity. She is simply – or, as it turns out, not so simply – writing a short story. But as we have seen, Hadley’s concern with illuminating the significance of the small event, her interest in rendering the tiny detail of Jane’s Peter Pan collar or a dusty footprint in the driveway, reveals more than a passing affinity with the kind of detail that preoccupies the writer of the psychoanalytic case history. Yet Freud (1905) seems to fret at the prospect of his case histories being tarred with a literary brush. In his tale of Dora in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria he writes: ‘there are many physicians who, (revolting though it may seem), choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of the neuroses but as a roman à clef designed for their private delectation’ (p. 9). A roman à clef is a novel about real events and people disguised as fiction; and so perhaps it is understandable, given his newly-minted approach to psychological treatment, that Freud wants to establish from the outset a firm claim to the scientific rather than the literary status of his case histories. But Freud’s very insistence here might alert us to a certain ambivalence about what he considers to be the evidence for such a claim: ‘the record is not absolutely – phonographically – exact’, he cautions, ‘but it can claim to a high degree of trustworthiness. Nothing of any importance has been altered in it except in some places the order in which the explanations are given; and this has been done for the sake of presenting the case in a more connected form’ (p. 10). In this surge of qualifications and disclaimers, Freud reveals himself to be not a little ill at ease with the way his case studies are so evidently, as Marcus (1976) points out, ‘abridged, edited, synthesized and constructed from the very outset’ (p. 405). His provisos merely beg the question of how ‘exact’ a report of psychoanalytic work really has to be before its credentials can be considered ‘trustworthy’. For if the case history, like a work of fiction, conveys ‘knowledge in the form of realization’, if it aims to demonstrate not just what psychoanalytic work is, nor what it does, but rather what psychoanalytic work is like, then it is a genre whose form will surely need to correspond to the narrative account of the patient whose unconscious ensures she does not know what it is she speaks. It will necessarily fail to provide an ‘absolutely – phonographically – exact’ representation of the subject in its totality. In this sense, trustworthiness might be less about trying to capture an ‘exact’ record of a therapeutic session, whatever that might mean, and more about fidelity to a psychoanalytic theory of language that governs and delimits the psychoanalyst-author no less than his or her patient. So perhaps we need to hold lightly the distinction between science and stories that Freud struggles to maintain; not only because of the rhetorical and representational strategies deployed in the psychoanalytic case history (Mulligan, 2017), but also because its very inexactitude mimes the ineluctable limits to self-knowledge of the subject who emerges in the telling of herself within a psychoanalysis. But the pursuit of coherent narratives within psychoanalytic work and the fabular basis of a fragmented, partial self speak to broader concerns than I have space for in this paper. In a forthcoming article, I intend to explore in more detail how psychoanalysis disrupts conventional ways of narrating a life, examining the extent to which the short story can offer us a possible literary model for the subject.

If, for some, Freud’s case histories read like fiction, perhaps Hadley’s An Abduction could be said by a reverse logic to read like a case history. ‘If I can get to the heart of Dublin’, claims James Joyce (in Ellman, 1959) of his novel Ulysses, ‘I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world’ (p. 520). So by way of concluding, we might want to ask what getting to the heart of Jane tells us about all the other Janes in the world. What can the test or representative case, whether in the form of a short story or a psychoanalytic case history, tell us about the lives of everyone else? ‘If p, then what?’ as Forrester (1996) puts it rather more pithily. Do psychotherapists have as much to learn from the fiction of Hadley as they do from the case histories of Freud? For just as Freud wanted to find something in the singularity and distinctiveness of his psychoanalytic case histories that could answer to a more general frame of reference, so too Hadley is concerned to find something within the particularity of her tale that speaks to us all: that has the power, as Nussbaum (1990) would have it, to ‘drag us to assent’ (p. 265). Indeed, in their search for a form of expression that can straddle the incommensurability between the universal and the unique, the standardised and the specific, both Freud and Hadley could be said to interrogate, blur and even surpass the boundaries of their respective literary genres. Theirs is a quest that, if it does nothing else, at least keeps alive and in circulation the tension between what it might mean to know about an individual – to recognise the particular ‘mark or impress’ left by their suffering, and to know what this is like – and what it might mean to know to know about something more general, abstract or theoretical about groups of individuals. Iris Murdoch (1954), one of those rare writers capable of turning a hand to both academic treatise and imaginative fiction, throws down the epistemological gauntlet in her characteristically trenchant way: ‘[T]he movement away from theory and generality’, she announces, ‘is the movement towards truth. All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular (p. 80). In her tale of Jane, Hadley shows us what it is like to be ‘ruled by the situation itself’ and thereby reminds us of the instability of our organised schemes of knowledge. By grounding us in her epistemologies of the particular, she leads us towards emotional truths via wonderfully imagined paths.

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Rosemary Rizq

Rosemary Rizq, PhD, C. Psychol. AFBPsS, FHEA is a Chartered Psychologist, an HCPC-registered counselling psychologist and a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton. Rosemary has published widely on issues relating to organisational dynamics and psychotherapeutic training and practice. Her latest book, The Industrialisation of Care, was co-edited with Catherine Jackson and published by PCCS Books in 2019. She is currently working on a book about the relationship between literary fiction and psychoanalysis. From Fiction to Psychoanalysis: Re-imagining a Relationship will be published by Routledge next year. Rosemary is the 2020 winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture.

Notes

1. All references to An Abduction are taken from Hadley (2017).