Research as Autobiography (article)

I am a professor of critical theory and literary modernism whose research interests have largely been in the area of psychoanalytic theories of shame and depression, Kleinian object relations, and the psychoanalysis of 20th-century culture. I am also a long-time user of the mental health system: for over 20 years, depression and antidepressants have been a part of my life; three years ago, I was diagnosed as “bipolar II” (mixed states of depression and hypomania). There is certainly a connection between my own experiences with depression and psychotherapies (not always psychoanalytic) and the research path I have been following. There is probably also a connection between my experiences with therapy and an earlier research interest in memory and its lapses: the problem of forgetting and the mnemonic systems erected against forgetting. What do these connections mean? Is it simply that, narcissistically, I am interested only in issues that resonate with my own experience — that I see my life, my experiences with shame, loss, and depression, mirrored in everything I (strategically) choose to read and gather into my research? Or might there be, more generally, a connection between the story of any academic’s life and the story of his or her research, a relationship that can be established? I believe that there is, and that psychoanalysis provides the ground for articulating this relationship.

Peter Brooks writes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) that psychoanalysis is “a ‘praxis’ of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling” (p. 76); it builds its clinical narratives on the basis of life-stories told “live,” on the spot, in analysis. Psychoanalysis has built up on these clinical stories, developing theoretical narratives of development and regression, conflict and integration, that in their turn shape analytic practice, the stories it interprets and tells. Guilt and repression, grief and reparation — such concepts are best understood when embodied in analytic narratives of resistance and transference, narratives that teach us that the past never quite ceases haunting us.

An academic research path is also a narrative. In it are implicated all the stories, manifest and submerged, that have shaped the researcher’s life. Research can thus be seen as a form of life-writing, however indirect. To put it another way, I would suggest that a research path has a transferential aspect: it is chosen not in a disinterested manner but rather in response to deep-seated needs, enacting or repeating in the present unresolved conflicts from the earliest object relations — the earliest and always unfinished stories of love and hate, guilt and aggression. (Melanie Klein, “The Origins of Transference” in The Selected Melanie Klein, 1987: pp. 206-207) And this is the case, I would argue, not only for academic research in psychoanalysis but for any research narrative, inasmuch as it is composed by a person whose life is still haunted or shaped by unfinished business, a narrative that will write itself by whatever means come to hand.

Perhaps this seems a rather paranoid view of academic research. As a further example, however, I will briefly offer a case that is not my own: that of Klein herself. Klein’s life story has

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been written by Phyllis Grosskurth in her absorbing biography, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (1986). Klein’s life was divided roughly in two: the first half comprising a conventional girlhood and marriage; the second being Klein’s career as a child analyst and object relations theorist. There were two turning points in this story of progress from middle-class married unhappiness to professional fulfillment: the discontented wife’s first reading of Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams) and subsequent entering into analysis while still married; and the Kleins’ divorce around ten years later. Klein suffered from depression throughout her married life and frequently beyond as she came to terms with a number of losses: besides the loss of her early aspirations, there were the deaths of a sister and a beloved brother, the loss of a lover, and the loss of a son in a mountaineering accident. Most strikingly, Klein lost her daughter, Melitta Schmideberg who as an analyst turned against her mother and waged an unrelenting war against her.

In a recent graduate seminar, my students and I traced parallels between Klein’s life story and her theoretical narrative, which posits the infant’s development from a “paranoid-schizoid” position, in which it splits its objects into good and bad, defending itself against that which it has sadistically attacked, to a “depressive position” in which the infant experiences guilt and grief over the damage it has done and seeks to make reparation — to make amends and to mend the broken object. Mourning is theorized by Klein, in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” in The Selected Melanie Klein, as involving a guilty process of reparation, a rebuilding of the inner world (p. 167); mourning brings about the ability to tolerate ambivalence and loss, and eventually love and gratitude replace the earlier rage and fears of persecution. (p. 173) In her theoretical narrative, then, which moves so strikingly from hatred and persecution to grief to the possibility of love and gratitude, Klein rewrites, however indirectly and schematically, the story of a life marked by recurring struggles with grief and depression. Importantly, she envisions at least the possibility of an end to mourning. However, Klein’s final paper, “On the Sense of Loneliness” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963 (1997), was on the problem of loneliness, the yearning for an “unattainable perfect internal state” and sense of “irretrievable loss” that can disturb the difficult process of integration at any point in a life. (pp. 300-301) In old age, Klein, still unreconciled with her daughter, felt that a number of her friends and colleagues had deserted her; as always, in “On the Sense of Loneliness” she was theorizing her own life.

I have offered Klein’s case as exemplifying the tendency of a research path, a theoretical narrative, to re-enact or repeat unfinished business in the researcher’s life. The research, and, perhaps more generally, the vocation, that one takes up is an analytic arena in which one works through and rewrites unfinished narratives — attempting to compose conclusions but never entirely being able to do so. Like Klein, I am (re)writing the story of my life, my depressions that resist conclusion, in the research path I have “chosen” — Klein’s work and its reworking (or working through) of grief — and, no doubt, I will continue to do so in a new project I am planning on mourning and the body in modernist women’s writing.

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