The House of Sleep (35 page)

‘This is a story,’ Russell Watts continued (reading from the screen of his laptop computer), ‘about language and the games it plays with us; about how language colludes with the unconscious; about the unholy alliance between the signified order and the repressed contents of the neurotic mind.

‘Sarah T. is a young woman who was sent to me for psychotherapy. Her GP was of the opinion that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her marriage was in crisis and she had recently been sacked from her job as a primary school teacher. She was not sleeping well, and this in turn was disturbing her husband’s sleep and exacerbating the problems in their relationship. She suspected him of infidelity.

‘At our first session she described to me the process by which she had lost her job. Exhausted from lack of night-time sleep, she had dozed off while teaching a lesson. When her headmaster arrived unexpectedly in the classroom a few minutes later, he found her sleeping soundly in front of an unruly class. This incident subsequently led to her dismissal. There had been other, similar ones, it transpired. There were two members of Sarah’s class whom she had trusted, and who had been in the habit of waking her whenever she fell asleep in such circumstances. On this last occasion, however, they had decided to take advantage of her and to let her sleep on while the class enjoyed a period of unsupervised leisure. I asked her whether she had mentioned this to her headmaster and she said that she had not, because “I wanted to protect my pupils”. I thought this a most remarkable turn of phrase, but naturally refrained from comment. As Lacan has so elegantly expressed it: “We must recognize, not that the analyst does not know anything, but that he is not the subject of his knowing. It is thus impossible for him to speak what he knows.”

‘At our second session, after a period of perhaps five or six minutes, Sarah fell into a profound sleep, which lasted for the
remainder of the consultation. Even more interestingly, when she awoke she seemed to be under the fixed impression that we had been engaged in animated dialogue for the last hour. Had she dreamed this dialogue, I was forced to ask myself? It was too early to reach a conclusion, but I decided to encourage her in this fascinating delusion, by charging her my full fee for a sixty-minute session.

‘During the next few meetings our conversation ranged, in a pleasingly haphazard way, over three central subjects: Sarah’s dreams, the continuing disintegration of her marriage, and her sexual history.

‘Sarah’s dreams fell into two distinct types. Many of them involved no fantastic element at all, but were thoroughly rooted in reality and mundane, often domestic detail. Mundane as they were, however, these dreams could also be very vivid, and she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the events of her dreams from the events of her real life. I asked her for an example, and she told me that once she had fallen asleep in the course of proof-reading a magazine article, and dreamed that she had “taken out” one of the footnotes, when in fact she had not. She described to me the unfortunate consequences of this dream, but they were of less interest, in my opinion, than her choice of the ambiguous phrase “take out”, which, as I’m sure you are aware, can also refer to the act of escorting a prospective lover on a date – the prelude to sexual intercourse, in many instances – or even to an act of assassination.

‘On the other hand, Sarah also had more bizarre and imaginative dreams, bordering on nightmares: these frequently involved lizards, snakes, and in particular frogs.

‘“Are you frightened of frogs?” I once asked her.

‘“Perhaps I am,” Sarah answered. “They repulse me, but I also feel sorry for them.”

‘“Why such a complex reaction?” I asked.

‘“Because of their eyes,” she said. “I don’t like the way their eyes bulge out. It makes them look ugly and vulnerable.”

‘She then described to me a strange occurrence from her student days. At an end-of-term party, one student had been entertaining a group of his friends with an obscene joke about a frog that performed fellatio. He had described the frog, Sarah said, in striking physical detail. When he reached the “punch-line” of the joke, Sarah had been joining in the laughter of the group, but had suddenly lost control of herself, and had collapsed into a sort of faint. Once again I refrained from commenting on this story, although the inference to be drawn from it was plain…’

‘Of course: Sarah was narcoleptic,’ said Professor Cole.

Russell Watts looked up in surprise. ‘Pardon?’

‘An obvious case of narcolepsy. She was exhibiting three of the classic symptoms.’

‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘Excessive daytime sleepiness; vivid pre-sleep dreaming; cataplexy brought on by laughter. Three of the main symptoms of narcolepsy. Wouldn’t everyone agree?’

He looked around for confirmation. Dr Myers nodded vigorously, and Dr Herriot said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘And what about you, Dr Dudden? You’re the sleep specialist, after all.’

Dr Dudden seemed to have something else on his mind at that moment. Most of the colour had drained from his face and he was taking small, nervous sips from a glass of water. Now, realizing that he was being directly addressed, he managed to murmur something along the lines of, ‘Quite so – narcoleptic – no doubt about it’; after which, in an apparently casual tone of voice, he asked Russell Watts this question:

‘Of course, purely as a matter of professional protocol, I’m assuming that you have changed all the names in this case?’

Russell Watts stared at him curiously and said, ‘Actually, no. That isn’t my practice. When you’re working in a discipline which concerns itself so minutely with matters of linguistics and nomenclature, case studies can often become quite meaningless if the names are changed.’

‘Do you make that clear to your patients?’ asked Dr Myers.

‘Of course.’ He turned back to Professor Cole. ‘On the subject of Sarah’s narcolepsy, you may have a point, I suppose. That was something her GP should have spotted.’

‘I’m amazed he didn’t.’

‘You realize that this was several years ago. There was far less awareness of the syndrome then.’

‘But did it never occur to
you
at all?’

‘It’s not really that aspect of the case that interests me,’ Russell Watts stammered, avoiding the Professor’s eye and returning instead to his computer screen. ‘This is actually a case… a story about… as I said before, a story about language, and… and discourse… As will become apparent if you just let me continue, without further interruptions.’

‘By all means,’ said Dr Myers. ‘Do carry on. This is very intriguing.’

‘Right.’ He scrolled up and down the screen a few times, trying to find his place. ‘Now where was I…’

‘The inference was plain,’ prompted Professor Cole, evenly.

‘Yes, of course. All right, then – to resume:

‘Sarah found it very hard to talk about the evening when this joke was told, and was evasive when I encouraged her to ask herself why. Eventually, however, certain interesting facts emerged. There had been two people present at the party, one of them a woman with whom she had recently enjoyed a sexual relationship, the other a man who, not content with being one of her closest friends, also fervently wanted to be her lover. This man’s name was Robert, and he had disappeared somewhat mysteriously and abruptly from her life shortly after the evening in question.

‘Now that I knew that Sarah had had sexual relations with both men and women, it was clear that we were making progress; and as she told me the details of her friendship with Robert, many things began to fall into place. She explained, for instance, that they had shared a communal bathroom as students, and once, not long after their first meeting, she had
entered it to find not only that he was lying in the bath, but that he had a razor in his hand and the bath-water was full of blood.

‘“What did you feel when you saw him like that?” I asked.

‘“I was very disturbed.”

‘“Because you thought he was trying to kill himself?”

‘“No,” Sarah answered. “That’s not what I thought.”

‘In fact – although she was never able to recognize this – it was clear to me that she suspected Robert of having guessed the secret of her sexuality, whereupon he was – or so she supposed – attempting to castrate himself in order to appeal to the homosexual aspect of her nature.

‘At this stage in the analysis, Sarah’s marriage came to a crisis. She had established beyond doubt that her husband Anthony was betraying her. What had particularly enraged her was the revelation that he had met this other woman, not through some chance, unplanned encounter, but by placing an advertisement in the “lonely hearts” column of the magazine
Private Eye
– a well-known method of arranging adulterous liaisons among the London middle classes. Sarah and her husband had quarrelled violently, and she had, in fact, assaulted him, following which he had packed his bags and left their marital home.

‘“How exactly did you assault him?” I asked.

‘“I kneed him in the balls,” she said.

‘I asked her to repeat this and she said once again, with great emphasis and satisfaction: “I kneed him in the balls.”

‘I suggest that you all remember these words and ponder them carefully, for they contain, in microcosm, the whole key to Sarah’s neurosis.

‘Meanwhile, further details of her friendship with Robert were being disclosed during every session. She talked repeatedly, for example, of an afternoon she had spent with him on a beach, in the company of a young girl who had been placed in their care for the day. On this occasion Robert, it seems,
had constructed an elaborate sandcastle with the child’s help, and she had started referring to him as “the Sandman” – an appellation which seemed to have lodged itself very firmly in Sarah’s mind.

‘It was this last detail which made me decide that it was time to confront Sarah with her obsession: an obsession which was now absolutely clear to me – as it will be to my distinguished audience – but of which she herself remained in complete ignorance. Sarah was, of course, obsessed with her eyes: obsessed with their vulnerability, fearful of their being harmed or violated. Was this not at the root of her fraught and ambivalent feelings towards frogs? Did it not explain her unusual choice of words when talking about her schoolchildren: “I wanted to protect my pupils”? Was this not the reason why she had felt so cruelly betrayed by her husband’s means of committing adultery – the placing of an advertisement in a magazine called
Private Eye
? I put these questions to her, and asked her, as a matter of urgency, if she could recall any early traumatic experience which had involved her eyes, particularly in an erotic or sexual context. Under my careful probing, it was not long before the truth came out.

‘During her time at university, Sarah told me, she had been deeply involved with a medical student called Gregory. He was her first… – I’m sorry, Dr Dudden, are you feeling all right?’

The others all turned to look at their colleague, who suddenly seemed to be choking on his glass of water. Dr Herriot patted him on the back, while Dr Myers took some tissue paper and tried to soak up some of the spilled liquid from the counterpane.

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he was saying, red-faced and gasping for breath. ‘Just a little water went down the wrong way, that’s all.’

‘Shall I carry on?’

‘Well, frankly,’ said Dr Dudden, now regaining his power of speech, ‘I’m beginning to find all this a little fanciful. Isn’t
it time we heard from someone whose methods are rather more rigorous, rather more, erm… scientific?’

‘I’ve nearly finished. Just a few more pages to go.’

‘I think we should hear it out to the end,’ said Dr Herriot. ‘I’m quite hooked, I must say.’

Professor Cole and Dr Myers agreed with her, and Russell Watts continued with his reading.

‘He was her first serious boyfriend, and I asked her if the early stages of the relationship had been happy.

‘“Yes,” Sarah answered. “He took me out to dinner, and he took me to concerts. I used to enjoy being taken out by him.”

‘There were, however, some aspects of Gregory’s behaviour which began to alarm her. He liked to watch over her while she was sleeping, for instance, and was especially fascinated by the activity he claimed to be able to discern behind her eyelids during Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Sometimes she would awake suddenly to find him shining a light into her eyes, or even touching her eyelids and applying pressure to them. Her sleep patterns, never very regular at the best of times, became highly disturbed from this point onwards.

‘It was to Gregory that Sarah had lost her virginity, and sex now began to play an increasingly important part in their relationship. He was, she told me, an energetic but also clumsy and unsatisfactory lover –’

This time a whole jet of water shot out of Dr Dudden’s mouth and landed on Professor Cole’s trousers. The Professor sprang to his feet with a cry of annoyance, and began wiping himself down with a pocket handkerchief.

‘For God’s sake, man, what on earth’s the matter with you?’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you just drink the stuff, like everybody else?’

Dr Dudden jumped to his assistance, and started using his own handkerchief to dab at the Professor’s trousers. ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, his voice shaky with mortification. ‘This is inexcusably careless of me. It’s just that the – I
don’t know how much longer I can tolerate the… the rank
amateurism
of this man’s approach…’

‘Just hear him out, will you?’ Professor Cole barked. ‘That’s what we’re here for. There’ll be plenty of time for argument when it’s over. Now just sit down and give the man a fair hearing.’

Dr Dudden meekly resumed his position on the bed; and as soon as calm, of a sort, had been restored, Russell Watts read out the concluding part of his paper.

‘He was, she told me, an energetic but also clumsy and unsatisfactory lover. Furthermore, he soon began to incorporate his fascination with Sarah’s eyes into their performance of the sexual act itself. Central to their lovemaking was something they had come to refer to as “the game”, in which he would touch both of her eyes with his outstretched fingers, applying more and more pressure as he approached his climax, this process being invariably accompanied by his ritual repetition of the phrase, “I spy with my little eye”. (The word “spy”, as I hardly need to point out to you at this stage, being almost synonymous with “private eye”.)