Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Page A

Wives, though with an E. P. Thompson paperback on top of them. This was because, among the young intelligentsia, class was the paradigm. As a useful concept, it was easier to deal with, and less dangerous than sexuality. The problems of the proletariat were not caused by being born a human being and living in families but by class conflict. Once these were solved by social change, most problems would evaporate. Any difficulties left over could be solved by Maoist group discussions.
    The Left could be puritanical: in the heaven of the far future, there would be more than enough fucking, but right now the priority was that everyone pushed for change. Freud was reviled as a white, bourgeois, patriarchal pig, and psychoanalysis was considered to be exhausted as a theory. What woman would admit to, or even accept the idea of, envying our little penises?—though that, of course, was exactly what feminism was. As Adorno wrote, “In Freudian psychoanalysis, nothing is more true than its exaggerations.”
    Nonetheless, R. D. Laing—popularly known as “the Two Ronnies,” after the television comedians—was still admired by students, mad behaviour was often idealised, and numerous therapies, a mixture of Vienna and California, were emerging. I knew Lennon and Ono had screamed and rolled around with Janov, and that the great Plastic Ono Band album had been the result. But I didn’t see what any of this could do for me. What of the quietly mad, the ordinary and unphotogenically disconcerted?
    Tahir Hussein told me that not knowing anything about technique was the best way to approach analysis. To drive a car you didn’t have to know what was under the bonnet.
    “You’re the mechanic of souls?” I said.
    He invited me to lie down on the couch and say whatever came into my mind. I did this immediately, determined not to miss the full Freudian experience. His chair was behind my head, but by his breathing I could tell he was leaning towards me, scratching his chin, waiting to hear. “The thing is…” I said.
    I began: hallucinations, panic attacks, inexplicable furies, frantic passions and dreams. It seemed only a minute before he said we had to finish. When I was outside, standing on the street knowing I would return in a couple of days, waves of terror tore through me, my body disassembled, exploding. To prevent myself collapsing, I had to hold on to a lamppost. I began to defecate uncontrollably. Shit ran down my legs and into my shoes. I began to weep; then I vomited—vomiting the past. My shirt was covered in sick. My insides were on the outside; everyone could see me. It wasn’t pretty and I had ruined my suit, but something had started. I came to love my analyst more than my father. He gave me more; he saved my life; he made and remade me.
    After a few sessions, when I asked him how he thought I would pay for my analysis, he only said, “You will get the money.”
    This did concentrate my mind. I noticed that the man who had given me Tahir Hussein’s phone number always studied the racing papers at lunchtime but never bet on horses, even though, as he put it, he believed he could make a lot of money that way. I told him my situation so far with Tahir Hussein and asked again for his help. “Easy,” he said, giving me a tip for the following day. I slung everything I had on the nag, about two hundred pounds, saved to pay my rent, and won over two thousand pounds, which I spent on my treatment. I went three mornings a week. It was serious and intense, the first time I’d taken myself seriously, as though normally what happened to me was not worth noting, and it wasn’t a moment too soon.
    My academic friend had told me that one of the virtues of psychoanalysis in England was that it had been developed not only by women but by people of all nationalities, by which he meant European. Unusually for an analyst, Tahir Hussein was a Pakistani Muslim. Tahir had a smart flat at a smart address, in South Kensington. Even as