Think Different – Neville-the-writer
By Charlotte Stansfield
In the 1990s Apple launched a marketing campaign.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently, says the voiceover on this now iconic advertisement, while flashing grainy footage of Bob Dylan, Piccaso and Amelia Eckhart among others — they’re not fond of rules…. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things…
The ad concluded with a clarion call to Think Different. It comes back to me now when I think about the Neville Symington in my mind. I didn’t know Neville well on a personal basis, but I have an ongoing conversation with him that has travelled from a chance meeting one day through his many books and papers. Neville often wrote about the importance of his own relationships with various writers, thinkers and rebels - Isiah Berlin, George Eliot and G.K Chesterton. I was always struck by how these relationships seemed to transcend time and space and remain so alive in Neville. It’s that kind of connection that I hope to pay tribute to as I share a few words about my relationship with Neville-the-writer.
- Symington’s list.
Many years ago, in a café in Manly, my friend, P handed me a note from her analyst, Neville.
P and I used to meet for coffee fairly regularly. Our conversations ran superficial and deep and we laughed a lot. She often prefaced her stories with “Guess what Neville said…?” and ended them with “I was furious.”
I’d never known anyone who had an analyst and I was intrigued. From my observations, this Neville of hers said some pithy, insightful and brave things although to my mind, she did seem to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with him.
P was keen to get me to someone that could help with the struggles I had. After watching me pursue a few painful and expensive dead ends, she recruited Neville. Later I learned he had written a list of potential analysts he thought might be a good fit, based on P’s descriptions of me and my dire financial situation.
“Neville says you should start at the top of the list and work your way down”
The list was hand written with a fountain pen. It contained the names of six Psychiatrists who with generous Medicare rebates; would enable me to access low-cost psychotherapy.
There were names that were located much closer to where I lived and worked, and I had no reason to follow the 2nd hand advice, but something made me trust it. I took a deep breath and contacted the analyst at the top.
This little folded up piece of paper was my first encounter with Neville’s writing. It was to herald the start of something so deeply significant to the trajectory of my life; I kept it for years.
- Neville the writer
I suspect Neville-the-writer might say that analysis had already begun in me, lost and troubled as I was, before I even held that list.
In one of my favourite of his papers, “The Essence of Psycho-Analysis as opposed to What Is Secondary” (2012), he certainly offers that view towards the end of the paper, after he has taken this reader on an expedition to discover the substance of the thing we call psychoanalysis. This conversation has accompanied me for the past few years shoring up something perhaps the poet David Whyte would call a “firm persuasion”(i), about my work. In this intriguing paper Neville, thinking different, discards psychoanalysis outer clothing : 50 minute session (ii), frequency of sessions, interpretation as the agent of change, use of a couch before the end of the 2nd page.
And on he strides, courageously bush bashing through everything I had tried, with difficulty, to learn. Transference, counter-transference, projection, denial and displacement - not of themselves goals to reach in our understanding, but instruments used to view the inner world of both participants, just as an astronomer uses the instrument of her telescope to view the stars. Reading these words came as such a relief as though something I had struggled with was clear. How could one telescope fully grasp the complexity of a galaxy? Or one theory encompass all that is communicated between two people in a given moment? All of these phenomena are secondary not primary, Neville repeats throughout this paper, as though clearing a thicket. What is primary, he says, is a relationship that fertilizes into understanding.
It sounds like such an obvious point, but like a lot of Neville’s writings, it’s deceptively simple. The presence of this kind of relationship cannot be taken for granted just because its outer clothing is on. Creating the conditions for growth, he writes elsewhere, requires other factors: freedom, a personal engagement with the other, scientific enquiry, and compassion. These factors, only if alive in the analysts mind, foster the development of the patients’ own creative capacity to reach understanding.
Every analytic training rests on a personal analysis so there is the understandable requirement for the analysts mind to be as free as possible from its own pathologies. However, there haven’t been that many analytic writers and thinkers that have stressed so passionately and repeatedly that it is the analyst-as-a-person, her understanding of the human experience, the uncluttered receptivity of her (heart)mind when she meets another, that is crucial to the work of transformation.
There are some, but not many, analytic writers that would share that the only resource they relied upon when treating a patient was a copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-in Wonderland. But only troublemakers publish their conviction, in a psychoanalytic journal, that psychoanalysis pre-dates Freud. And then as a follow up, assert its substance can be found in the words of the prophet Nathan and the Buddha. In this paper Neville seems to take analysis out of the consulting room and connect it to a set of far more mysterious ancient and timeless truths about our existence. What that then implies about the analysts role is liberating.
Maybe freedom seeking rebels, misfits and trouble makers have a way of finding each other: singing poetry with a harmonica and a guitar, through the name written with a fountain pen on a small piece of paper. Across time and space. There’s an analytic film version of my Apple ad running through my mind right now, and Neville is there in good company with other writers and crazy ones who have gone against the tide, who have changed things, who have helped me do what I truly believe psychoanalysis is for. To Think Different.
(i) “To have what William Blake called ‘a firm persuasion’ in our work -- to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time is one of the great triumphs of human existence. To have a firm persuasion - to set out boldly; to look back and delight in error as a way of having rediscovered the way, to find a mature generosity through what we thought at first, was only for personal gain, to see humiliation not as a punishment but as the daily test of our sincerity: is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task and finding the way as we do it... work, at its best, at its most sincere, and in all its heartbreaking forms, is one of the great human gateways to the eternal and the timeless”.
(ii).Maurice Whelan has made similar points convincingly in his paper, “What Counts in the Counting Game”
Symington, N (2012) The Essence of Psychoanalysis as Opposed to What Is Secondary. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 22:395-409.
Symington, N (2003) Healing the Mind – What is the Healer’s Task? Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy 22-1.
Whyte, David. (2015) Crossing The Unknown Sea - Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. Riverhead Books.
Apple 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpzvwkR1RYU