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Darian Leader

— I was interested in analytic training when I finished school but I was a bit young. I went to Cambridge to study Philosophy and spent a lot of time exploring and investigating different traditions and trainings. In the end, the Lacanian one seemed the most serious and the most scientific. After leaving Cambridge, I moved to Paris, where I lived for nine years, and trained as an analyst.

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Darian Leader

— I’ve always had a strong interest in the History of Science. I did an MA in Paris on an area in the late seventeenth-, early eighteenth-century History of Science, looking at the development of optics and how that was taken up into philosophical discourse. It was about how the notion of an internal world was created. What interested me were the links between scientific work, technology and discourse about what nowadays we would call the self. There was a religious framework to scientific work at that time and I did a lot of research on that for many years when I was in Paris.

 

This is something that still interests me a great deal, and having that as a kind of formation I always find it very puzzling that we live in an era of new pseudo-sciences. The disciplines that were never very sure of having any scientific credentials are now telling the traditional natural sciences what they should be doing to be scientific. It’s a very, very interesting inversion of what has actually happened historically in terms of the place of psychology and other disciplines in relation to the traditional natural sciences.

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Darian Leader

— The theory interested me for several years before I knew anything about the practice, because to know about the practice you have to enter as a patient, as an analysand. So, at first what interested me was what I took to be the theoretical seriousness of it and the complexity, the sophistication of the theory, the fact that Jacques Lacan drew on many different disciplines – linguistics, anthropology, mathematics – using methods and ideas from all those other disciplines to try to build on Freud’s work. It seemed to me very convincing and well worth studying. I also liked the way in which it wasn’t knowledge on a plate, as it were – you had to make a real effort to study and it was in itself an education. It made you explore other disciplines, which was a wonderful experience.

 

Later on, when I actually started analysis I realised things were different and that to be on a couch talking about your personal problems was rather different from reading a book and trying to make sense of a text, and it was a very difficult experience. It’s not really something you can prepare yourself for in any way. No book can ever tell you what it’s like and obviously it’s different for everyone who undertakes it. It was a difficult and challenging experience which over time questioned the ideals and expectations I’d had about what it would mean to work psychoanalytically.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, that’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? A psychoanalyst and a writer. For me it’s all part of the same thing, I can’t see them being separate. I was always interested in writing, I always enjoyed writing – although for a long time I never wrote anything. Then when I was in Paris I wrote the draft of Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? Although it was published second it was actually my first book, which came out of my own experiences in … a love story, let’s say. When I came back to England I was asked to write a brief introduction to Lacan which was called Introducing Lacan, which was actually published first. After that, I did a kind of sequel to Why do Women and since then the work has focused more on clinical issues.

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Darian Leader

— In terms of style, I’ve probably changed over the years, but they were very enjoyable books to write. I wrote them when I had a lot of time to read and I’d been teaching Comparative Literature in Paris. I spent several hours a day reading old books, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century essays and novels, and so I was able to do something which I really love doing, which is to enter the world of a particular writer – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë – and reading all of their work and biographies to try to have a sense of what they were trying to do with their writing. In the last ten to fifteen years, nearly all my time is taken up with clinical practice, so I don’t have the luxury of that time to read or re-read a particular author’s work.

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Darian Leader

— I’m very attached to that book. I often use it if I’m thinking about something or preparing a talk because it condenses so much work and research that I’d done over the years. Freud’s Footnotes looks at traditional things: the gender question in the 1910s and ‘20s; psychoanalysis and music; the internal world; where people got the idea of the internal world from; beating fantasies; and the relation between Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan is also something I’m very interested in. In both The New Black and my bipolar book I try to find links between the work of Klein and Lacan. I like to put them together and see what comes out.

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Darian Leader

— I’ve always written about artists’ work. I started in Paris and when I came back I wrote some stuff for Marc Quinn, whom I knew from Cambridge. I’ve done a lot now: I’ve written almost forty essays about artists. Most of the work has grown through social things because most of my friends are artists or work in the artworld. I always feel that most of my friends understand psychoanalysis better than a lot of analysts because artists understand how framing works.

 

If you go to art school and do an art foundation course the first thing you may be asked to do is to take a familiar object, like that tape recorder or chair, and de-familiarise it. You make a huge model of it in felt or a tiny model of it or show how it could be different. In that process you learn how much of what we take to be the real world around us is the result of conventions, language and social processes.

 

Artists seem to understand that perfectly and so I’ve always had a kind of affinity. I talk about what I’m doing or discuss ideas more with artists than I do with analysts and through that I end up writing catalogue pieces or stuff about their work. The Mona Lisa book really came out of that although I was interested in the story of the Mona Lisa when I was in Paris.

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Darian Leader

— It took the theft to give both the iconic status to the painting but also to make it move around. Its image was found on cigarette lighters, posters, chocolate boxes: you see the dissemination of the image that you’d never really had for any artwork before. There had been works of art that had been reproduced a lot and popularised but you’d never had a work of art that had such a wide dissemination until that theft. It’s very interesting to compare that moment of reality of the theft – when it became clear that it was a poor house painter who took it, that there wasn’t a huge conspiracy – with all the theories that were woven around it: at one point it was the Germans, an Argentinean mastermind… It’s an example of the way people build fantasies around the point of loss.

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Darian Leader

— Well, in Promises there is also a loss of paragraphing. I forget what the exact circumstances were but there was a rush to get it to print and they lost nearly all the paragraph breaks in the book. If you see the book it looks like a kind of word sandwich, one long, huge paragraph.

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Darian Leader

— It’s very precise in that when I am doing an essay about an artist, even if I know them already, I’ll go and spend a lot of time with them in the studio. I’ll go for several visits every week over a few months and I’ll look at all their work that is available, from their student days until now. I’ll get out old boxes and look at things and look at their old jpegs. It’s an attempt to enter into someone’s world and understand why they took the particular paths they took, at what moment things change, at what moment there was a movement in style from one track to another, and I always find that doing that brings up questions and makes me think about things that are useful for my practice.

 

For example working with Cornelia Parker about the idea of presence and absence in her work gave me some new ideas about what we call negative objects and the way that absence can function. With the Mona Lisa there is an absence created by the removal of the painting but in Cornelia Parker’s work absence can be modulated and used in different ways. Thinking about her work and talking to her really helped me to go further in thinking about that.

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Darian Leader

— This is what Mary my partner says! That I used to write books with titles like Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? and Promises Lovers Make When it Gets Late and now they have titles like The New Black and What is Madness? For me Why do Women is a very serious book, and the issues within it are very serious, whereas with Promises I was trying to write a lighter book and I didn’t succeed in doing that because the issues are always about the pain of human relationships.

 

There is a thread that runs through the last books that you mentioned, The New Black and What is Madness?, which has to do with what in a human life can be turned into a story, and what can’t. What is susceptible to some forms of symbolisation and narrativisation, and what isn’t? And what do people do with what can’t be taken up into story? And what rules, methods, practices do people adopt to deal with those residues, those remainders? I think that’s the theme in all of those books, the thread that runs through them.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, exactly. In a way this is what draws a lot of people to analysis. They read accounts, case histories which look like nice, well-rounded stories – and people love stories – but at the same time it makes them sceptical because they say quite rightly that you can’t really bound a human life in such a narrow framework. But in the actual analytic work what you will find is that it takes many years working with each person.

 

First of all, what happens is that the person tries to present some kind of narrative of their life and it generally doesn’t work. There will be points of contradiction or failure in consistency which are where things get interesting, which you then try and explore. In the end the person might come up with a new version of their own history, which is incredibly important, and at the same time come to a recognition, painfully at the time, that there are certain things where there will never be the missing jigsaw piece that will explain everything. People are left with certain difficulties or problems that stories aren’t really the answer for and they have to find other ways to elaborate them or try and turn them into something else. You’ve always got those two sides.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, it’s very difficult because people like things to be complete. It’s very difficult to recognise that maybe there are some areas of your family history or your childhood that you’ll never know about or some other aspects of your experience that perhaps will not change but you can still do something with them.

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Darian Leader

— I will always do that. I write the odd journal article for people in the field but I don’t want to just address people in the field because for me psychoanalysis always involves trying to transmit something to an audience beyond just psychoanalysts, otherwise you get a kind of entropy and the whole analytic project gets kind of stuck. It always seemed very important to me for new people to come into the field, to get an interest in it, and how can they do that unless they find analytically orientated books, articles, whatever, that aren’t just speaking to the initiated? Also, it’s very useful to have to explain concepts that you might just take for granted. As you explain them you might find that they’re not very good concepts or that they need revision or junking, or that you don’t understand them yourself. It’s always a stimulating process to try to explain what you wouldn’t normally feel you have to explain.

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Darian Leader

— It’s very difficult because the Lacanian way of practice is unfamiliar to most people while in France, if you say you’re an analyst people generally have an idea what that means. Normally, here, most people don’t know the difference between a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychologist or psychotherapist. It ought to be said that the distinctions aren’t that clear anyway, when it comes to certain questions about those labels.

 

England has a very anti-intellectual culture and people prefer to see, to have, simple theories about how people work based on some kind of economic model: we’re one-dimensional, we have instrumental goals, we go to work, earn a wage, don’t cause too much trouble, aim for health, wealth, success and happiness. That is the kind of model that most people are familiar with, which many theories of mental functioning are based on.

 

The analytic model has always been trickier because it supposes that you can want two conflicting things at the same time. You can want failure and success, you can want wealth and poverty, you can want love and hate. So you’re immediately in a much more tricky and fragile field when it comes to using those basics to try and elaborate something about human subjectivity and the interactions between people.

 

In our times, people don’t want complexity, they want simple answers. It is why in the papers, almost every week we’ll read a new headline about some so-called scientific research into so-called mental illness, the gene for this, the gene for that, and when it’s all disproved six months later that doesn’t get into the paper. Biologists in the 1960s noted that the way in which the media feeds on great success stories but don’t publish the negative results, because there’s probably not enough space in the papers to do that.

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Darian Leader

— I explained to the interviewer that I always charge people what they can afford so some people pay five pounds or in some cases less. I didn’t read the finished interview because I never like reading the finished interview because they always change it, but after the finished interview I had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of often quite rude emails from people saying, ‘Can I come and see you for a pound?’ If they’d been a bit more polite they might have had an appointment but I was just deluged with people.

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Darian Leader

— People hate psychoanalysis in this country. But I think psychoanalysis has always been in a hostile environment. There are some analysts who see themselves as mental health professionals, who want respectability and who do some really very silly research – what purports to be research – to try to make psychoanalysis respectable. If that’s what they like doing, fine. But ultimately, it is an ill-starred project.

 

Freud said that psychoanalysis will never be smiled upon by the public and if it ever is it won’t be psychoanalysis any more. It is a marginal, difficult, painful and uncomfortable activity and it will never be socially accepted. When people come into the field and want to train we always tell them, certainly in our organisation, to think very carefully because they are going to have to deal with a lot of hate for the rest of their lives. If you go to a dinner party and you say that you study dolphins, people might be nice to you, but if you say you are a psychoanalyst, you get people’s hatred all evening.

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Darian Leader

— Exactly, or their dreams.

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Darian Leader

— They are more polemical. It’s interesting that since I started doing that I’ve had a lot of anonymous hate mail and phone calls from so-called professionals who wouldn’t sign their names. What’s funny is that I never had that when I wrote about love and human passion, no one bothered me. The moment I start writing about mental health policy, you get this avalanche of hatred, which is interesting, sociologically. When you address the passions directly no one is too bothered about it but when you address people’s investment in the system things are trickier. It’s an economic system, it is based on money. What is sad about it is that the categories that most serious psychiatrists in our field realise are inadequate or false are still in use.

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Darian Leader

— Yes. But also, in some parts of this country, you have to fill out a feedback form from your patient after every session. How is that going to affect the way you relate to your patient? Are you going to want to keep them happy? Because in some NHS practices the salary you receive is linked to patient satisfaction with your work in psychotherapy. So if you challenge someone, they might not be very happy about it. If you meet someone who has done a talking therapy and they say ‘Ah, I love my therapist, I had such a great time, I am a new person,’ you can almost bet that nothing has happened. If you meet someone and they say, ‘Oh god, I fucking hate my therapist, they really fucked me over, it was a nightmare,’ at least you know something has happened.

 

In this climate which is based on fixed outcomes and pre-determined aims, once you’ve made your diagnosis you know what is wrong with that person, you don’t really need to speak to them, then you’ll know what your outcomes will be. It’s a very normative view of human life: you put them in the machine and out they come, serviced and back to their work and back to their family and back into society. I mean, fine, it’s just not psychotherapy – to my mind, anyway. It’s not an ethical practice.

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Darian Leader

— In a way it’s very simple. Psychoanalysis involves not responding to the patient’s demands. So if someone demands that you get rid of a particular symptom, you then actually follow another thread. If they make a particular demand on you, explicitly or implicitly, you follow it somewhere else. To put it very, very simply, for me that is what the analytic ethics are about. The interest is – if it is a neurotic person at least – in engaging and helping them to engage with unconscious material rather than keeping them happy or satisfying their ego or ego functions. It is not a happy business.

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Darian Leader

— You’re not buying into wellbeing at all – but you have to see what’s particular to each person. So you can say analytic work involves the attempt to construct something of one’s autobiography, sure, but also the limits of that. It’s not normative in the sense that you then never know what’s going to happen, you never know what materials will emerge, what direction the work is going to take and you can never say this is the end point of the work. In the same way as you often can’t say what the end point of a conversation is going to be, you don’t know where it is going to go. You try and elaborate with the person their own response – solution might be too strong a word – their own way of dealing with the things that have tormented them, that have troubled them.

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Darian Leader

— They’re crucial because when you start thinking along those lines, as the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychiatrists did and Lacanians do today, you realise that you have to disassociate symptomology from structure. That people’s spectacular, attention-grabbing symptomology isn’t constitutive in any way of a proper diagnostic category: anyone can behave in an outlandish way. But the more that extravagant symptomology is linked to madness the more that is what we expect from madness. If someone behaves in a way that socially would be considered to be crazy it is more likely they are going to label them psychotic, whereas if they are well-spoken, carefully dressed, well-groomed and so on, it is much less likely.

 

Social psychologists pointed this out a long time ago but I think the more you try and elaborate the ideas, the more you see the way in which so many people want there to be a barrier between the sane ‘us’ and the insane ‘them’ and the way you can do that is to focus on the surface behavioural symptoms. Once you realise that that is false, that most cases of psychosis are untriggered, you not only then challenge these discriminating distinctions between us and them, but crucially you have tools to help people where the psychosis has triggered because in a sense you are studying with the knowledge of cases, what has allowed them to not go mad, what has allowed them to have a normal life and get on with things. When you figure out what tools, what instruments and practices have allowed that person not to trigger, it can then help you to formulate strategies for those people that have. That’s one of the most important things we can learn from those writers.

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Darian Leader

— Psychosis is a structure of the psyche. There are different forms of it. In the book I talk about three: paranoia, the group of schizophrenias, and melancholia. What links them, perhaps, are questions of meaning, questions of morbid excitation, and questions of distance from what’s perceived as a significant other for them or the social field, in some instances. If there was one defining characteristic you could say that it is at the epistemic level of certainty. Whereas with a neurotic person at the centre of their psychical world there is a fundamental doubt, with a psychotic person in most cases – though not all – there is not a doubt but a certainty, as if something has been solved. Neurotic people haven’t found the solution, which is why they often gravitate towards psychotic people who seem to have the answers, because they feel that they know something about the world, what’s wrong with the world and how to live better or whatever it happens to be.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, for example, but it can also be scientific theories or political movements – anything which revolves around knowledge. It can be psychoanalysis as well — if people are certain that Freud or Lacan have the missing piece to the jigsaw then that would be an example as well. No area is exempt from that, everything can be thought of in those terms. So the difference between a fundamental doubt and a fundamental certainty is probably the most obvious difference. But it seems to me that the other very, very important thing that was recognised by the early-twentieth century psychiatrists – less so today – is the difference between primary and secondary phenomena.

 

If you get on the Tube and you suddenly hear voices or your body starts to feel as if it is collapsing that would be a primary phenomenon. If you then develop a theory that the voice you heard was someone transmitting on the Tube because there is a plot which the CIA are involved in, that would be your attempt to make sense of your initial experiences so it would be a secondary phenomenon, it would be the person’s effort at self-cure. Today what we find is that in most contexts the primary and secondary would be lumped together, so the treatment would aim to get rid of not only the voices or the bodily sensations but also the person’s attempts to cure themselves. A more analytic approach would explore very carefully what those efforts at self-cure had been and to try to work with those rather than against them – so always separating the primary and secondary phenomena.

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Darian Leader

— Any author would be very happy if their books had some kind of social effect. I’ve had loads and loads of correspondence around the madness book, and it’s nice to see people in hospitals and people who work with psychotic subjects are reading the book, asking questions about it. It’s great to see that. We didn’t think that the book was going to do as well as it did, with my editor…

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Darian Leader

— I’ve got a lot of correspondence from psychotic subjects, people who’ve been through the mental health system who discuss things; a lot of stuff from the families of psychotic subjects asking questions, wanting to meet to talk about things; and a lot of correspondence from people who work with psychosis. So in a sense, that is the ideal audience for the book because it is people who are directly affected by psychosis, so it’s great to see the book has got through there.

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Darian Leader

— It’s the best way, I mean it’s the only way. If you go into analysis and say ‘I’m okay, I’m happy but I’ve got all this intellectual interest in Lacan or Freud,’ you’re not going to get anywhere. If someone comes and says they’ve just had some terrible drama in their lives or there’s some terrible sadness or misery or anxiety that has overwhelmed them, then you’ve got something to work with, you’ve got a motive for the work. It is a clinical discipline, it is not just making stories out of people’s lives.

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Darian Leader

— People do have restricted access but in the Lacanian world in Paris when I went to do my training in the mid-Eighties if your analyst was in a café you would go to another café or if he was at a party you wouldn’t go and shake hands. In the Lacanian world now, you will meet your analyst at seminars and meetings and there is much more of an emphasis on the work you do in the analytic session and less on silly protocols about external behaviour.

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Darian Leader

— The power relation is very interesting. In the Lacanian way of working, the analyst is more of a clownish figure, perhaps desperately trying to make sense of things and usually getting it wrong. You’re not an authority figure for the patient – only maybe for the first few meetings. After a while they realise that you are probably just as foolish as most people, as insensitive, showing the lacks that any other people will do, although some people might spend a long time trying to deny that if they want to have a image of a perfect analyst. At some point it will be the analyst’s job to disabuse them.

 

Sometimes the analyst has to say things that they know are false or ridiculous in order to make something happen. Analytic practice is like theatre. You’re not applying a set of rules but you’re using a totally artificial, bizarre context – someone laying on the couch and talking – in order to hear things in a different way. Think of the way that theatre operates in a repressive regime where people will use a play to get across a message that isn’t broadcast on the surface because of censorship so you have to use other ways to transmit something. Think of the play within a play in Elizabethan drama – you are using a false situation in order to try and make something happen at a deeper level.

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Darian Leader

— I’m not that talkative, the analysand is talking – I invite people to talk.

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Darian Leader

— Well, in Freud it is a Socratic method. He explicitly links it to the Socratic method. In order to confront problems in your construction or your own life, the only way you will confront those problems, contradictions and inconsistencies is through dialogue with another person through which you will hear your speech in a different way. If a person just goes about their life, they are not going to question how they perceive themselves because it is a given, but the moment someone is put on the spot and has to talk about their perceptions of their own history then they are going to start maybe seeing things don’t quite work, don’t quite fit, that there are questions that aren’t resolved, questions that need elaboration, things that happened in their life that they had never been aware of.

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Darian Leader

— I think it’s different. With that fascination with that form of interview it’s about biography but not in the sense of the contradictions, the inconsistencies in their own account but rather the idea that – it’s the exact opposite – that we need to have a defined self-image of someone like an artist so that the work doesn’t trouble us anymore, so we can pigeonhole the work. It seems to me that this happens more with women artists than with male artists – there is more of an insistence on explaining the work through biography than with men. There is this idea that we need to make sense of this rather than what actually happens in analysis, that you make sense of a few things, then recognise and circumscribe things that don’t make sense and maybe try and do something with those things.

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Darian Leader

— It’s a shorter book, called Strictly Bipolar, which is a quote from someone who said he’s ‘strictly bipolar’, meaning he didn’t have anything else going on, because nowadays you get medication for everything that’s wrong with you. A typical person with a bipolar diagnosis will take five or six different drugs for all the different things that are wrong with them. The book looks at why the diagnosis of bipolar has risen by 4,000% and asks whether bipolar is a legitimate category.

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Darian Leader

— I don’t go into that a lot in the book or every book will be making the same argument.

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Darian Leader

— Just a little bit, but not too much.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, it is very political. The whole field of mental health is now big business, which is the same as politics today: politics is economics. So these are political questions and it is amazing in the mental health world how little protest there is. I mean, there is significant protest but in terms of the national – the way things are – people aren’t saying no enough.

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Darian Leader

— Yes, and you can ask the question, ‘What is it like for a patient who comes here who takes medication and reads something I write in a book or in the press about the dangers of medication?’ That is just something that we will have to deal with in the analysis.