Excerpt from “I Wish I Had More Time: On Lynne Tillman and Psychoanalysis”

An excerpt from Claire Donato’s essay “I Wish I Had More Time: On Lynne Tillman and Psychoanalysis,” collected in The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman, forthcoming from Archway Editions on June 17.

When Tillman was growing up as a child in Woodmere, Long Island in the 1950s, two of her relatives, one a teenager, were in psychoanalysis four times a week. At that time, it was unusual for middle class families to have children in psychoanalysis, but Tillman’s parents “were not opposed to anyone going into psychotherapy or just therapy. They didn’t think it was shameful to speak about,” she says. Still, this decade wasn’t an ideal time for young women to be in psychoanalysis. With the misogyny of the day making its way into consulting rooms, young women were often particularly unsafe in treatments with their male analysts.

Tillman recalls a vivid memory—she was 10 years old and “wrote in [her] little diary that [she] was depressed.” In Lewandowski’s conversation with her, she also shares that she wanted to be a writer from the age of 8. So she had the terminology down, and was already reckoning with having a melancholy consciousness through her words from a young age.

In her first semester of college, Tillman was in treatment with a male psychologist (not a psychoanalyst) whom she says “was not great at all.” His name was Mr. Williams—he did not have a doctorate—and, to quote Tillman, he “had no idea what a young girl with my ambitions and depression and issues around sexuality [was going through].” Alienated by work with him, Tillman wound up talking to him mostly about American history, which was her minor in college.

Subsequently, during a difficult time as an undergraduate, when she was in-between institutions (she transferred from Hunter to SUNY Binghamton back to Hunter College) and especially depressed and overeating, she began seeing an older woman, who “basically kept [her] alive.” She wasn’t an analyst, but she was wise and alert—Tillman began to trust her and slowly found her footing as a young adult.

After graduation, Tillman moved to Europe for seven years, where she continued to repeat patterns that had been haunting her. “I wasn’t getting away from what I needed to get away from psychologically, which was my family,” she explains. She also wanted to write fiction but, as she says to Lewandowski, she had trouble finishing stories and “had no support” there. When she came back to the States, she knew she needed therapy and began to see a psychoanalyst-in-formation, a former book editor who was enrolled as a candidate at a training institute. In our conversation, Tillman uncharacteristically referred to this clinician by her first name despite the fact that she calls all of her other treatment providers by formal monikers: Mr., Mrs., Dr. “I never call my doctors by their first names, because they are different from me. And I want that distance. They're not my friends,” she says. Was this clinician an exception to this rule because she was once part of the literary world?

It was under her care that Tillman began writing Haunted Houses, whose title refers to H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, in which H.D. writes: “We are all haunted houses.” Tillman occasionally read chapters-in-progress from Haunted Houses aloud in the consulting room. “I was unable to show my work to anyone,” she says. “I think reading it to [my analyst] was really helpful to me.”

One day, the therapist had a stroke in the consulting room, for which Tillman was present. “I was lying on the couch, and I knew because she slurred her words,” Tillman says. Tillman told Heather she was having a stroke, and the two argued about it. Because Heather did not go to the hospital right away, the stroke caused significant damage to her brain, which led to an eventual termination of Tillman’s psychoanalytic treatment with her. “It was very, very disturbing,” Tillman says. “And so for a while, for a few years after that, I didn’t see anyone.”

The events narrated in Mothercare—Tillman’s painstaking daily care for her aging mother, with whom she had a fraught relationship, and who was diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, a condition that took her through the perils of America’s medical industrial complex—eventually led Tillman back into psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Dr. Stanley Grand. (She dedicated her essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, to him and so has agreed to my mentioning his name.) Dr. Grand was a past president of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and chair of its ethics committee, a faculty member in the NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and a member of the Contemporary Freudian Society. Tillman worked with Dr. Grand until he passed away in 2018. In his Legacy.com obituary comments, one former patient writes that “his gentle care and treatment saved [his] life.”

“There’s much I did not write about in [Mothercare],” Tillman says. “It was abysmal, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell the story of what happens when suddenly a parent, a lover, a friend gets sick—you don’t know what it is; you don’t know how to deal with anything. It’s just all thrust on you.” To Lewandowski, she adds that she wrote this book to forget—“writing helps you, anyway me, to forget.”

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Claire Donato Lives in Brooklyn, NY. Author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions).