Some Notes on the Final Session (An Exploded Essay)

by patrick wright

When does acceptance become too accepting? Is this the kind of

question a melancholic would ask? Indeed, ongoing sadness can be

seen as a form of revolt – not seeking closure on loss, but leaving it

open, recollecting past injustices over and over. This, as Walter

Benjamin saw, can also be a political stance.

If there was a push towards acceptance – to critique Elisabeth

Kübler Ross’s original five stages of grief – it was rarely linear;

instead, it was marked by recursiveness and slippage – back into

chasms, tears, the collapse again of Being’s foundations. At the nadir,

I could relate with Mephistopheles. I wanted everything to burn.

It started because I was ready to follow my beloved into death.

Devotion? Perhaps. Though it also suggests an excess of

identification. As many bereaved spouses know, loss can also be the

loss of ourselves – the self bound up with our partner. I was, and

stayed for a while, wraith-like, dissociated.

To others, I wore a grief face. I was made to feel an outcast and

scapegoat, shunned by the community for what I couldn’t help but

mirror back – their own fears of losing their loved ones. How ironic

in the aftermath: even those I thought close didn’t rush to my aid.

No – they ran the other way.

My EMDR treatment was likened to re-ordering a filing cabinet

that’s had its contents flung around a room. A re-experiencing, a

temporal re-sequencing, saying it all again, and differently. Though

healing, my language was often discontinuous, broken; trailing off

into silence, or what felt out of bounds, unspeakable...

The poem I present above (meant to dovetail with this piece)

provides a dramatic monologue in fragments, evoking the discursive

flow of my final session, where the clinician’s voice merges

ambiguously into mine. Metaphorical leaps throughout the poem

represent the digressions and allusions inherent in such dialogue.

We drifted into metaphysics, myth, philosophy ... My psychologist

saw literature as my saviour – a conduit for psychical wounds to

become elaborated into speech. This included the absurdity of

anthropomorphising God: directing my gripes at Him – or shifting

to Ancient Greece, the gods in all their capriciousness.

In my vainglorious moments, I’d even cast myself as Orpheus – his

tragic tale warning me of a possible fate, while indicating a way out.

Was his only mistake, when he turned back, that he lacked faith? Did

I lack faith in myself ? At first, I hammered on the door of Hades; I

just sat there in civil disobedience.

“Perhaps we’re just dealing with Nature,” he said, folding up his bag

of tricks. Again, I felt ushered towards acceptance. Nature, in all its

indifference – just cells multiplying; the cycle of cells, cells ... Was

this to get me to see that millions before me had asked the same

questions? Their prayers bouncing down from the ceiling.

If therapy does come to an end, it’s seldom because it’s complete; it

can be interminable, as Freud saw. The final session is usually only

final in a pragmatic sense. We ended not because anything was in

any meaningful way “finished,” but because, as is often the case, the

funding ran out.

My questions were then for the priests or existentialists – beyond

pathology. My most important insight was: it’s less about acceptance

and more about the reintegration of the beloved into the self. If the

self is smashed like a vase, we should reassemble the parts into a

fresh and fascinating mosaic ... If a new selfhood emerges, having

grown around the loss (as often we’re taught), it’s not one that

emerges unscathed.

Other truths include: beauty – paraphrasing Dostoyevsky – is the

only thing that can save us; on the ultimate problem of time, the

glass is already broken; and if there is a desperate holding on, it’s the

shadow of love.