. . . after psychoanalysis, opera, at least in its traditional form, is no longer possible.
— Slavoj Žižek, Lacan: The Silent Partners, 261
Most people repress their richness and their fullness, and this group was disturbed because so many people were living only half lives because they were not free enough to live whole lives. We were disturbed by people becoming old before their time because they’ve lost the joy of laughter and the sense of humour.
We have come to recognize such a thing as pathological independence and have seen that the overly-independent individual is very frightened and has to deny his dependencies by denying them altogether.
— Lea Hindley-Smith, Axis, May 15, 1974
This chapter could have been titled “Psychotherapy and Poetics” or “Psychotherapy and Poetry” — it is indeed about those interactive pairings, but also about a closer pairing than even those phrases suggest. Beginning in 1966 Barrie in his “regular” poetry developed a poetics directly out of psychoanalytic procedures and understandings. This is something Nichol critics have for the most part overlooked, or perhaps even tried to overlook, often dutifully misled by Barrie’s occasional declarations that his writing and therapy work were only distantly related. In general they have treated Barrie’s 15-year work as a lay psychological therapist as if it were similar to Wallace Stevens’s employment as a surety claims specialist for the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company — as something that the poet also did, alongside his writing, but rarely as part of it. In Barrie’s case this was simply not so.1
The evidence in Barrie’s notebooks suggests that his therapy was relatively conventional for the early Therafields period. It was a therapy built on Freudian concepts through Lea’s readings of Melanie Klein, Edmund Bergler, Wilhelm Reich, Jacob Moreno, Robert Lindner, and others. An individual session would likely have begun with Lea leading Barrie into an at least moderate state of relaxation, during which a dream could be recalled and analyzed or childhood events or fantasies remembered and reconsidered. The relaxation — intended to exclude immediate daily concerns and increase one’s focus on pervasive memories and associations — would have been especially relevant for Barrie who suffered from frequent anxiety or panic attacks. Lea’s relaxation mantra, directing the client to focus on body parts successively and cumulatively from the toes to the top of the head, would — with minor changes of vocabulary and phrase — become internalized and used by Barrie himself for personal stress relief, or later as a therapist on his own clients. Lea may also have employed abreactive therapy, using the relaxed state to direct the client to relive an intensely traumatic moment — such as that moment of utter psychological abandonment by his mother that Barrie writes of believing he was experiencing when an infant.
Barrie also participated in two kinds of group therapy. He was a member of one of Lea’s first “deep” groups (later to be known as “standard” groups), in which members witnessed and contributed to each other’s undergoing of relaxation therapies and dream analysis work in the group setting. In 1967 this group would become the training group “Hypno I”— so named because Lea perceived relaxation, during which the therapist typically made suggestions such as “every nerve and every muscle relaxes and rests” or “you are going back now to when you are very young,” as a mild form of hypnosis.2 And Barrie was a member of a house group in which he experienced what Lea thought of as “horizontal” therapy in contrast to “deep” — a therapy that focussed not on clients’ inner lives but on their social interactions. The group-house residents, who paid rent as part of their therapy fees, would meet once a week or more with Lea as a group to analyze the difficulties and impasses that their living together had occasioned. At this time in Therafields practice “deep” individual material that these meetings revealed would be worked with mainly in individual therapy sessions — a policy that was changed once newly trained therapists began taking over much of Lea’s work.
Therafields therapy was based partly on the assumption that its clients would bring their most profound and troubling anxieties to their group or individual session. They were at the very least confronted and told to come back later if they attended either occasion visibly inebriated or on drugs. They were also strongly discouraged from chattering or joking when gathering for groups — in the belief that such chatter could prematurely release anxious energies that were essential to the group’s work. The group would sometimes begin with a long period of silence as the therapists waited to see which members’ anxieties were so strong that they would find the silence unbearable. It is this understanding of therapy work that Barrie was referring to when he told Niechoda in her July 1983 interview with him that The Martyrology was not, or should not have been, a “therapeutic text” because he was already “doing my therapy over here — in my therapy [with Lea].” He had similar thoughts about the lyrics he had published in “Journeying and the Returns” (written 1963–66), The Other Side of the Room (written 1966–69), and Monotones (written 1968–70). He told Niechoda that one “problem he had with those poems is that to a degree I’m doing that. I’m using them.”
In a way I’m taking material to those [poems] I should be taking to my session, to use the language we would use in therapy. I’m not dealing with it over here. Instead I’m shoving it in [the poems] as a place to not deal with it. Literally for me “dealing with something” meant sitting still long enough to actually look at the thing, see how I felt about it, understand what the source of that feeling was, in a very immediate way. (1992, 135)
He told Niechoda that if he subsequently used material from his sessions in a poem, that material was no longer an interesting mystery, it was “part of the world of fact. ‘This was an emotion I had.’”
It wasn’t something to be treasured, raised above, something that made me a better person because I had this emotion, or superior because I wrote a poem and look how sensitive I am. In those early poems I was kind of making a case over here and saying “look how I’m suffering and look how I’m sensitive.” That’s what I mean by the sentimentalization. And I find it repugnant. I find it in a lot of contemporary poetry, and it really bothers me.
“Repugnant” — it’s a strong word from someone most often thought of as eclectic, generous, and tolerant — especially as an editor. He of course meant more that such poems are repugnant than that their writers may be, although clearly he also found the ambition to write such poems repugnant, as well as what such poems do to popular understanding of poetry — that it is a place to implicitly brag about one’s sensitivity, pain, and self-invited misfortunes — again the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” poem that historically has made numerous writers appear impressively “sensitive.”
Elsewhere in this Niechoda interview Barrie said that he had once made more “than needed to be” of the “interpersonal difficulties I might have had with [future wife] Ellie or my mother, or whatever.”
The use therapy had for me — this is thinking about it now from a poetic angle as opposed to a personal angle — was that I could go beyond getting hung up on the level of false mystery — sentimentalization. I read those poems and I think, I’m not confronting the material here. I’m just saying “wow! Is this pain I feel ever mysterious. Does it ever come from a mysterious source!” Well, it didn’t spring from a mysterious source. It’s because we moved a whole bunch when I was a kid, and I felt alienated from my ma, and my ma was depressed all the time because we were moving etc. etc. etc. It was a no-win situation. But then to say that and say “well hey — I’m in touch with the Eternal Mystery of the universe [. . .]!”
Through therapy I could get beyond those false mysteries and start to deal with the real mysteries of the world. (1992, 134)3
There are echoes here of his unrealized intention in the Captain Poetry Poems — to ridicule writers who “use” poetry as a means of self-celebration, or assertions, or heroic independence. As well, as elsewhere in Nichol’s thinking about poetry, the influence of Robert Duncan is evident. In his various lectures that had resonated throughout Vancouver’s poetry scene in the early 1960s, Duncan had deplored what he called “crisis poets” who unconsciously trigger crises in their personal lives so that they can have exquisite sufferings to write about. A poet in his relationship with language was like a priest in his relationship to the Church, Duncan had argued. A poet should not seek self-aggrandizement but rather the flourishing of language and poetry. A poem should not be led by the writer’s personal ideas, themes, or feelings, or conviction that he can speak authoritatively about any of these, but by the language and its sounds.
In July 1971, virtually while The Martyrology, Book I and Book II were being printed, Barrie wrote an unsolicited letter to Duncan. He began by declaring that this was a kind of fan letter, an expression of appreciation, of a kind that he had not written since he was a child and sent letters to various stars of the cinema. He told Duncan how much his poetry moved him, and how instructive that was, since he often had no knowledge of the facts or histories of which Duncan wrote. It was instructive because it demonstrated how the sound of poetry was more important than the allusions it made — and he repeated the word “sound” several times as if the sound of the word was illustrating his observation. He then confessed to Duncan that he had often felt insecure about his own poems because they seemed to lack profound or learned references, but that after reading Duncan’s recent series of poems “Passages” (in his 1968 book Bending the Bow) he had been both amazed by what Duncan had achieved and reassured about his own writing. The complex musicality of those poems, he wrote, confirmed him in the decision he had made long ago to let the sound of his poems direct their content, even if they consequently moved toward meanings that he had not anticipated or wanted.
Barrie wrote this letter during the period in which he was beginning to understand the relationship between his therapy and his poetry, and how that changing understanding had been reflected in The Martyrology’s two books — Book I, which he tried to revise even as the pages were being printed (Niechoda 1992 48), misusing his life’s misadventures for mysterious poetry and celebrations of fantasy, Book II achieving an understanding of how insight into the reality of his life could open a way to writing for its own sake. Earlier, this understanding of creation for its own sake had been available to him mostly in his “ideopomes.”
In the various interviews he gave in subsequent years Barrie would often hint broadly at the psychoanalytic ground of his poetics. In his Axis editorials he was praising honest communication to the Therafields community, and in his journals deploring how he was not able to declare to friends or in therapy sessions his own honest feelings. In response to the question “what is the use of poetry?” he was telling Raôul Duguay:
I think poetry is language raised to its highest power & its joy — & language is the expression of the total body [. . . .] — if everybody’s using language raised to its highest power then they take what they say more seriously — they don’t play cheap in conversation — they really say what they feel — because language is not a cheap thing anymore — it’s a felt thing an important thing. (1973, reprinted Miki 2002 125)
Duguay, of course, had no way of recognizing that “the total body” was a reference to the bioenergetic therapies that some Therafields therapists, including Barrie’s brother Don, were practising and writing about in the early 1970s, or that the statement “they really say what they feel” was echoing a fundamental dialogical goal of Therafields group therapy.
In a 1974 interview in which Barrie fielded questions from Daphne Marlatt, Gladys Hindmarch, Pierre Coupey, and Dwight Gardner, the first question, from Marlatt, was about his statement published with The Martyrology, Book II in 1972 that “we must return again to the human voice and listen / rip off the mask of words to free the sounds.” The statement appears to have had one of its origins in the psychodramatic abreactive therapies that Lea Hindley-Smith had developed in 1955 (see Goodbrand 27–28) and later routinely trained her student therapists to employ.4 In Therafields, groups and individuals would be confronted by the therapist, with the assistance of group members (who often called out to the person “use your voice”), with a dramatic reenactment of a childhood trauma — a reenactment that could drive that person beyond language, its rationalizations and excuses, into convulsive wails and cries of despair, anger, and grief. Honest communication, which Barrie would have witnessed in his therapy work numerous times. Barrie replied first with an account about his work in sound poetry “to free the emotional content of speech from ideation or from words, necessarily, and to just be able to let out the voice,” detoured into a more intellectual account of the Hopi Palongawhoya legend,5 swerved back to a comment about how he aimed “to not use words as a masking, which a lot of people do in conversations,” and then to making a list of evasive or dishonest ways of speaking. The questioners had no easy way to connect the dots within Barrie’s complex response. The next questioner asked him about characterization in his fiction. But Barrie was already subsconsciously connecting those dots and began his answer:
Yeah. Well you see, in the work I do, which is working for Therafields as a theradramist and seeing people and talking with them about what’s bothering them, what you’re doing in the situation is not imposing yourself on the person but basically being a catalyst: to ask questions they can’t formulate, to put them in the situation where they’re going to have to deal with the material themselves and where you help them as much as you can. It negates a certain type of writing. (Miki 2002 146–47)
But again none of the interviewers appeared interested in a question that Barrie here seemed to be virtually inviting them to ask. They wanted him to talk about how he wrote literature, but didn’t recognize that he was. The writing that being a psychoanalyst “negated” was a writing of arrogance, authority, mastery.
Barrie’s openness to talk about the connection between Therafields and his writing was also not noticed later that year by Caroline Bayard and Jack David. In their interview, Bayard asked Barrie about the “new humanism” which he had declared in 1966, in his box-book bp, “will one day touch the world to its core.” Barrie candidly replied, “I was talking about my experience with Therafields at that point and the attempt to deal with emotional disturbances, creating a human context of community for people where they could live, where they could function, and where they could . . .” until Bayard interrupted him with the follow-up “Are you saying that some political revolutions are not really touching the individual at all?” Again, Barrie tried to connect the question to his work as a therapist. “No, I’m not saying that at all [. . . .] All I’m saying is that eventually these things tend to run afoul of a restrictive element in the individual which leads to a type of dehumanizing process” (Bayard 27). Various kinds of “restrictive element” in individuals is of course what Barrie as a therapist worked with every day. Bayard, however, wanted to talk not about language and the individual language user but about whether there is a connection “between world order and word order.” “Oh yes,” Barrie said, and immediately swerved back to the individual — “because I think syntax equals the body structure” (27). This is an intriguing declaration, again resonant of the Reichian bioenergetics practised by his brother and fellow therapist Don at this time, 1976 (although not by Barrie himself). But it apparently interested neither interviewer.
A page later Bayard asked Barrie to elaborate on statements he had made about how “formal constraints limit your ability to develop exits from the self.” Barrie replied that indeed “[s]yntax and the way you structure the sentence limits the content you can put out,” and how the only way to produce new content is to enlarge or change the forms of writing one is able to practice. He illustrated from Therafields bioenergetics, using the code word “armour” — first used by Reich, and later by his student Alexander Lowen, who in the 1970s had held bioenergetics seminars in Toronto attended by Therafields therapists. At Therafields, “armour” and “armouring” were often being used to describe how people defensively “armour” themselves verbally or physically against revealing embarrassing or socially complicating feelings. Barrie began telling Bayard about
[t]he form — and the need to free up form — to unarmour the poem. You know how the muscles can get tight and constricted, and therefore the body. I have this arm — let me demonstrate. My arm floats above the floor, you see. Now that’s because of the muscles that are too tight up in here which depends upon all sorts of tensions because of all sorts of other things. The hand does not actually relax onto the floor. I can force it down, but if I just let it go, it just floats above the floor. Same thing happens in poems. Depending on what structures you put in, you limit what can happen, you limit the flexibility of it, you limit what you can do. (28)
Jack David, perhaps not surprisingly, didn’t pick up the “armour” reference — nor why Barrie, who in 1980 would co-author an internal Therafields paper titled “Communication and Armouring,” may have been lying on the floor as if at a Therafields session — and continued the discussion not with a question about relaxation poetics but with the statement “The great emphasis of contemporary poetry is on the ideational and not the emotional,” and asked Barrie whether he found “it difficult to integrate the two . . . the ideational and the emotional.”
“Ideational and emotional” were not a Barrie Nichol dichotomy, nor one common at Therafields. But he tried to reply, employing awkwardly complex syntax to say that how this question “reveals itself in the emotional is through formal things. That’s where ideas influence the structures — free up the structures — and I find myself able to say things I’m simply not able to say before, because I did not have the language, I did not have the formal ability” (29). In a 1973 notebook, Barrie had said virtually the same thing about the goal of therapy in daily life as he was saying here about his form-centered poetics in his poetry: that therapy “is a process that strides toward expanding your range of awareness your ability to deal flexibly and openly with situations you encounter in everyday life.”
In a 1972 article on Therafields he co-wrote with Lea Hindley-Smith, Philip McKenna, and Stan Kutz — an article published in slightly different versions in the January 1, 1972, issue of Axis and the January 1973 issue of The Canadian Forum — Barrie and his colleagues had written “Where the adult allows expression to the repressed scream of the child the repressing layers (defenses, armouring) are broken through and energy frozen by unacknowledged terror is delivered to the adult” (Axis 2:113). Part of this energy in Barrie’s case was for writing less conventional or less “armoured” poetry.
Barrie’s “syntax equals body structure” statement became the title of a 1982 “conversation” with Roy Miki, Jack Miller, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and others, but again Barrie’s precise understanding of what the statement meant evaded the discussion — on this occasion derailed by a Bowering jest. It was Miller who recalled the statement, in a question that appeared to assume that Barrie might have meant writing about the body, or perhaps have been echoing Hélène Cixous’s concept of “writing the body.” Addressing Barrie, Miller asked, “Could you explain that statement, and George, could you expand on this by talking about [your book] Autobiology?” Barrie’s response partly repeated his bioenergetic “arm” demonstration to David and Bayard.
I discovered — and this is what that statement comes out of — that emotionally and psychologically speaking we learn that we often armour the body, the easiest illustration of which is: if I live in a house with a low doorway, I’m probably going to end up walking like this a lot. (Hunching) I’ve seen tall people do this when they’ve lived in situations where the ceiling is low. You get an armouring of the body. I discovered that the order in which I wrote my poems allows certain contents in . . . and excludes others. So what I was trying to find, because that is part of a larger thing I’ve been working towards, is a way to increase my own formal range (something I’m still trying to do), and therefore not merely be stuck, shall we say, by the physical limitation of my body at that point, i.e. just because I’m walking around with my shoulders up like this, if I can learn to relax I can see the world in a slightly different way and so on. If I can keep moving the structure of the poem around, hopefully I can encompass different realities and different ways of looking at things. In that sense I’ve always seen a connection between the breathing I do and what comes out of me, the words I do, so syntax/body structure, sequence/body structure, but also the body of the poem. I don’t know if that makes it clear or muddy, what I’ve just said. Muddy, eh? (Miki 2002 276)
When Bowering’s reply uncomprehendingly linked this explanation to T.S. Eliot and Imagism, Barrie apologized for his failure to communicate — “In a way, it’s an over-condensed statement, it’s a conversational statement. I mean, were I to sit down and write that out, I’d probably take about five pages — and here I am, yet again, in conversation trying to explain it!” (276–77). The discussion then ended in jokes about the body and Barrie’s first magazine Ganglia — without anyone recalling that its title had been a metaphor for communication. In a Therafields context, where some groups began with the therapists asking the members to take several deep slow breaths, or with body-relaxing exercises, Barrie’s explanation would have been anything but “muddy.”
Two years before, in 1980, Barrie had indeed co-authored with fellow therapist Adam Crabtree a more than five-page article, the one titled “Communication and Armouring,” for the Therafields internal journal Axis. Here are some of its salient arguments:
Communication . . . does not just mean language, or at least does not merely mean the narrow definition of language as a verbal medium, but rather the whole spectrum of information that is conveyed by a person’s bodily movements, muscle tone, voice pitch and tone, facial expressions etc.
Th[e] tendency to refine, to objectify, to syphon off the subjective biological-emotional content of language is a contracting and shrinking of language out of fear. Wilhelm Reich has given us a valuable insight into this process in its broadest range in his discussion of “muscular armouring.” The armoured individual — and few if any can escape some degree of armouring — is in a state of muscular contraction and tension which he is ordinarily not aware of and cannot alter.
We have talked of the armouring the body effects as a defense against feeling. It is no great step to carry this over into the individual’s speech as well as his body movements, since speech is rooted in physical movements. . . . (324–25)
The period in which Barrie does most of his thinking about poetics — from deciding in 1965 to write only “ideopomes” so as to avoid the “arrogance” that he believed infected his “regular” poems, through in the late 1960s when he was learning to resolve personal material in his therapy before including it in his writing, to learning in the early 1970s to “unarmour” his writing so that its possibilities were not boundaried by habitual defensive writing mannerisms, and so that its language could produce unintended and unexpected content (much like a Freudian analysand during a therapy session) — began with him becoming intensively involved with his personal therapy. His thinking about both therapy and poetics would continue to develop, as Therafields itself developed during Lea’s frequent illnesses and absences. In the early 1970s he would learn to read analytically as he wrote — to read each line for hidden meaning as if he were listening to the language of a client or the imagery of a dream. He would be combining the discourse of the client or analysand and that of the analyst. In Books 3, 4, 5, and 6 of The Martyrology this would often result in a text in which each line was a kind of editing of the line before, extending it or implicitly commenting on it, and in which the first draft would often be identical to the eventually published text. That is, his editing was mostly taking place during initial composition rather than in subsequent drafts. The process of editing would become part of the poem. As for bioenergetics, although not adopting it for his own therapy work, he would see its usefulness as a liberationist metaphor for writing.