Transference or Twin Flames: Interview with Claire Donato, 
Part 2

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I’d been lowkey waiting for Claire Donato’s newest work since learning (years ago, on Instagram) about a class she was teaching at Pratt on “Oceanic Feeling.” Over social media Donato periodically mentions psychoanalysis as an area of study, a site and inspiration for creative production, her experience of undergoing psychoanalysis, and later on, the experience studying to practice psychoanalysis professionally. I wanted to talk to her about this.

In her story “The Analyst,” Donato writes, “About psychoanalysis, my ex-partner says, ‘It’s a dying profession.’” For many reasons, the use of multi-day-a-week talk therapy that is guided by a patient’s free association has been eclipsed by both psychotropic drugs and cognitive behavior therapy. Born out of the phallocentric work of Sigmund Freud (who I sometimes think of–for better or worse–as the most influential literary critic of all time) and filtered through countless representations in art and culture, psychoanalysis can seem like a quaint 20th century cultural relic. Donato and I discussed over Zoom in November 2023 our shared fascination (and ambivalence) about psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic influences on her book of fiction Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, and Donato’s psychoanalytic training.

For our discussion of the origins, formal composition, and themes of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, as well as its uneasy relation to autofiction, and Donato’s experience working with Archway Editions to publish the book, see part 1 of our interview.

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical thought pervade Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. There's  instances of doubling, repetition compulsion, dissociation, projection, phantasy. Throughout the book’s narration, there's a continuous impulse to pull oneself away from oneself to look at oneself. What drew you to psychoanalysis?

Many people come to psychoanalysis via academia. They’re introduced to it in college English or psychology courses, for example. I began a course of psychoanalytic treatment seven years ago, when I was 30. I was having a personal crisis and wound up in psychoanalysis because I needed support and received a referral, not because I was drawn to it via my previous academic studies. When I began analysis, I wasn’t aware of its history. I didn’t know it was a practice sometimes done with a couch. Nor could I afford its cost as a part-time college adjunct instructor. Fortunately, I worked with a psychoanalyst who let me pay a sliding-scale rate, and after many years, I now have out-of-network health insurance benefits, which I do not take for granted.

I similarly came to psychoanalysis because I needed mental health intervention.

Oh, wow—did you also do multi-day-a-week analysis?

Yeah, in NYC, I did three days and eventually four-days-a-week for almost four years. My analyst was this very tall, slender British man with tattoos who looked like he was in an indie rock band. And then, years later, I did it again in Chicago three-days-a-week for a few years.

I think of psychoanalysis as something that literally saved my life and was incredibly helpful to better understand myself. But I also love making fun of psychoanalysis.

It’s funny to me, too. Within psychoanalysis there exist highly specific lexicons, which are often internal to thinkers with whom people feel affinities, or lack thereof. To be honest, these lexicons often make me feel really alienated, though I've contradictorily taught a number of psychoanalytically-inflected classes: one on twinning and doubling and literary forms that deploy twonesses; another on poetry and psychoanalysis; a third on the oceanic feeling.

As a practice, psychoanalysis has given me a way to more clearly see my life, and has helped me pay greater attention to the parts of my life that glow. When I first started analysis, I felt like my days took on the shape of short stories: images within a day would recur and feel like touchstones within a narrative, wherein I was writing the moments in-between. Some analysands say the practice of psychoanalysis itself (i.e., on the couch) feels like writing, but this was not the case for me. Being on the couch felt like grieving, and my life outside of the consulting room began to feel like writing a book. Psychoanalysis changed the way I see the world.

When psychoanalytic terms are invoked in Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, I almost feel like they appear in a farcical way, somewhere between a funny clown and a grotesque clown. For example, in “Colour Green,” the protagonist chats with an online hook-up about her hysteria, and in “The Only Person You Hurt Is Yourself,” the narrator recounts working through her disorganized attachment style in a consulting room. But I'm also earnestly interested in psychoanalysis; it too saved my life. So I'm not just flippantly deploying its terminology.

Projection happens a lot in “The Analyst,” which is one of my favorite pieces in the book. There's a lot of moments of dissociation in the book.

In a lot of ways, Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts contains highly structured free association. I trust the progression of my mind’s thoughts and images because of analysis, and try to be fearless about transcribing the sequence of my thoughts on the page. Though I suppose there’s no pure free association because pure free association would be psychotic, right? We're always choosing what thoughts to articulate in language.

I was a big Jodie Foster fan in high school, and I had read an interview with her where she talked about analysis. In it, she called psychoanalysis ‘literary criticism for your own mind.’ And I was really drawn to that. Although I also definitely thought at times in analysis like the analyst is promoting or producing a story about my own life, and part of the cure is accepting that story. I was like ‘that story sounds plausible.’ And if I accept it, I'll have a better understanding of myself. But I'm also like ‘how much of this is coming from me?’ It's a very weird relationship.

Yeah! It’s also like, ‘you haven't met my mom; you don't know my dad.’

Right. 

It all takes place within a white box theater. Although my own analysis, which is now mostly on Zoom, no longer takes place in a white box. When my analyst is in the city, we meet in a windowless basement.



Now I'm imagining the air purifier in my bedroom. (There is also an air purifier in the windowless basement.) When I do analysis at my desk next to the air purifier, I keep its main setting on “auto.” This means the air purifier adjusts to the toxicity of my bedroom’s air. If the air is clean enough, the air purifier’s light is blue. When the air is dirty—filled with toxic particulates—it turns red. Sometimes when I’m in analysis, the light turns red, indicating the air is very toxic. In these moments, I can’t help but wonder if I'm purging something really horrible from within me. My demons? And now I’m thinking about the analyst herself as an air purifier, helping to clarify the selves, the self.

 

This can be on the record: I applied to numerous PhD programs years ago, and I got rejected from all of them. I decided that was the universe's very clear way of telling me not to follow in my parents’ footsteps.

I was curious about becoming an analyst within the first six months of undergoing analysis. Maybe that was a sort of fusion impulse in me to want to be the analyst or to know the person with whom I was in relation so well that I could become a version of them.

Last year, I was admitted to a new psychoanalytic training institute called Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, which officially received accreditation in Fall 2023 [Note: This interview was conducted in November 2023. Donato is currently on a leave of absence from Pulsion]. I was initially drawn to Pulsion because Jamieson Webster, whose work I admire, is affiliated with it. For those of us in academia, Pulsion offers half-scholarships. Training institutes can be pricey in New York City, so this is a boon. I really like the people associated with Pulsion but have always had a difficult time being a student. My Catholic school background brings up a lot of resistance.




I’m currently an academic administrator who adjuncted for 10 years in New York City. None of this work feels sustainable into older age, though people do it. I’m curious about what I can do with the rest of my life. Being a mental health provider or an analyst feels like something I could practice into late age that would be gratifying and perhaps akin to some of the more psychodynamic parts of teaching.

I'm not yet sitting with patients. If I can afford supervision, I’ll begin doing so next fall. I think if I was working with patients now, I would feel clearer on why I'm in school again. Emerging from this conversation is my ambivalence about some of these texts and schools of thought and ways of speaking about psychoanalysis, and about psychoanalytic training institutes themselves. I feel a bit outside of the language of it all, but I’m also excited about the prospect of sitting with patients and listening to them, and helping them write their lives (though some people debate whether psychoanalysts can ever truly help anyone at all!).

I feel like all this conversation informs the story “The Analyst,” which is a series of fantasies (or phantasies) about an analysand who feels like a double of her analyst (or the other way around), and imagines them spending time together and having the same feelings or experiences. We often lose the thread of who is who. The narrative becomes almost this kind of utopia of the two characters in the Hamptons, hanging out and drinking wine, realizing they are having the same thoughts, sensations, and appetites.

The title of your book Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is mentioned in “The Analyst” as a book the analyst is going to write, and the speaker is going to write a novel called The Analyst. So, this story is almost like a titular work in some weird way. All the things in the rest of the book come together here in a highly achieved way.

I wrote the first draft of “The Analyst” at the beginning of my transference onto my analyst in my own analysis, and gifted it to my analyst one Valentine’s Day. A simple definition of transference is when an analysand projects feelings about someone else onto the analyst.

I have an essay in issue three of Parapraxis about “The Analyst,” and about how Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts got its title. In the early part of my treatment, I had an idea via transference that my analyst would write a book called Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. I told that to her, and this was something we worked through in the treatment: that my desire for her was really a desire for my own self that I was projecting on to her. It became clear to me over time that Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts was actually the title of a book I wanted to write. When I came to that realization, I felt guilt about claiming a book title that belonged to her (in my mind) as my own. I subsequently wrote “The Analyst,” a fictional reverie about an analyst and an analysand taking an almost Thelma and Louise-style road trip to the Hamptons to go on a writing retreat together.

“The Analyst” was a joy to write, but I was also devastated while writing it. I remember crying while typing it, because I realized that the friendship I was imagining between the analyst and the analysand was a fantasy, and that I was truly crafting fiction. Maybe there’s nothing autofictional about that story because I didn't really know my analyst.

I think the vibe of the story is a bit like Bonjour Tristesse—both the novel by Françoise Sagan and the 1958 film adaptation by Otto Preminger. There’s a big, beach side party in Bonjour Tristesse that feels to me akin to the energy of “The Analyst.” At the end of the story, there’s also an image of a table on a beach where the analyst and the analysand sit drinking tea. In my mind, that image gives a nod to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Maybe the image encompasses a memory that the narrator of the story actually wants to be erased or forgotten. Because for all the joy and love in the story, there's the pain of this relationship not actually being real.

Have you heard of Twin Flames? There are a couple of new documentaries [on Amazon Prime and Netflix] about this phenomenon. One is called Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe; the other is called Escaping Twin Flames. Twin Flames Universe (TFU) is a New Age cult that posits that everybody on earth possesses a divine other half—an intensified version of a soulmate. It can also be a moniker used to refer to a kind of idyllic friendship. At one point, around the time I was writing “The Analyst,” I was obsessed with the performance of Twin Flame rhetoric online and its accompanying, very cheesy websites. (The writer and artist Patty Gone and I worked on a project that satirized this rhetoric.) I sometimes think of the analyst and the analysand in “The Analyst” as platonic Twin Flames.

When I published this short story in The Chicago Review, I dedicated it to my analyst, and my poor analyst—

Ha!

—my analyst had people reaching out to her being like, ‘That's a curious analysis you're conducting, taking a road trip with your patient…’ Again, the question of why people can't approach a short story as fiction arises. Or, to put it in other words: why can’t analysts, of all people, read literature? 

I feel like there is also a kind of teasing out of this dynamic between reality and fiction because the story sits among other stories with a character named Claire, who shares a name with the author of the book. I think the ambiguity heightens the literary effect.

As the story goes: “My analyst: she is me, as I am her. We have already begun to tell our story.”

Dan Magers’s first book of poems, Partyknife, (Birds, LLC) is described by Thurston Moore “as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes…Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band.” His writing has been published in Notre Dame Review, Hyperallergic, Vice, Fanzine, the Pen America blog, Barrelhouse, and others. He lives in Chicago.

Claire Donato’s writing collates forms and materials. She is the author of three books, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions, 2023). Her previous two book, Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and The Second Body (Poor Claudia), are out of print. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Forever, The Chicago Review, The End, Oversound, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, and GoldFlakePaint. Currently, she works as Acting Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-21 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.