characteristics of psychoanalysis which are akin to those of literature: ‘It is as though Freud invented a setting or a treatment in which people could not exactly speak the poetry that they are, but that they could articulate themselves as fully as they are able.’33 Montaigne developed a process of revision that was entirely unrepentant and which allowed him to articulate himself – in all his multiplicity – in full. His Essays defy conventional hierarchies of correction which would insist that mistakes are a source of shame and that first thoughts, once contradicted or superseded by a second thought, must be got rid of. He shows how it is possible to go backwards in a way that is healthy rather than regressive or ruminative. In particular, it is Montaigne’s sense of constructive uncertainty which allows him to loop backwards again and again, opening up more thinking space for himself and reactivating formerly closed off lines of thought. The psychoanalyst Susie Orbach discusses the importance of a similar kind of constructive uncertainty in her book In Therapy: The Unfolding Story:
Psychoanalysis and psychological theories of development see the capacity to hold complexity in mind – which is to say, when thinking is not arranged in banishing binaries […] Complexity is essential to thought. There is rarely one story, one subjectivity, one way to look at and evaluate things […] Complexity and category-making are the dialectical prerequisites of being human. We all struggle with the tension between the two poles of questioning and certainty. Out of that tension comes an enormous creativity.34
Montaigne’s Essays provide a clear model of this creativity in action. The importance of this cannot be overstated for it is very difficult to even begin to imagine doing or being something without access to an external template that proves that it is possible: Montaigne is the external template that defies any other fixed template. His portrayal of individual psychology in action demands to be met with ways of thinking and versions of therapy which go beyond universal cures or overgeneralised theories.
Chapter 6 of this book will – in part – look at exactly what does happen when a group of individuals are asked to write diaries arising out of their reading in the act of becoming personal essayists. But it would be to take Montaigne too literally, too slavishly, if, like Marion Milner, everyone was required to write. The Essays cannot show us in steps how to attain the healthy attitude that Montaigne has cultivated because his writing is so emphatically individual and unreplicable, but he has shown that it is possible to carve out an individual space and to develop individual thinking patterns that serve to make life much more bearable.
Notes
1Donald Frame, Montaigne’s Essais – A Study (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 97; hereafter cited as ‘Frame’.
2Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), Book III, Essay 5, p. 950; hereafter cited as Essays.
3Epistles, i, VII, p. 35.
4Essays, I, 8, p. 31.
5Ibid.
6Ibid., I, 39, p. 277.
7Ibid., III, 5, p. 990.
8Ibid., I, 29, p. 221.
9Evans, p. 4.
10Essays, I, 14, p. 52.
11Epistles, i, XIII, p. 75.
12Essays, II, 6, p. 418.
13Frame, p. 31.
14Ibid., p. 24.
15Essays, II, 12, p. 683.
16Ibid., III, 9, p. 1114.
17Ibid., III, 9, p. 1091.
18Ibid., I, 28, pp. 211–12.
19Saul Frampton, When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 27; hereafter cited as ‘Frampton’.
20Essays, III, 11, p. 1165.
21Warren Boutcher, The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ii, p. 459.
22Alexander Welsh, The Humanist Comedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 97.
23Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1934] 1952), p. 33.
24Ibid., pp. 31–32.
25Essays, II, 1, p. 377.
26Frampton, p. 7.
27Essays, III, 2, p. 908.
28Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 17; hereafter cited as ‘Rieff’. The authorship of this book has since been credited to Rieff’s then wife Susan Sontag.
29Ibid., p. 17.
30Ibid., p. 66.
31Adam Philips, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 7’, interview by Paul Holdengraber, Paris Review, 208 (2014), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6286/adam-phillips-the-art-of-nonfiction-no-7-adam-phillips, accessed 15 April 2016.
