The Vivisector: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Peter Smith
(Presented at APAS Open Day Conference
“The Mind and Body in Turbulent Times”)
Saturday 9 November 2024
In keeping with the conference theme, I have chosen in this paper to look at and discuss the turbulent life of the central fictional character from Patrick White's novel ‘The Vivisector’ published in 1970.
The author’s portrayal of the life and times of this character affords us an opportunity to look at and think about psychic development. From a psychoanalytic perspective, White’s creation and depiction of this character is masterly. Not primarily in terms of literary merit (although I think it has that too) but from the position of our interest in psychoanalytic ideas, constructs and theory.
Dating back to Freud, the realm of psychoanalytic knowledge has evolved from direct observation in the clinical context complemented by observational studies in non-clinical settings (eg infant observation) and supplemented by contributions from other fields of human endeavour including mythology, sociology and literature.
In the novel, the protagonist Hurtle Duffield had a rough start to life. He was born into an impoverished unhappy family. His mother was perennially pregnant, overworked and emotionally neglected by her taciturn distant husband, Hurtle’s father.
There is a strong bond between Hurtle and his mother. The erotic dimension for the young boy is evident; the touch, feel and smell of his mother's skin excites and fires his imagination. From an early age, sexual awareness if not precocity is apparent.
When still quite young, a deal is struck which becomes life changing for Hurtle. He is sold by his parents to a wealthy family. His parents argue. ‘We did it for love’ his mother blubbers. ‘Or money’ his father belts out and then belts his wife.
Hurtle’s adoptive family has two females and there are several influential female domestic staff. His adoptive mother is insistent that Hurtle call her Maman not Mama. The only child in this family is the daughter, Rhoda, born deformed with a hunchback. He takes an instant dislike and aversion to her.
Hurtle is hyperaware of the tension between his adoptive parents and the sexuality of his adoptive mother. Her glamour and seductiveness are beguiling. He has transcendent visions that give her a kind of ethereal other world quality. Young Hurtle is portrayed as curious, perceptive and intelligent with an ever-developing sense of sexuality, both his own and the girls and women he encounters as he moves through adolescence in his adoptive family.
From early in his development, Hurtle had an urge to express himself through the use of paint and the activity of painting. When quite young he was reprimanded by his biological parents for scribbling - his retort was ‘it’s not scribbling, it’s droring”. Later, he was to tell a teacher, ‘I draw everything I know’.
Hurtle experiences and processes the world through the prism of his own vivid and graphic imagination.
We begin to see that he thinks and feels in terms of vivid colours. The excitement associated with ‘live red’, the despair associated with ‘black black’ and much later the uplifting ‘vertiginous blue’ and the ‘ultimate indigo’ are referenced as expressing the intensity and full range of passionate and deep feeling states.
As the author traces Hurtle Duffield’s passage through life, two main themes are apparent in this narrative.
The first is the fraught nature of his relationships with the women who come and go, leave him and then re-enter his life.
There are many and varied aspects to each of these women and to each of these relationships, but they are all turbulent, troubled and ultimately doomed. These are not happy or enjoyable intimate encounters, sexual or otherwise, but invariably conflictual and problematic for one party or the other or most often both.
The second theme is the nature of Hurtle’s painting activity and the content of his paintings. The activity of expressing his innermost feelings, visions and imaginative constructions into the external form of painted graphic representations often has a frenetic, impulsive and most certainly compulsive quality. The impression conveyed is that Hurtle needs to get some intolerable experience or experiences out of his system and onto the canvas. As if this is a kind of subjective imperative and a necessary psychological evacuation. Periodically he has a sense of this as a masturbatory activity.
His graphic representations are partly figurative, variably abstract and make use of vibrant colours and brilliant tones. Shadings of light and dark are important features to create an atmosphere of ambiguity and intrigue.
Women, parts of women's bodies, and other representations of the female form feature prominently together with couples and couplings in a variety of landscape settings. His figures include the hated deformed adoptive sister Rhoda, then in turn the hapless prostitute Nance and thereafter a wealthy socialite, then the wife of a Greek shipping magnate and finally, the nymphet Kathy with whom he becomes infatuated and refers to as his ‘spiritual child’.
Hurtle Duffield's experience with each of these women provides the raw material for his intrapsychic machinations before subjecting each to his artistic forays.
His completed artistic works are enigmatic and convey to those who view them a range of feelings, including horror, repulsion or plain puzzlement.
His intimate contacts recognise cruelty and brutality, and indeed perverse sexuality related to the degradation of the female form, sometimes their own.
Despite the content of his paintings or quite possibly because of the content as well as the form, his art has aesthetic appeal to the general viewing public. And with a keen agent who promotes his work, Hurtle Duffield achieves fame.
Worldly success, however, means little to him. He is indifferent to the fact that his paintings become the subject of grand exhibitions and command high prices. Indeed, he holds in callous disregard and contempt those who regard him with esteem for his artistic creations. As well as loathing of others, there is, mostly between the lines, much self-loathing. He refers to his paintings as ‘crude, disproportionate clotted painful textures’.
Hurtle’s compulsion to paint continues unabatedly and his works accrue in number. Worldly success and the relentless pursuit to continue expressing himself in paint are as though two parallel lines are moving ever forward. There is seemingly no synthesis between the relentless inner world and the exigencies of his outer life.
There is the ordinary day to day life of an isolated and reclusive middle-aged man in the material world untouched by fame and success, and side by side, the inner generative, ever restless, turbulent mind with its unremitting need to create, destroy and recreate through painting.
I have chosen the fictional character of Hurtle Duffield to illustrate and discuss some important ideas that I have found useful in understanding the concept of early life trauma and its developmental sequelae.
As many of you will be aware, the interest of psychoanalysis in trauma dates back to its earliest beginnings. A significant point early in the history of psychoanalysis was when Freud abandoned the so-called ‘seduction theory’ as the cause of neurotic illness.
Although he never dismissed the pathogenic significance of adverse external factors, his thinking shifted to the importance of unconscious phantasy life and the interplay between the reality of the external world and the world of the very active unconscious mind with its attendant conflicting passionate wishes, impulses and fears.
Freud acknowledged the central role of the experiences of helplessness and impotence in the genesis of the traumas of childhood and the disruption of a notional protective psychic shield meant to provide stability and equilibrium to the immature ego. Protection not only from excessive external stimuli, but what he called ‘excitations’ from within.
In addition to this intrapsychic dimension, the interpersonal realm was later elaborated. Winnicott and others were to develop this further with the understanding for the necessity in early life of a good (holding) environment, meaning loving caregivers, with special reference to the importance of receptive and appropriate timely responsive maternal care and a stable parental relationship.
Bowlby’s groundbreaking ethologically informed work also highlighted the prime importance of secure attachments in the earliest years of childhood for later healthy development.
To my way of thinking, the selling of young Hurtle by his parents to the wealthy family was undoubtedly a traumatic blow or injury with traumatising consequences. The mother's wet kiss as she prepares him for his introduction to the new family was reminiscent of the Judas kiss. A betrayal of the highest order.
One of Hurtle’s early artistic works was of his mother's hollowed out body with a new baby beginning to sprout inside. He is aware of wanting to creep inside the maternal body and keep tight in warm, wet love…this could be understood as a regressive wish and the very antithesis of painful separation and abandonment.
If we consider further the young boy’s libidinal erotic tie to his mother, then the transaction of the sale also suggests the felt experience of infidelity. How could she, his beloved and loving mother cast him aside and abandon him this way!
We could speculate then that there were 2 abandonments and major losses occurring. The first as the embryonic undeveloped self - prematurely cast out of the warm maternal space and second, as if cruelly rejected as mother’s lover in his unconscious infantile mind.
Hurtle stolidly accepts his fate with his new family. However, he is in turn exposed to the person of his adoptive mother who taunts, teases, flirts and excites the boy’s developing sexual interest. Her boundaries are loose. She uses him for her own ends and gratifications.
Periodically Hurtle gets drawn into collusions with his adoptive mother. Sometimes she can seem to be the apotheosis of the female form. A kind of goddess on a pedestal and ultimately unattainable.
At the same time as this kind of idealisation is happening, the adoptive sister is the one who is the recipient of his hatred and derision for her disfigured femaleness.
These continuing formative experiences are powerful. They are played out in subsequent heterosexual relationships in his adult life. And these liaisons have a kind of vexed instability about them.
They veer between the passions of intense sexual desire, callous disregard, mutual manipulation, disillusionment and overt destructiveness. There is an inevitability about the fate of these relationships.
Hurtle’s early life experiences did not equip him well for being able to engage later in life with stable, lasting, mutually satisfying heterosexual relationships. The themes of being betrayed as well as betraying are repeated. This is his internal template or working model for close encounters of the intimate kind with women.
The betrayal by his biological parents clearly tells us that he was the victim of a cruel fate, not unlike the myth of Oedipus who was abandoned as an infant to die on a hillside.
In his relationships with women, Hurtle is both the victim and victimizer. He subjects himself and his partners to cruelty and callousness. Anna Freud termed this ‘identification with the aggressor’. To be sure, there are also episodic elements of mutual concern, tenderness and, at times, genuine pleasure but the shadow of destructiveness ultimately eclipses and trumps good experiences with women.
In his compulsive painting activity, Hurtle needs to express what he experiences in his contemporary adult life. He tells one lover, ‘I convey in paint what I see and feel……but can't say’.
He is also aware of a power which intoxicates and is the antidote to fear and psychic pain. The author writes ‘when his fingers weren't behaving as the instruments of his power, they returned to being the trembling reeds he had grown up with’.
It is as though his fraught experiences in the present are the consequences of his troubled internal world, and in turn are also catalysts for the need to release and express his inner demons from the past as well as the lived present, onto the canvas.
And what is expressed? Distortions and disfigurations of women. Often in the abstract form but nonetheless recognisable more or less as mutilations.
The painter with his perceptive eye cuts into, as it were, the living flesh of those women he encounters through his intimate associations.
The prostitute Nance writes to Hurtle in desperation, saying that her brain and guts are being laid open in their turbulent encounters. ‘You aren't a human being’ she tells him. ‘You're a kind of perv’. Hurtle responds matter of factly ‘I'm an artist’. And to himself, it sounded ‘a shifty claim’.
As Hurtle paints he sometimes recognises that his painting activity has an overt destructive element but also a vaguely intuited restorative one…or at least an attempt at restoration. He has an uneasy sense of guilt about the destructive element, and I think a mostly implicit sense of shame about what he commits to the canvas.
Self-loathing and despair are evident.
On one occasion, Hurtle looks at a series of his works and sees his imperfections and his agonies. He refers to future unpainted paintings as ‘too black to paint’.
On another occasion over a period of a week, he works and reworks a self -portrait…and he realizes that he would never control his desire to paint. He struggles in a state of agitated frustration to produce what he calls ‘an honest version of my dishonest self’.
And while painting in this perturbed and melancholic state of mind, ‘all the significant figures from his troubled past’, the author writes, ‘encroach on him from all quarters like ghosts from the past… ‘all of them resentful with demands being heaped upon him and he with all his instincts in a state of retaliatory resistance.’ Inner torment is evident.
Turning now from the particulars of the life of the central character of the novel, I would like to detail some of the contributions on trauma from psychoanalytic thinking post-Freud.
Some of these understandings will be pertinent to the literary character and others less so.
Heinz Wiess has reviewed and commented on the debilitating consequences of traumatic early life experiences. The ensuing damage can leave permanent traces of silent zones of forgetting and dissociating, variously described as a ‘black hole, a psychic vacuum or an empty circle’.
Dana Amir has described traumatic lacunae with varying degrees of the capacity to use language to represent in thought and communicate in words such internal experiences of severe trauma from the past.
In the clinical context, such patients may lack the basic experience of trust of a containing good other / object or person…not only in the past but also in the present.
In these instances, there is often no inner sense of a solid or consolidated good self which may have been irreparably damaged or lost.
A timeless state of mind can be a feature in severely traumatized persons. In such cases, the traumatic past is never past but ever present. It can be as though time is frozen in and around a coalesced early life trauma, sometimes not directly remembered but nor ever able to be forgotten. These frozen experiences can have in turn an organizing impact on subsequent development and be a kind of motif throughout life.
Some authors have described the experience of trauma as being like a foreign body in the mind- unable to be emotionally processed but rather forever present as a source of pain, suffering and anguish.
The passage of time alone does not erase or resolve such experience which thereby remains emotionally undigested and unprocessed. Psychological defence mechanisms in the form of pathological constructions (eg dissociative states) or positions (eg John Steiner’s concept of psychic retreats) may be resorted to, such that anxiety is reduced and a semblance of order brought to chaos.
Such mechanisms can also be attempts to provide a temporary state of relief from despair. But this can be at a great cost – development and psychic integration can be impeded and essentially curtailed.
The metaphor of trauma as a wound goes back to Freud’s notion of a protective psychic shield. If this is ruptured, the subjective experience may be of a lifelong sense of vulnerability, fragility and potential susceptibility to further injury.
In the framework of clinical psychiatry and complex post traumatic anxiety, this may manifest as hyperarousal, hypervigilance, avoidance of closeness and chronic mistrust lest there be the possibility of retraumatization. A wound may heal but leave a residue memory in the form of a scar. And scars, subject to being revived, can be painful reminders of a traumatic past experienced in the present.
One of the consequential features of early personal trauma can be a failure of the capacity for symbolization in thought and words. It is as if there is a concrete quality associated with the incapacity to process the traumatic experience into the symbols of language and thought.
This may be related to Hurtle Duffield’s comment ‘I can’t say’ …perhaps reflecting an incapacity to verbalize or be able to put into words painful and feared experiences past and present.
Some psychoanalytic writers have equated this with the lack of an imaginative capacity and a general inability to represent the traumatic experience. While this may be so for some, it may be true only for the symbols of words and language, with others.
The pioneering work of Melanie Klein with her child patients from the 1920’s onwards showed that representation and enactment through play and play technique in the consulting room, revealed a wealth of material about the conflicts and fears in the unconscious minds and inner worlds of her young, troubled patients.
Back to Hurtle Duffield. One of the outstanding features of this character is not only his capacity, but indeed his compulsive need to represent and keep representing his experiences through his familiar medium of paint and painting.
And this activity has something of an addictive quality. It is also illustrative of the key analytic concepts of repetition compulsion and enactment. That which cannot be remembered is played out in the form of action or we might say transformed (in the case of the artist) via the action of artistic activity and represented visually as imagery on the canvas.
This is an attempt to work out of his troubled mind, perturbed experience which haunts him. And in particular, the personal meaning and significance of the trauma of rejection is played out, and painted out, onto the canvas.
The artist, as he paints, is the one who, in fantasy and on the canvas, is creating the damage and is the perpetrator of violence to women.
The female form is subject to violation as well as violence. This could be thought of as enacting a reversal of the trauma of early life. Passive experience is turned on its head- the painter transforms a psychic wound in which he is the victim, into himself as the active one inflicting injury of a horrible kind.
This wound may be thought of as a narcissistic injury. His sense of rejection by his parents, mother especially, left him with an indelible impact on his ability to trust women.
Hand in hand with mistrust, his passionate misogynistic hatred continued with little remission despite temporary interludes both in his real-life relationships with women and in those painted works which were relatively free from vehemence and revenge.
The concept of omnipotence is useful to consider in conjunction with the notion of a narcissistic wound. It is the corollary to infantile helplessness.
Hurtle Duffield had no say in who his parents were and no say in the circumstances of the cruel fate in which he was sold off by his parents and rejected by his mother. His artistic abilities gave him a sense of great power as he wielded his brushes and paints. He is no longer the one rendered helpless and impotent but the one who in fantasy powerfully and omnipotently controls or attempts to control his destiny and the fate of the women he encounters.
Conspicuous in the narrative of the artist’s life is the absence of a good other- specifically a good mother or maternal-like figure. This is associated with two related features. First, there is seemingly no capacity within Hurtle himself to mourn his early life losses and second, there is no good other to consistently assist and enable him with the work of mourning to emotionally process these losses.
In the absence of such a person(s) and such an opportunity, the artist resorts to what he vaguely senses as an endeavour to restore and make good. But it is coexistent with his wish (partly conscious but mostly unconscious) to continue to attack the female form.
Interestingly though, Hurtle also rejects or otherwise refuses to accept ordinary expressions of love, tenderness and concern from various women. In one instance, as he sits on the toilet reading a letter from the socialite Boo in which she tells him she loves him, he summarily and contemptuously wipes himself with the letter.
We could consider that there is an attempt at a kind of manic reparation through his painting. That is, a wish to restore omnipotently and magically the desperately sought prototypic female form and the desired female body. But as this unconscious wish is coexistent with his violent attacks, such reparative efforts are doomed to be unsuccessful.
Some authors, both psychoanalytic and outside the field of analysis, have written about the necessity for forgiveness in the path to recovery from traumatic experiences.
This is associated with being able to mourn and relinquish hatred and vengeance. I think we can see that Hurtle was not only unable to grieve, mourn and unconsciously ‘let go’ his significant losses, but was also unable to forgive (as well as forget) and hence there is a melancholic aggrievance in perpetuity.
It is apparent that he continued to pay out, so to speak, his hatred to the women he encountered throughout life and hand-in-hand his artistic representations repeatedly reflected this ongoing state of psychic turbulence and vehemence.
There was a simple three-line poem composed by the artist and recorded on the wall of his backyard dunny:
God the Vivisector
God the Artist
God
Hurtle Duffield reflected on his own powers and those aspects of his life beyond his personal sense of agency including what the author called ‘the unalterable landscape of (his) childhood’.
The brief haiku-like poem encapsulates the overarching sense of omnipotence which determines destiny…an omnipotent power or being which mercilessly influenced the direction and course of the artist’s life. This is the legacy from nature & nurture totally beyond his control (God). Then there’s the living out and expression of inner omnipotence (God the Artist) with particular reference to the unremitting destructiveness played out, cutting into the life of himself and others (God the Vivisector).
In conclusion, Patrick White’s portrayal of the protagonist’s life is a powerful rendition of all aspects of the human condition but highlights especially psychic pain, raw damage and crude destructiveness. The author’s narrative account of the character and life of Hurtle Duffield conveys and evokes pathos, generates intrigue and a range of complex and conflicting emotional resonances for the character’s plight.
There is much more to this lengthy epic novel of course, apart from the singular approach I have taken. But the psychic truths communicated have an authenticity and I have attempted to show how a psychoanalytic perspective can be informed by, and in turn enhance understanding of those truths that are so convincingly communicated by the author’s literary creativity.
To finish, an ironic twist. In Patrick White’s autobiography, ‘Flaws in the Glass’, the author writes ‘I had imagined that if I could acquire the technique (of painting), I might give visual expression to what I have inside me, and that the physical act of painting would exhilarate me far more than grinding away at grey, bronchial prose’.
There is a definite resonance here between the author and his central character as Hurtle refers to the futility, ‘drudgery’ and ‘utter shit’ of painting as a means of expressing his innermost thoughts and feelings. Indeed, the painter imagines that another medium like music or language would be different!
‘The Vivisector’ is an engaging, colourful and stimulating novel with a lively portrayal of its central turbulent character…….to my mind neither the book nor the character is grey or prosaic!