Mis/Fitting

I.

I walked into the office and sat in the chair. I had been referred to him by several trusted mentors, including my supervisor, as a possible training analyst. Although I was still working with my now-long-distance therapist, I was beginning to feel antsy to get started in my analysis. He is one of those rare analysts whom everyone seems to respect, across disciplinary and theoretical dividing lines. As I sat, anxious to begin our consult, he was diagonal from me, the couch beside him and across from me. I sat trying to look at him but found my gaze drawn to the couch. Of course, the couch: the mythical analytic object. It was exquisite, and I felt terror rolling around in my center. Spindly beautiful wooden legs, seemingly thin enough to be the heel of a stiletto. There was a lovely plush cushion on top, flat and modern. I could not imagine even sitting on it, much less lying on it. My thought: Could it hold me? Would it collapse under my weight? Would I be able to breathe lying flat on my back without a headrest? Would he shudder when I sat my weight onto it? What would he think when I had trouble rolling off of the low seat, trying to get my feet under me enough to stand back up at the end of a session?

II.

I don’t know how old I was the first time. Elementary school? Probably middle school. In fact, the years of meetings off and on blur together. There was the time I sat resentfully in a corner insisting I was just there to support my mom. This wasn’t for me. Another I proudly told everyone (excitedly! giddily!) that I had found a low-point chocolate mousse—you just mixed sugar-free chocolate Jell-O powder with a tub of light whipped cream. I didn’t tell them about the migraines the artificial sweeteners gave me, because why ruin such a triumph! As the meeting leaders loaded us up onto the scale so nonchalantly, a line of women and girls with the occasional man, moving forward one at a time, it felt nearly like leading the cattle to slaughter. The repetition of intense feelings of superiority and self-righteousness when the scale went down (I had a burger this week and still lost three pounds! Ha!) and the hopelessness and frustration when, inevitably, the numbers ticked back up or stood still despite my religious and systematic starvation of myself, was the only constant, my emotional world cycling alongside my body size.

III.

The patient was a woman who had been in treatment for quite a few years and who had made major changes in her life and her self-experience, except with regard to the thing that had brought her into treatment in the first place, her obesity. She felt her weight as a burden that she would carry unto death, with no hope of relief. At the point I entered the case, it was her analyst who was feeling no hope of relief, and that was a major reason for the consultation. The situation was quite an extraordinary one and impressed me once again with the fact that when it comes to certain kinds of enactments, it’s really a lot more pleasurable to be the consultant than the analyst. As a consultant, I’m spared the experience of being personally dismantled by the patient, a fact I feel is critical to comprehend in working as a therapist from this frame of reference… In the case of the patient I mentioned, whose treatment I had been following, the dismantling took place around the analyst’s “failure” to mention the patient’s weight when she herself wasn’t mentioning it. “You ought to know,” the patient insisted, “that when I’m talking about anything else as long as I’m still fat, it’s only my good self that’s talking and that I’m doing something self-destructive that you’re not even caring about.” In fact, the analyst cared a great deal about it, as you might well imagine. It was the one painfully overt sign that something still needed to be “cured” and that talking hadn’t helped. So, the analyst had decided (on his own) to stop addressing it because he was tired of getting nowhere (kind of “fed up,” you might say) and hoped that the patient would then bring it up herself¹.

I encountered this example in my first year of training. When I tried to address the fatphobia of the case, I was met with silence from my class and from the instructors. The silence was eventually broken by another student asking a theoretical question about the article, which was taken up immediately by the faculty. Once again, I left before the class ended, despite speaking, unseen and too big. If this is the discourse around fat bodies within my training and within the literature, how do I have space and room to fit? Although our training is online—and thus from the comfort of my own fat-friendly furniture—I dread in-person meetups where I am unsure if there will be adequate seating, both in how much or what kind of seating might be provided. I dread even more the unspoken judgment, the silence around my body like the silence of Bromberg’s supervisee.

IV.

I had recently become more interested in genealogy. I knew my great-grandmother had immigrated with family from central Italy, but had little other understanding of my family’s origins. I asked my grandmother if she had any family documents I might borrow for this endeavor. She told me that she actually had a document another cousin had compiled and sent around many years ago. As I flipped through the pages, amazed that I had never heard about this set of documents, I turned a page and sat stunned. As I saw a photo of three smiling fat women, I teared up. These were my ancestors! These fat women sitting together, family, community, with bodies like mine: the same body that was taken to Weight Watchers meetings as a child. I felt simultaneously tearful joy and deep sadness. How could this body, so similar to these ancestors’, be so shameful in my own family? How can my body as an echo of my family still not fit even in the place from which it came?

V.

I could not stop dwelling on that first question: Can it hold me? Will I fit? My Goldilocks search for an analytic training program, and more specifically for a training analyst, has been a long one, spanning three institutes and nearly a decade. This question of fit and containment has been at the crux of that search. I became a therapist in the first place because of my life-changing encounter with psychoanalytic theory while I was on another path. Yet my experiences with training and with the analytic community have consistently been of myself as a person at odds with the field. I have been asked why I am even involved with training if I am so hostile toward psychoanalysis. Understanding in that moment how deeply misunderstood I had been for nearly two years, I responded: I love psychoanalysis so much that I want it to be better. To be better requires acknowledging the harm it’s done and been complicit in. I wondered if I, like Goldilocks, was somewhere I didn’t belong. I left, the question circling: Can psychoanalysis make space for me? Can I fit?

¹ Bromberg, P.M. (1994). Speak! That I may hear you: Some reflections on disassociation, reality, and psychoanalytic listening. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 4, 523–525.