John Ashbery’s Analyst

John Ashbery was analyzed by Carlos Carrillo. Jane Freilicher was analyzed by Edmund Bergler. Bernadette Mayer was in analysis with David Rubinfine. Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. James Schuyler was hospitalized at Payne Whitney and Bloomingdale, where the day got slowly started. John Wieners was sent to Medfield and then sent us Asylum Poems. Was Barbara Guest analyzed? Someone told me she was, but I couldn’t prove it. Alice Notley told me she was in treatment for a bit after Ted Berrigan died. There is no information about Frank O’Hara being analyzed. No information about Amiri Baraka being analyzed, save for when Vivian Gornick imagined how it might go down, in the Village Voice.

We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’s negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis.

What we have looked at less is whether poets love analysis, being analyzed, what use they make of it. On the one hand, we know poets—artists generally—tend to be afraid of the cure. Sublimation must hold. My friend Joshua Clover recently said to me, “We all know that the poems get worse after analysis, Hannah.” Suffice it to say, he has not been analyzed, and his work remains excellent. On the other hand, sometimes poets seek treatment precisely because they can’t even make their art anymore—anecdotally, from the archive: they’re too depressed or drinking too much—so they might as well get free of the thing that spurs them to sublimation, given that sublimation is now impossible.

We know about H.D. (analyzed by Freud himself) but also Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop—I could go on, I could move on to the living. But I won’t, and anyway, to keep cataloguing names, despite its formal pleasures, might not tell us much. Or the much it might suggest is that many poets who made it were white and middle class or richer. (Josef Kaplan’s Kill List comes to mind; we could cross-reference it with a list of poets who have been analyzed.)

When we come to the New York School, what do we make of the fact that so many of that first generation, the second, the third, were on the couch? In a way nothing much, or nothing more than I’ve just stated: it makes perfect historical sense, which is the kind of sense I’m tempted to make of the world. That New York, becoming at midcentury a laboratory for psychoanalysis both conservative and radical, might see analysts mixing it up with practitioners of the arts. That, at the height of Freud mania, some poets, especially those Harvard-educated, might go in for a bout of the talking cure. And anyway, poets tend to be verbal, and many analysts (not all) tend to like their verbal patients. 

So, by one token, this one, there’s nothing to do with the prevalence of analyzed poets sitting in the Cedar Tavern. But it is also somewhat strange that when American psychoanalysis ostensibly got conservative—homophobic in particular, and violently so—more and more New York School poets, and particularly queer poets, made use of, and I’ll add, at least sometimes voluntarily, psychoanalysis.

It turns out that the New York School does this and it does that, and, yes, one of the things it does in its poems, and does to make them, is analysis. Oh, and analysis didn’t make the poems worse either.

***

Ashbery had read Freud in college and had been on the couch before he turned to Carrillo. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Ashbery actively sought out an analysis to do one thing that it was promising it could do then: work as a conversion therapy. He wanted to become straight. This, we can thank God, ended when he could no longer afford the treatment. According to Jimmy Schuyler, he may have also had another treatment in the early fifties but was “obsessed with the idea that somebody was listening outside the door.”

This first treatment—if Schuyler was indeed right and there was a second one immediately—would have ended in 1949, and the next year, when he registered for the draft, Ashbery listed himself as “homosexual.” From this view, we can see the contours of Ashbery’s own deep ambivalence about being thought of as gay, escorted through the world under the sign of this identity, even if he resolved his ambivalence about being gay and stopped trying to be something else. Ashbery’s distaste for being thought of as a gay poet was something he didn’t shed at least into the nineties, when he was still angry about John Shoptaw’s work on his poems, although Charles Bernstein reports he would eventually, grudgingly offer, “Well, I guess I am a role model.” (We might hear this shift emerging as early as the ambivalent moment in Three Poems: “You are the Mascot of that time.”)

In the consulting room Ashbery couch surfed and left, we can likewise see the contours of the psychoanalysis we all know and hate at midcentury, the moment psychoanalysis became an ever-more-stereotyped image of itself in this country, before it would give us queer, left analysts like Richard Isay, who perhaps treated Ashbery’s friend and coauthor of Nest of Ninnies, Schuyler, down at Payne Whitney in New York. They overlapped, so who’s to say.

After at least one, if not two, failed analyses—a failure in its own terms, a success in mine since it ended before it could do too much damage—Ashbery eventually sought another treatment sometime in the sixties. This was when he was back from France but, just to be as direct about it as the poet himself, falling-down drunk a lot. He would show up to dinner parties and leave before the food was served. He would get off the plane to give a reading and be too drunk to give it, other poets having to carry him down the gangway. And he sought help in Dr. Carrillo—never fully named in Ashbery scholarship, sometimes called the “Chilean” or the “South American concert pianist” after how Ashbery spoke of him in interviews.

As I tried to figure out who treated John, I found Carrillo. Carrillo was an alcohol addiction specialist, who, as the latter moniker might suggest, was also sad to be a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and wished to just make his art. And in referring to him only as an artist or as “my shrink who actually is an artist”—Ashbery was perhaps also lowering the stakes of the treatment while increasing a kind of mechanical solidarity with his analyst. But Carrillo really was a shrink, too; he had been a resident in psychiatry at the notorious Bellevue hospital. In 1963, around when John sought him for treatment, he was at the Westchester Community Mental Health Service, where he oversaw an alcoholism clinic. He also wrote for medical journals—and once sent an irate letter to the New York Review of Books, which they felt moved to print.

Carrillo didn’t help John get sober—John wasn’t sober when I knew him, and I don’t really know if he ever was. But he did help John drink less, it seems, and helped him immensely in other, related modes, first by placing him in a more structured treatment, and then eventually through something closer to a friendship (and we might recall friendship as that all-important New York School mode of relating). What did he help him with? Many things, we might presume. Sometimes the alcohol problem got renamed as writer’s block by the two of them. Sometimes Carrillo was remembered as a specialist for writers (perhaps because John started to send his friends to him). Ashbery once reported a conversation between the two, apparently from a session:

CARRILLO: So tell me what your daily schedule is.

ASHBERY: Well, I wake up and get up and—

CARRILLO: You do what?

ASHBERY: I get up—

CARRILLO: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.

ASHBERY: Why?

CARRILLO: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you’ll be closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out.

Stay closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out. Don’t get up—stay down to become free. This is the principle of analysis. In this treatment, trying to write seems to have been contiguous with trying to figure out who John was, in part because he was insistent that he didn’t know who he was, couldn’t put a finger on the him of himself, between drastically different impressions he could give off. After all, he once declared, “I’m John. Ashbery writes the poems”—splitting himself into the name of the father and the son, the poet and the person. As much as he worried over who “John” was, he he worried equally over “Ashbery”: “I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.”

To access the person who might write the poems, Carrillo once asked Ashbery to hand over his boyhood diaries—which Carrillo then subsequently claimed to have lost. Writing to Mark Ford, John would say, and he did love to use non sequiturs to begin letters or speech (my favorite being his reliance on the term incidentally):

Au fait, I mysteriously received some lost diaries of mine I wrote in high school. I’d lent them to my Chilean shrink 25 years ago, imagining they might be helpful to my therapy. I don’t think he ever looked at them though, and then he told me he lost them, except for the first one (1941). Then he died about ten years ago. Last week out of the blue an antique dealer called me at Bard saying he had some diaries of mine and did I want them back—he’d bought the contents of the shrink’s apartment quite a while ago and just happened on the diaries again. So then he came by and gave them to me! It’s like having a time capsule dropped on your head. I just looked in the 1941 one to see what happened 60 years ago. Are you ready? … At my art class in Rochester: “One of my pictures was kept. It was a picture of Nazi boots crushing Holland tulips—’Tulip Time in Holland – 1940′.” (And they say I don’t have a social conscience!)

We hear John’s frustration with Ashbery’s reception here—it’s something John would remark upon across his life, never settled with how he was seen, not quite able to get past it. He was neither comfortable being the queer role model younger men wanted him to be nor happy to be seen as abdicating the political. (In his essay “Closet-Laureate: John Ashbery’s Contrarian Queerness,” Nick Daoust argues that rather than existing without a “social conscience,” Ashbery had politics aplenty. These politics were “not apolitical, but rather politically inconvenient, both to the heteronormative literary establishment of which his loudest critics are a part, and to the emerging liberationist gay establishment of Ashbery’s career-peak.”) Relatedly, John also had a problem with himself. He said once, “It doesn’t seem to me like my voice.” Ashbery was uncanny to himself. Carrillo understood—and John understood him as understanding—that the poems came from somewhere else, although, to that, Ashbery would add, “My reason tells me that my poems are not dictated, that I am not a voyant.” It apparently wasn’t his reason after all: the authorship of his poems was the subject of a routine fight between Ashbery and his analyst. John felt that he didn’t author his own poems and described the problem in a number of different ways; his analyst was pretty sure he did.

But there was a kernel of truth to this: Ashbery did not author the poems on his own, per se. Eventually, we see the analysis all over both the poems themselves and the way they were made. John would finally decide the poems came from “part of me that I am not in touch with very much except when I am actually writing.” Another time he would say, “As far as my own poetry goes, while there’s a lot of my unconscious mind in it, there’s a lot of the conscious mind too, which is only normal, since we do sometimes think consciously—not very often, but sometimes.” This is to describe, twice over, sublimation as well as anyone ever has, although I love Jimmy Schuyler’s notion, written from Payne Whitney, of the end of sublimation as the beginning of thought and thus the beginning of trouble: “when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom.”

So: What we do know? Carrillo helped John manage the urge to drink somewhat, he helped him write, they discussed how and where that writing appeared. But what of the content of this poetry? Yes, that, too, sometimes came from session.

With John, and for John, Carrillo occasioned Ashbery’s poems, like a lover or a friend or the muse. And those poems, the ones we know about, that came from elsewhere, were not just sublimative in the sense of not being in touch with oneself while making art from the self one can’t bear another way—but John was also given the instruction to work through. What was he to work through? His losses. A dead brother. A dead mother. The results: One of them is Three Poems, which I’ve already quoted. The other, again, that we know of, is Flow Chart, which Carrillo expressly demanded he write; and Ashbery did write it, right at the end of his treatment, to mourn his mother, not knowing his analyst would soon die, the same year as that book appeared. We could make a case for “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too, as already analytic, written amid his treatment:

Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn’t tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That matters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge.

It turns out that for Ashbery, the big theory was psychoanalysis, the process by which secondhand knowledge becomes firsthand.

***

Jane Freilicher was in treatment with Edmund Bergler. Bergler had been a handmaiden to Freud, working at his Vienna Ambulatorium until he was forced to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved prominence in American psychoanalysis. Particularly invested in Freud’s notion of the superego, and sure that most psychic life boiled down to masochist instincts, Bergler was especially interested in sexuality (and gambling). He was the author of such books as Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life, Counterfeit-Sex: Homosexuality, Impotence and Frigidity, and One Thousand Homosexuals. As this list suggests, he thought queerness a defense mechanism, and not a good one. And if you don’t know or can’t guess: he was one of the most prominent U.S. psychoanalysts on the topic of homosexuality—remembered as violently homophobic by my friend, now passed, Kenneth Lewes.

I would be remiss not to say that Bergler is also the person who coined the term writer’s block, in his 1950 book The Writer and Psychoanalysis. There, Bergler evidenced a theory of the artists and writers (or those who “bothered others with their unjustified claims of being writers”) rendered unable to work. Bergler begins by offering his reader a composite case, drawing on a sample of thirty-six such stymied patients, half of whom he estimates are considered first-rate by critics: “the poor man sharpens his pencil to take notes, then finds the point still not sharp enough; the typewriter stares up at him like a reproachful face; he is simply not in the mood … and at the end of all his twisting and turning feels only deep depression.” Bergler ventures that we (psychoanalysts, but also T. S. Eliot) know that the muse is basically just the unconscious at work, and that the unconscious’s supply of ideas is then subjected to “manipulation.” Writing stops when the writer is stopped up: there is an inner conflict that can no longer be resolved through sublimation. Or, for Bergler, the blocked writer fails to sublimate his masochism, his guilt. Instead, he, like all melancholics, turns the masochism against himself. Writer’s block, then, is like all blockages, all forms of psychoanalytic resistance. Writers think they want to give but actually do not and cannot. The takeaway: writers need analysis.

Is this why Freilicher sought Bergler out? Or was she referred by Joseph Hazan, her husband, who was also his patient? Was she having difficulty painting, perhaps after the birth of her daughter? Was one of her friends in the New York School one of his “first-rate” patients? We don’t know. Freilicher’s treatment with Bergler was, according to Evan Kindley, often a subject of in-jokes in letters between Jane and John. For instance, John wrote on November 12, 1959: “I read a review of Dr. Bergler’s new book in Time, and I’m mad at him for swiping the title I was planning to use for my memoirs.” (The book was probably Principles of Self-Damage, but possibly One Thousand Homosexuals, both published that year.)

***

Bernadette Mayer, who has written the best description of the problem of psychoanalysis—“Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside”—was in analysis with David Rubinfine. She was referred by Ed Bowes, and then seen for free. But she wasn’t just an analysand—she was analytically inclined, and significantly (enough to dream about fucking Freud’s pseudonymous patient the Rat Man, which, I never). She’d read Freud but also Ferenczi, Lacan. By the time she wound up on the couch in ’72, Rubinfine was no less controversial than Bergler, but for other, albeit still classic, reasons. Rubinfine was known to violate boundaries—and Mayer claimed the two had an affair in the course of their treatment. Rubinfine was actively shunned by the analytic community for sleeping with Elaine May, the comedian who was also his patient, and then marrying her, just weeks after his wife died by suicide. All of this had happened by the time Mayer became his patient.

So if Carrillo occasioned Ashbery’s poems by telling him what to write through, Mayer wrote an entire book around writing to and for her analyst. This became Studying Hunger Journals, about which she wrote, “I wanted to try to record, like a diary, in writing, states of consciousness, my states of consciousness, as fully as I could.” She did this all the time, making a method by which she would use two notebooks, which Rubinfine would buy for her. When she wrote in one, she gave Rubinfine the other, who would read and study it, bringing what he found there into the analysis. Then they switched back and the process was repeated. She color-coded her feelings, wrote a great deal about sex (and sex dreams; see also, Rat Man). And these radical, out-there workbooks of her own analysis became her breakthrough book. It was this book that Ashbery blurbed, calling it “magnificent”—bringing Mayer fully into the New York School.

***

Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. Loewenstein is important to the history of psychoanalysis—analyzed by Hanns Sachs, sent to France by Freud himself to bring psychoanalysis there, where he trained the first two generations of French analysts before fleeing the Vichy government and settling in New York. There, he became the imago of what was called ego psychology—working at the most conservative institute in New York and holding the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Perhaps no other analyst exerted as much influence across such different terrains within the nascent and maturing field.

Koch included a poem titled “To Psychoanalysis” in his last book, New Addresses (a pun on both the New York address lived in and experienced and the occasional form itself). First published in 2000 in The New York Review of Books, the poem begins like every bad O’Hara copycat: with a subway trip up Lex. But here the destination is a time:

To arrive at you in your glory days
Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed
That you could solve any problem

This is the poem’s addressee, psychoanalysis of the fifties:

I dreamed
Exclusively for you. I was told not to make important decisions.
This was perfect. I never wanted to. On to the hartru surface of my emotions
Your ideas sank in so I could play again.
But something was happening. You gave me an ideal
Of conversation—entirely about me
But including almost everything else in the world.
But this wasn’t poetry it was something else.

This is an occasional poem, much like one that would be read at a celebration—whether a funeral or a wedding. Of that form, the scholar and poet Noah Warren argues, “the occasional poem is beset by an ontological flicker, a nagging insubstantiality, as it leads our readings away from itself, back from the text to the history and sociality it subordinates itself to.” Thus, we read such poems differently; the successful occasional poem sends us reading, Warren continues, “for values such as wit, utility, conversation, lightness.”

Quickly, Koch’s poem becomes to and of and from and for his analyst, and the scene of termination:

After two years of spending time in you
Years in which I gave my best thoughts to you
And always felt you infiltrating and invigorating my feelings
Two years at five days a week, I had to give you up.
It wasn’t my idea. “I think you are nearly through,”
Dr. Loewenstein said. “You seem much better.” But, Light!
Comedy! Tragedy! Energy! Science! Balance! Breath!
I didn’t want to leave you. I cried. I sat up.
I stood up. I lay back down. I sat. I said
But I still get sore throats and have hay fever.
“And some day you are going to die. We can’t cure everything.”

Despite his focus here on Dr. Loewenstein, who died in 1976, the address is named as to the discipline itself, a lyrical compensation for the loss of intimate speech, sent wide to the practice like poems are eventually sent to a public. If poetry is meant to be overheard, unlike the protected speech of analysis, then this poem about analysis means to let us overhear a session right when there will, so we were told, be no more.

No more what? No more addresses. And I mean this three ways: Koch wrote the poem, and not long after publishing it, he did die. But before doing so, Koch gave psychoanalysis its send-off (while sending up the hallmarks of his own art form). Two more deaths. After all, this was the moment psychoanalysis had become understood as lost, both as cure and as social form. (Freud’s cultural obituary had been collectively authored, incidentally, also in the New York Review of Books, in a series of communiques from what was called “the Freud Wars.”) The poem is thus an elegiac address, on the occasion of psychoanalysis’ funeral, even if Koch’s actual analyst had died a quarter century prior. But also, we can hear in the poem a quiet elegy, through near parody, to another form that had everyone checking for signs of life: the poem.

If the poet is addressing his analyst, long dead, just before dying, so too does poetry celebrate what analysis had done for them—as one dies, and then the other. If, in 2001 we ostensibly entered a new millennium unfriendly to both poetry (thanks, internet) and psychoanalysis (thanks, insurance), now, just a quarter century later, it seems clear that rumors of both deaths have been at least somewhat exaggerated.

 

This essay was originally presented at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, in New York City, on April 11, 2025. The author wishes to thank David Kermani, Emily Skillings, Lytle Shaw, Noah Warren, Evan Kindley, and Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance is forthcoming from Penguin Press. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the founding editor of Parapraxis.

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