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Chapter 2

THERAPY AND THE ESSAY: MONTAIGNE, AFTER SENECA

A Case History

The French aristocrat Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) devoted himself to public service as a magistrate, counsellor and Mayor of Bordeaux during the period of political and religious upheaval in France marked by the civil war that raged intermittently from 1562 to 1598. In 1571 – at the age of 38 – Montaigne retired from public life, set up a library in the tower of his chateaux, and focused on studying ancient philosophy and writing a book of essays. Montaigne was a particularly keen student of Seneca and was described by his contemporary, Estienne Pasquier as ‘another Seneca in our language’.¹ The first half of this chapter will examine Montaigne as a reader of Seneca, considering how he put the principles of Stoicism into practice, testing them against the reality of his own experiences and adapting them to better serve and suit himself. As he wrote in the essay ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’, ‘My philosophy lies in action.’² The second half of the chapter examines whether Montaigne’s Essays offer up a particular model of self-help, concluding that they do contain a valuable therapeutic model, but one which is distinctly different from conventional modern self-help therapy.

Montaigne’s self-enforced retirement followed the example of Seneca who had himself retired from his public role as advisor to the Roman Emperor Nero towards the end of his life and who, in retirement, had written his series of letters to Lucilius. In these epistles, Seneca had advised his friend to follow his lead and ‘withdraw into yourself, as far as you can’.³ As Montaigne retreated to his library he was trying to put Seneca’s advice into practice: ‘It seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself’.’⁴ However, in reality he found himself struggling to achieve anything close to the Stoic ideal of tranquillity, as his mind immediately ‘bolted off like a runaway horse’.⁵ The discordancy between the Stoic theory of retirement and Montaigne’s own lived experience was an early indication for him that philosophy was something that had to be made and moulded afresh by each individual through the act of living. It was mental and not public action to which his retirement was dedicated.

Writing in his essay ‘On Solitude’, Montaigne uses Seneca’s advice on retirement as a starting point, but then goes on to add the caveats that he has learned through years of troubled experience:

Withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome yourself there. It would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself, if you did not know how to govern yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.⁶

‘But’ is always an important word for Montaigne and here the sharp second thought allows him to launch on past Seneca’s initial advice. In practice the Stoic maxim can only be a starting point. After the first shift of withdrawal from the public realm into the private space, there must be a second move, developing from the private sphere into the individual space.

In 1580 – nine years after retiring – Montaigne published the first edition of his Essays, consisting of 94 chapters split into two volumes. He wrote in the first person, in French rather than Latin, and covered a whole host of varied themes, for as he would later assert, ‘All topics are equally productive to me. I could write about a fly!’⁷ Montaigne called these short improvised bursts of writing ‘essais’ or ‘attempts’, inventing the essay as a form of relatively unpremeditated thinking. Time and mood took the place of a prior sense of assumed importance or a definitive commitment to hierarchical size. After their first publication, Montaigne continued to work on his Essays: a second edition was printed in 1582, and in 1588 a radically altered third edition was produced. This version of the Essays contained a third volume consisting of 13 new chapters. Rather than simply adding to the length of his work over time, Montaigne also returned again and again to the original 94 essays of Books I and II, revising and adding quotations to them in light of his further thinking and reading. Approximately five hundred and fifty new quotations were inserted into the third edition of the Essays, along with a further six hundred additions to the text. In the four years between the publication of the third edition of the Essays and Montaigne’s death in 1592, he continued to make changes to his book, adding one thousand new passages and making an estimated nine thousand revisions to his punctuation. The final manuscript that he had been working on up until his death is known as ‘The Bordeaux Copy’ and provides the source material for the posthumous editions of the Essays that are published today. This manuscript was the culmination of 21 years of work, yet it remained unfinished because Montaigne’s method of continual revision meant that there could never be a definitive, fixed version of the Essays; instead it was a living text.

The Essays were originally conceived as a tribute to Montaigne’s friend – his fellow councillor, writer and Stoic – Etienne de La Boétie, who had died in 1563. Montaigne planned to publish his friend’s work, De La Servitude Volontaire, alongside his own writing in order to preserve the memory of La Boétie and recreate a dialogue between the two men. However, Montaigne eventually resolved not to publish his friend’s work, replacing what was to be the heart of the book with his own essay ‘On Friendship’. A chapter of La Boétie’s sonnets was included in early editions of the Essays but was later struck out by Montaigne in protest at the misappropriation of his friend’s memory and political ideas by radical Protestants calling for a revolt against the Catholic monarchy. Instead, Montaigne left a blank space where the sonnets had previously been printed and the statement, ‘Nine and Twenty Sonnets of Etienne de la Boétie: These verses can be found elsewhere.’⁸ While La Boétie’s work can no longer be found within the Essays, his Stoic beliefs did leave an important imprint on Montaigne’s life and work. Montaigne turned to ancient philosophy for comfort after the death of La Boétie. He read widely in his retirement and inscribed his favourite quotations onto the walls and beams of his study, making them a concrete part of his physical environment. The philosophers that he frequently quotes in his Essays became his companions in thinking and provided him with a supporting structure or scaffolding upon which to build his own work.

Montaigne has an easy personal intimacy with the material that he quotes. He assimilates his reading into his writing and blends ancient philosophy with his own thoughts to create a chorus of co-opted voices within one text. The idea of ‘essaying’ or ‘trialling’ is central to Montaigne’s work. As he writes, Montaigne is putting philosophy – and in particular the philosophy of Stoicism – to the test. Over the course of the 21 years that Montaigne was writing the Essays, he repeatedly questions whether Stoicism is a philosophy that can work in practice. Over time, as his conclusions begin to change, he is less inclined to disguise quotations from Seneca within his writing and instead more likely to hold them up – distinctly apart from his own thoughts – so that they can be properly inspected and critiqued.

‘The taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them’ is characteristic of the early essays of Book I in which Montaigne is largely supportive of Stoicism. He begins by thinking about the same Stoic maxim of Epictetus that Jules Evans described as being the starting point for Albert Ellis in the development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), ‘Men are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about them.’⁹ Montaigne measures this central tenet against his own lived experiences:

There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained for the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgement it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do throw themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment as far as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities then it lies within our power to change those qualities. […] Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.¹⁰

The repetition of ‘if’ four times in this passage shows Montaigne’s sceptical mind in action, while the phrase ‘let us see’ marks the movement from theory to personal, practical example. Montaigne is testing the concept set out by the Greek Stoic Epictetus, for can it actually be possible in reality that a person can determine their own emotional responses by regulating their thoughts? Can the theory be translated into practice? And if it can, then why isn’t that the end of all of our problems? Why do we still suffer if it is in our power to transform our suffering by changing the way we think? For the Stoics, the extent to which pain is felt is a choice; its magnitude is determined by how much mental territory it is given to exist within. While certain patterns of thought accommodate pain and give it space to grow, Stoicism was developed as a means of starving and shrinking it.

In his essay ‘On Practice’ Montaigne describes a riding accident that brought him close to death. Before the accident Montaigne had been intently preoccupied with his own mortality, but this experience led to a change in his thinking and was a practical reminder of what Seneca had warned of in his Epistle XIII, ‘Some things torment us more than they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all.’¹¹ For Montaigne, knowledge that is gained through chance or by accident – as happens here – seems to be a particularly important way of learning:

Many things appear greater in thought than in fact. I have spent a large part of my life in perfect good health: it was not only perfect but vivacious and boiling over. That state, so full of sap and festivity, made thinking of illness so horrifying that when I came to experience it I found its stabbing pains to be mild and weak compared to my fears.

Here is an everyday experience of mine: if I am sheltered and warm in a pleasant room during a night of storm and tempest, I am dumbstruck with affliction for those then caught out in the open; yet when I am out there myself I never want to be anywhere else.

The mere thought of always being shut up indoors used to seem quite unbearable to me. Suddenly I was directed to remain there for a week or a month, all restless, distempered and feeble; but I have found that I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of actual sickness bigger by half. I hope the same thing will happen with death, and that it will not be worth all the trouble that I am taking to prepare for it.¹²

Montaigne demonstrates his characteristic mental mobility in this passage as he builds a case for Stoicism out of his own ‘everyday experiences’ and thus translates reality back into philosophy. The riding accident demonstrated to him the disparity between the fearful expectations he had supposed absolute and the sudden upsetting reality of experience. His previous state of health meant that he was both physically and emotionally distanced from illness, leaving space for his imagination to create something much worse than reality. While previously, fear, dread and ‘the power of my imagination’ even in health had warped his perceptions and magnified certain unknowns, making the thought of sickness seem ‘bigger by half’. Montaigne learns through experience to measure the world more accurately. The ability to rescale experiences in order to give them their correct weight and significance is an important part of the attitude that Montaigne cultivated. A vital element of this system of weights and measures is Montaigne’s humour; the lightness of his tone and wry, carefree approach to the world helps to lighten and to shrink potentially large, heavy problems. Wry humour, born of accidents, serves as an alternative to and a defence against tragic fear and dread.

In the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne directs his mocking humour towards – among others – Seneca and the Stoics themselves. This is the longest essay that Montaigne ever wrote and marks a distinct break with Stoic philosophy. It can be read as Montaigne’s manifesto for scepticism or as Donald Frame describes it, ‘a declaration of intellectual independence’.¹³ In 1569, Montaigne had translated Raymond Sebond’s fourteenth-century text Theologica Naturalis from Latin into French at the request of his father. Sebond had written the book with the aim of proving the existence of God, but his attempt to reconcile philosophy and theology had proven controversial and in 1595 its prologue was placed on the Pope’s list of banned books. In his ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ Montaigne does not take long to deviate from the task of defending the text and its author, and the essay instead quickly becomes ‘a devastating critique of all dogmatic philosophy’¹⁴ which therefore included criticism of Sebond himself.

In the final passage of ‘The Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne takes one particular quotation from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones and – as he has done so often in the Essays – puts it to the test:

To that very religious conclusion of a pagan I would merely add one more word from a witness of the same condition, in order to bring to a close this long and tedious discourse which could furnish me with matter for ever. ‘Oh what a vile and abject thing is Man,’ he said, ‘if he does not rise above humanity.’

A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can see only with his own eyes, grip only with his own grasp. He will rise if God proffers him – extraordinarily – His hand; he will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.

It is for our Christian faith, not that Stoic virtue of his, to aspire to that holy and miraculous metamorphosis.¹⁵

Montaigne dismantles Seneca’s argument with three concise clauses which mimic the Roman philosopher’s own succinct style: ‘A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal.’ The first three editions of the Essays were published with the gentler alternative of ‘There is in all his Stoic school no saying truer than that one: but to make a fistful bigger than a fist.’ But after 1588, this initially hesitant critique of Seneca was substituted by Montaigne’s final crisp verdict. The confidence of the three new clauses correspond with Montaigne’s growing scepticism. Rather than using Seneca for support, here the voices of the two men are distinctly separate. Montaigne deconstructs Seneca’s theory by separating the Stoic’s theoretical man into his physical parts; by giving him a ‘fist’, an ‘arm’, a ‘stride’ and a ‘grasp’ he demonstrates what it would mean in practice for a man ‘to rise above humanity’. For Montaigne, not only would it be impossible for an individual to single-handedly exceed the physical capacities of his species, it would be ‘monstrous’ or inhuman to reject our natural boundaries and try to become something beyond our own natural limits. This is the kind of philosophy that would lead to a state of constant disappointment and repentance, for every attempt to stretch beyond the physical and biological parameters of the human species is doomed to fail.

Rather than setting himself up for failure or regretting his insufficiencies, Montaigne is interested in a philosophy that will make his life more able to be lived. To read Montaigne’s Essays is to meet somebody who has achieved ease with his own self, who can nonchalantly dismiss a precept with a shrug and relax within his own skin. This is not however a thoughtless version of nonchalance, much here depends on tone, for it is as though tone is the almost unconscious physical accompaniment to what is thought.

In his essay ‘On Vanity’ – also in Book III – Montaigne deviates from his central theme to discuss his travels around France. His physical freedom of movement corresponds with his mental mobility and provides in this passage a model or template of a particularly sane kind of non-linear progress that is itself explicitly against preset templates. Montaigne’s Essays offer a model of healthy thinking, even while existing as they do in defiant opposition to the possibility of universally applicable templates for living:

I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delicacy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked.¹⁶

Montaigne is not constrained by straight lines or preset routes; if there is danger ahead, he simply turns off in a different direction. There is no obligation to follow a certain path, he is guided by an internal compass which serves him. There is no need to endure and maintain a damaging straight route. The flexibility required to change direction is something to be nurtured.

Montaigne has no difficulty in looping back to repeat or remake his path, hence his revisions of the Essays. He goes back again and again to build up layers of experience just as in the Essays he loops back into earlier attempts at writing to consider again something he may have overlooked at first or not explored to its full depth. But importantly, he also gives himself the time to move away from certain places – often for many years – before returning again to add new layers of thought. As he declared in the essay ‘On Vanity’, ‘I make additions not corrections.’¹⁷ Montaigne’s natural changeability contains within it something subtly constant and is all the more constant for not being under fixed mental control.

The additions made to the essay ‘On Friendship’ – Montaigne’s ode to Etienne de La Boétie in Book I – show this process in action. In the Bordeaux copy of the Essays, which Montaigne was working on up until his death, he returned to one passage in the twenty-eighth essay of Book I and added the following words in italics to the original text:

In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it some inexplicable force of destiny.¹⁸

It was at least eight years after the publication of the first edition of the Essays and over twenty-five years after La Boétie’s death that Montaigne was able to complete his sentence and answer the question of ‘Why I loved him’. Saul Frampton goes further in his examination of Montaigne’s final manuscript when he notes that ‘each part of the addition [was] written in a different pen’.¹⁹ Frampton breaks down what at first appears to be one addition into its three component parts. From the initial full stop after ‘I feel that it cannot be expressed’ Montaigne first of all makes an opening for himself, deleting the full stop and reigniting the thought by inserting ‘except’. He writes ‘except by replying’ in one colour ink, ‘because it was him’ in another and ‘because it was me’ in a third shade, indicating that each small segment was written at a different time as the thought continued to germinate mid-articulation. The bursts of clarity within these short sentences are the closest that Montaigne gets to some kind of end point or realisation, but the process of revision that he follows in writing, namely his constant looping back into the text, mean that these moments of crystallisation are scattered throughout the Essays. The clarity, when it surfaces, is not an answer to the question of ‘Why I loved him’, but an acceptance of the felt unknowable that existed between the two friends, as the two words, ‘specifically’ and ‘inexplicable’ themselves add.

An important feature of Montaigne’s sanity is his capacity and willingness to go backwards and to think again by making additions to old thoughts. In order to do this he needs a language which will allow him to return to, re-open and re-energise old thoughts. In ‘On Repentance’ he writes about the value of the specific terms which allow him to do this important work of revision:

You make me hate things probable when you thrust them on me as things infallible. I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward, terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ and so on. And if I had had any sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’, ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act as learned doctors at ten.²⁰

Montaigne avoids the false language of certainty by using a set of terms that instead introduces a helpful uncertainty and flexibility into his thought process. These words are a set of tools for developing a healthier way of thinking, ‘softening’ rigid straight lines, ‘toning down’ black-and-white absolutism and instead creating space for contradiction, compromise and indecision in the very midst of the route. This is a vocabulary for changing the way of thinking that must be learned and practised. Having a syntactic language enabling the expression of doubt or contradiction – not a set of nouns but a series of functional route-seeking adverbs and conjunctions – makes it possible to have doubts and to be contradictory. Without a linguistic mechanism to help call forward these layers of feeling from the unconscious or implicit mind, it is impossible for them to exist in the conscious world. Montaigne was engaged in a lifelong apprenticeship, and part of the sanity of the Essays is due to the fact that he never stopped being willing to rethink and rework his ideas and thus he never reached – or even tried to reach – a conclusion. That is his creative and buoyant scepticism.

Montaigne’s Model of Self-Help

The programme of exercises typically contained within self-help books lead readers – theoretically – in a straight line from sickness to health. The imperative, instructive tone that they adopt establishes a sense of the counsellor–patient dynamic within the mind of the solitary reader and helps to impose a particular therapeutic framework. Warren Boutcher writes in The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe that the Essays have ‘recently been re-discovered as a kind of self-help book that is relevant to our time’.²¹ Yet, in his Essays Montaigne refuses to be explicitly instructive or to comply with any kind of permanently set framework. His tone is instead wryly comical, and it is this humour which, as Alexander Welsh describes in The Humanist Comedy, allows him to create a certain degree of mental ‘leeway’²² for himself. It is Montaigne’s capacity to create mental leeway, humour being only one of his methods for doing so, which is perhaps his most important contribution to psychology. It is his most valuable modification of the otherwise seemingly constrictive philosophy of Stoicism and the nuanced, discretionary quality most lacking in conventional self-help.

Marion Milner, a writer who later became a psychoanalyst, was reacting against the constraints of textbook psychology when, in 1926, she began keeping a diary. In A Life of One’s Own (1934) she went on to analyse her own diary writing experience:

Of course there were books on psychology, handbooks telling one how to be happy, successful, well-balanced, thousands of words of exhortation about how one ought to live. But these were all outside me; they seemed too remote, they spoke in general terms and it was hard to see how they applied in special cases; it was so fatally easy to evade their demands on oneself. Was there not a way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him? Perhaps, then, if one could not write for other people one could write for oneself.²³

Milner was looking for a genuinely self-directed therapy rather than one which was imposed upon her from the outside. As she explains in A Life of One’s Own, her diary writing project was inspired by reading Montaigne’s Essays:

I must have known vaguely what lay ahead of me, for I still have a crumpled piece of paper with a quotation which I had copied out, and which I remember carrying about in my pocket at the time:

[…] Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, ‘bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal’ – in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life in merely trying to run her to earth.²⁴

Milner is quoting an essay on Montaigne written by Virginia Woolf and published in The Common Reader in 1925. In turn, Woolf is quoting from Montaigne’s essay ‘On the inconstancy of the self’:

Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, generous, miserly and then prodigal – I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own logic is DISTINGUO.²⁵

This essay was first published in 1580, yet Montaigne returned to it at the end of his life to add more to his list of contradictory characteristics. In the Bordeaux copy of the Essays he inserted the words, ‘chaste, lecherous’, ‘learned, ignorant’, ‘generous, miserly and then prodigal’. The revisions that Montaigne made add further complexity to his already rich catalogue of personality traits, suggesting that as time passed he became to himself ever harder to pin down. Each contradictory pair is divided by only a comma; this removes any value judgement from the list and indicates how easy it is to shift from one state to its opposite. The final trio of traits that Montaigne added to this passage break up the pattern of pairs and move him even further from a binary understanding of human behaviour. The movement from ‘generous’ to ‘miserly and then prodigal’ defies conventional patterns of progression and instead follows a backwards-forwards motion that ends with Montaigne swinging towards wasteful extravagance rather than settling at a balanced Aristotelian middle ground. Montaigne’s ‘own logic’ is determined by his own personal preference, signalled here by the Latin term distinguo that is used in formal debates to declare that a distinction has been made. Montaigne’s additions defy the idea that mental clarity is associated with a minimalist stripping back or that contradiction and complexity signify a chaotic mind. The density of ideas that is created within the Essays by this gradual process of revision helps to demonstrate just how much is really contained within a person, and by extension just how much is at stake for a person in the act of living. Montaigne gives himself permission to wander as he thinks. He eschews maps or guidelines and as such his work offers up a model of a non-linear process that is markedly different to that provided by CBT self-help books and which perhaps more closely resembles the thinking shapes of psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud first read Montaigne’s Essays in 1914 as war broke out in Europe and his annotated copy of the text can be found today in The Freud Museum. The Essays would have offered Freud a model of self-directed analysis for they contain ‘the first sustained representation of human consciousness in Western literature’,²⁶ or as Montaigne put it himself in the essay ‘On Repentance’, ‘No man ever went more deeply into his matter’.²⁷ In Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff highlights the ‘genuine affinity between psychoanalysis and the psychological theories of Stoicism’,²⁸ and positions Freud – alongside Montaigne – within a long tradition of thinkers that were inspired by Stoicism: ‘The Stoic imagination […] produced a number of psychologists – Montaigne, Burton, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld – with whom it would be apt and even historically sound to compare to Freud’.²⁹ Rieff argues that it is Freud’s commitment to honest self-examination through writing that links him to Montaigne: ‘I know of only one writer who, in a mood or urbanity not unlike Freud’s, may be said to have resolved the problem of being honest about himself: Montaigne.’³⁰ Freud’s psychoanalytic work can be considered as an evolution of what Montaigne began when he retired from public life, turned inwards and made himself into his own subject matter. For in doing so, Montaigne began to translate the generalised theories of philosophy into something personal, specific and practical, and as such moved from philosophy into something that would come to be termed as psychology. By taking Stoicism personally and applying it to his own individual self, Montaigne demonstrated the differences both between and within individuals, and between general rules and particular practices.

In an interview with The Paris Review, the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips spoke of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, and more specifically, made a connection between psychoanalysis and the essay form that he himself has admired in Montaigne: ‘Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays – though they are rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be like essays […] There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed, and so on […] Essays can wander, they can meander’.³¹ Montaigne makes no attempt to think or to write in progressive sequence, for his content – namely his own psychological matter – cannot be arranged in a single, linear form. As he writes in the essay ‘How we weep and laugh at the same thing’, ‘We deceive ourselves if we want to make this never-ending succession into one continuous whole.’³²

In an interview with The Economist, Adam Phillips again discussed 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.

32Essays, I, 38, p. 265.

33London, E. H., ‘The Q&A: Adam Phillips. Poetry as Therapy’, The Economist, 29 March 2012, https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/qa-adam-phillips, accessed 15 April 2016.

34Susie Orbach, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (London: Profile Books, 2018), pp. 83–84.