Granta Goes to Therapy

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Our Winter issue is now online and will be on newsstands next week!

Inside, you will find a tour de force essay by Sheila Heti, in which the novelist takes a spiritual-existential quest through the underworld of psychedelic drugs. ‘Medicine’, one practitioner reminds her. ‘We don’t say drug.’ With intimacy and casual command, Heti relays the images and revelations that came to her over a summer of ketamine, DMT, and LSD/MDMA treatments. 'In the ten days that followed, before my next appointment, I found it fun, in small and daily ways, to press myself, testingly, against the world, and to feel it, gently, pressing back.’

The California-born psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, who became, over the course of his career, the British Object Relations School’s greatest inheritor, discusses the stories we tell about ourselves in a new interview with Granta editor Thomas Meaney. ‘Most people reveal more truths about themselves through fictive representations than they do by stating the solemn and verifiable truths of their lives. No analyst I know in the United Kingdom would maintain that he or she was trying to get to the ‘truth’ beyond self-fictionalization. That is because to create fiction is to unconsciously tell the truth.’

Also in our pages you will find prose by Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Keegan, Anne Serre, Benjamin Kunkel, Camilla Grudova and Missouri Williams, poems by Robert Hass and Natalie Shapero, and selections from Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings, unearthed by her longtime assistant Jerry Gorvoy. Produced between 1951 and 1966, these dream records and process notes capture the struggle to make language record what’s really going on in our heads. ‘When I do not attack,’ she writes on one loose sheet, ‘I do not feel myself alive.’