Mike's notes on Katherine's text

Dialogue on Love. Eva Kosowski Sedgewick.

In this piece, Kosowski Sedgewick discusses her interaction with a therapist during a period toward the end of her life when she had contracted breast cancer and was terminally ill. She died a short time after writing it.

It is broadly concerned with the various ways in which her illness was affecting her work and her life in general during this period.

It is written in the first person and in a series of isolated sections which each focus on a particular encounter with the therapist. The style serves to slow down the pace of the narrative and complicate the reading. Some of the sections have the look of poems, with lines in italics and spaces around particular words and phrases. Often these highlighted details transpire to be important.

She describes the subjects that she discusses with the therapist, starting at the beginning of their meetings. She discusses notions of identity, her work which is in the field of queer studies, her family background, her recent breast cancer treatments and her sexual identity.

She believes that she has often had difficulties in therapy due to her tendency to over-intellectualise. She notices that she has often been misunderstood for who she is, both in her work and in her family life. In her work, she often discusses her sexual fantasies and therefore has come to be seen as sexually adventurous but she sees herself as fairly normal and restrained. She is in a straight up, heterosexual marriage.

She goes on to say that since she contracted cancer, she has been unable to imagine herself in these sexual fantasies. She feels that her sick body has no place in them. Her presence has become unsexy.

In another anecdote, she speaks about a recent experience getting her bloods taken at the hospital. The nurse has some difficulty taking blood from her and she becomes angry at the nurse and the nurse gets angry at her. It is only when the two cool off with one another, that the blood flows and the two find peace with one another.

Finally she talks about a recent occasion when she arrived to therapy early and saw her therapist walking about outside. She had just clumsily dislodged a chunk of mulch from the side of the path. She watched unseen as the therapist passed the dislodged clump and replaced it in the hole it had come from.

She enjoyed seeing this and, afterwards, wrote to a friend saying it was

‘an immediate involuntary substitution. Anonymous shrinks doing reparative work in their spare time’.

She suggests that she might be coming to love her therapist. She feels that the relationship she has with him is unlike any she’s had with a therapist in the past. Throughout this period of therapy and reflection she develops from being preoccupied with a fear of her cancerous future into a concern with dealing with the bodily reality of her present.