CHAPTER FOUR
Writing in psychoanalysis
Antonio Alberto Semi
The theme of writing in psychoanalysis is at once clearly delimited and quite broad. However, before dealing with the more specific question of this main focus, I would like to make a few observations on the broader Issue of writing—that is, the problems that writing itself, from its very origins, has posed for mankind. It must have been a truly ecstatic moment when man understood that a concrete fact—a mark on a tablet or a rock, a carving on a tree—could be linked to a thought. No activity is more consistently symbolic than writing, and no activity more consistently recalls the original reality of the symbol, in both its material and Its psychic make-up.
Narrowing the field, I will give only two examples drawn from our two main cultural roots: ancient Greece and Judaism. Indeed, these two cultures—or some of their important representatives—have dealt, in quite different ways, with the problems and possibilities offered by writing.
The classic reference point of the Greek tradition is a text by Plato on writing. I have taken the liberty of citing it at length because at least two passages concern us quite closely. In the first, Socrates, according to Plato, tells Phaedrus (in the dialogue of the same name) the following story:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the Inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses. … But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutillty of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. [“Phaedrus”, 274–275]
This is the first passage: it is radically contrary to the idea that wisdom—which is to say true knowledge—can be acquired through reading. It is noteworthy here that Plato shifts the focus from the discovery of writing to its use. In a certain sense, then, this well-known passage strays from our theme, so to speak: it concerns readers more than writers. But further on there is another short piece that concerns us more directly. Socrates poses to Phaedrus an analogy between sowing and the transmission of knowledge: writing is compared to the “gardens of Adonis”, small pots in which seeds germinate rapidly but die in eight days. True sowing is, instead, linked to oral transmission. Socrates, however, points out that
… in the garden of letters [the philosopher] will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth. [“Phaedrus”, 276; italics added]
The first excerpt, we could venture, represents the relational point of view, the second, the intrapsychic.
The other cultural root of our problem is Judaism. It is interesting to note that in classical Greek culture it is a written text, on the topic of writing, that praises the oral transmission of knowledge, whereas in Judaism reflections on writing relied for many centuries upon oral tradition. Only in the first centuries of the Vulgar era were these reflections collected in the Mishnah and still later in the Talmud. In the Hebrew tradition it is said that God gave two laws to Moses upon the Sinai, the written law and the oral law. It is this twofold nature of the law that attributes value to the blank spaces, between the letters and between the lines, of the written law. Without dwelling on questions of Jewish mysticism, however, I would like to emphasize two elements of the Judaic contribution to the problems of writing. The first concerns contents: writing serves first and foremost to deliver the Law. The second element is striking and has been the subject of many Midrashim: the Law was given upon the Sinai to a person, Moses, who had a speech defect. It is written:
And Moses spake before the Lord, saying, “Behold, the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of unclrcumclsed lips?” [Ex., 6.12]
Shortly thereafter it continues:
And the Lord said unto Moses, “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. Thou shalt speak all that I command thee: and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of his land.” [Ex., 7.1–2]
Aaron, of course, possesses a long rod that turns into a snake, eating other snakes and moistening the land it touches. Aaron is also the one who will enter into the promised land, while Moses can only look at it. What interests me here, however, is the symbolic personification in Moses of the incompleteness of the word and the distinction that is drawn between those who (like Aaron) deliver the law and the commands of God orally, and those who, instead, receive it and write it down. Thus, just as the blank spaces on the written page take on meaning, so the difference between Moses and Aaron—between the person who carries a written text and the one who formulates it verbally in an intelligible form—represents a difference in the state of thought, which I will try to describe later.
I don't believe I can take these scholarly analyses any further, but I would like to point out a possible analogy between the Platonic reference to writing as play and the figures of Moses and Aaron. In both cases, we could say, the element of solitude is in the foreground. In Plato's case it is the life-giving, playful qualities of solitude that are stressed; in Moses and Aaron the accent falls on the element of inefficacy and yet of truth. The fact remains that, in both cultures, the word, in order to effectively transform others, must follow certain rules: those of the dialogues and symposia among philosophers in the first case and those of language in the latter. The word of the text is ineffectual if it is not spoken.
Before closing these historical observations, however, I would like to point out a relative timelessness, or a relative constant, if I may be allowed the oxymoron. There is no need to emphasize that this ancient debate concerns us directly, since one of the issues of psychoanalytic writing is whether it can serve to transmit psychoanalysis. But is it possible to transmit knowledge through writing? Or, what is meant by knowledge in our case? Or, more simply, is the transmission of knowledge possible only through writing? Or, lastly, is it possible to transmit knowledge only orally?
It is obvious that I am concerned with the inaugural moments of writing. Thus, a third observation on the birth of writing might help highlight one of the two elements that the Hebrew root gives us: that of the Law, and thus of power.
One man witnessed the zero degree of writing: he had the chance to observe a group of people begin, if not to write, at least to understand the significance of writing. This person was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote about it in A World on the Wane (1961, ch. 25: “A Writing Lesson”). While studying the Nambikwara, an Amazonian tribe unfamiliar with writing, he handed out pieces of paper and pencils to some tribe members. The chief observed Lévi-Strauss (who was also the chief of his group) taking notes during the interviews, and he began scrawling long wavy lines on the paper in response to the anthropologist's questions. However, except to discuss some “clarifications” when Lévi-Strauss asked him, the tribal chief refused to say what he had written (which, of course, was non-existent). Then he began to use the pieces of paper to issue commands to his own small tribe and demonstrate his power. Lévi-Strauss comments,
So the Nambikwara had learnt what it meant to write! But not at all, as one might have supposed, as the result of a laborious apprenticeship. The symbol had been borrowed, but the reality remained quite foreign to them. Even the borrowing had had a sociological, rather than an intellectual object: for it was not a question of knowing specific things, or understanding them, or keeping them in mind, but merely of enhancing the prestige and authority of one individual—or one function—at the expense of the rest of the party. A native, still in the period of the stone age, had realized that even if he could not himself understand the great instrument of understanding he could at least make it serve other ends. [p. 290; italics added]
In a rapid excursus on the history of writing, Lévi-Strauss then argues that “… nothing of what we know of writing, or of its role in evolution (p. 291)” justifies an “intellectual” conception of the origin of writing. On the contrary, “… when writing makes its début … it seems to favour rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind” (p. 292). Archaeologists studying the third millennium—the age of the birth of cuneiform writing— agree on this thesis. Writing arises with the Law, or, if we wish, with a social organization meant to exploit large masses of individuals:
… the use of writing for disinterested ends and with a view to satisfactions of the mind in the fields either of science or the arts, is a secondary result of its invention—and may even be no more than a way of reinforcing, Justifying, or dissimulating its primary function. [p. 292]
I believe that this reference to a primary/secondary category is applicable to our writing as well: we assume our responsibility for attempting to broaden the secondary outcome while remaining aware of the fact that, in the act of writing, we are also dealing with our inner savage or inner child at play with bows and arrows. (Freud, 1900a).
Returning to the problem at hand, we must first of all observe that, if writing in psychoanalysis is already difficult, then writing about writing psychoanalysis is even more so. My discussion of the problem will begin—as we are wont to do, somewhat superstitlously, religiously, and, lastly, scientifically—with the writings of Freud. Observations on writing can be found in a number of Freud's texts and in particular in some letters. When I first began reflecting on the topic, I thought of starting off with one of two texts written for publication: either the early writings on hysteria, or the introductory chapter to the case of the Wolf Man (Freud, 1918b [1914]). The first instance, I thought, offered the advantage of allowing us to observe an inaugural situation that, to a certain though lesser degree, all of us have had to face (if for no other reason than to write up the case histories needed to become associate members). In the second instance, on the other hand, Freud had already made fundamental contributions to the study of the human soul and, as was his habit, tossed a stone into the pond of ideas, polemically addressing a fundamental problem: the relevance that writing in psychoanalysis has for the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge.
I am unable to give either a purely historical or a purely thematic account of my patient's story; I can write a history neither of the treatment nor of the illness, but I shall find myself obliged to combine the two methods of presentation. It is well known that no means has been found of in any way introducing into the reproduction of an analysis the sense of conviction which results from the analysis itself. Exhaustive verbatim reports of the proceedings during the hours of analysis would certainly be of no help at all; and in any case the techniques of the treatment make it impossible to draw them up. So analyses such as this are not published in order to produce conviction in the minds of those whose attitude has hitherto been recusant and sceptical. The intention is only to bring forward some new facts for investigators who have already been convinced by their own clinical experiences. [Freud, 1918b [1914], p. 13]
Here, then, the import of writing is greatly reduced. Freud clearly affirms the point that one is writing for insiders, those who are already convinced of the psychoanalytic method. It is interesting that he poses the problem not in terms of scientific demonstration, but in terms of rhetorical efficacy and the degree of persuasiveness that psychoanalytic writing can have. This degree is, in fact, close to zero. Freud issued these warnings within the context of his disagreement with Jung and Adler, after having recognized that the resistances to psychoanalysis had shifted. At first, these had been expressed in the pure and simple negation of the existence of psychoanalytic phenomena. The dispute with Jung and Adler, instead, had the novel feature that the phenomena were not negated, but interpreted in a reductive or at any rate partial manner, incompatible with the entire theoretic corpus elaborated up to that moment (Freud, 1914).
I believe that these questions on resistance to psychoanalysis must still be kept in mind (in the context, of course, of present-day reality) by those of us who publish a journai of psychoanalysis—a journal that, by its very nature, is directed not only at members of our own psychoanalytic community but at all its interested readers. What resistances do these readers have? What is resistance to psychoanalysis like nowadays? How many of our readers still belong to those whom I call (to myself) the “pot of soup types”? [It may be recalled that Freud, in Lecture XXIX of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933a [1932], noted, “But if you ask how much of dream-interpretation has been accepted by outsiders—by the many psychiatrists and psychotherapists who warm their pot of soup at our fire (incidentally without being very grateful for our hospitality) … —the reply gives little cause for satisfaction” (p. 8). If this sentence contains, as I think it does, an allusion to the witch's kitchen scene in Goethe's Urfaust, then those doing the cooking are the bogeys.]
And how many, instead, have an interest in psychoanalysis? To write psychoanalysis—which is neither “describing psychoanalysis” nor “writing about psychoanalysis”—in the attempt, through the act of writing, to accomplish an act of persuasion (in the most noble sense of the word), runs the risk of attempting an impossible task. And what is the sense of persuading?
We can describe several facets of this impossible, yet very real task (like analysis itself), beginning with the psychic functions necessary for writing, writing as a combination of functions necessary for psychoanalytic elaboration, and the description of the other, the stranger (or the reader in this case), and the vicissitudes of the writer-reader pair. I wonder if, in this sense, the editorial board-author relationship is not to the author-reader relationship as analysis is to the relationship between the patient and a significant figure in his past. I ask myself this question and immediately reply in the negative, not because this is not true, but because there can be no working context, no setting, or no framework for analysing this relationship. Still, I wonder.
These questions are even more pertinent in a broader context: for instance, no novels are written in Italian any longer. As we know, this incapacity or impossibility has cultural origins; in other countries, such as Germany, the United States, England, or Israel, there are still outstanding novelists. Italy, however, has a novel-writing crisis. Therefore, we might also ask ourselves whether this does not also concern, albeit in a particular form, the paucity of satisfactory clinical articles. In other words, the specific crisis of individuality and subjectivity that is moving across our culture could take on a particular form in our country, reflected both in the “novel-writing crisis” and in clinical psychoanalytic writing. The editorial board, then, would find itself faced with a reflection—in the visual sense of the word—of something that lies beyond and proves to be an unsurmountable limitation.
As far as Freud is concerned, we should first consider a well-known observation from the introduction to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). I believe that an important variant of our problem is to be found here. (It bears emphasizing, though, that this was written well after Studies on Hysteria, 1895d). We can suppose that the personal element in those writings was much less conscious than we think of in rereading them today. At any rate, in the preface Freud writes very simply, “This book has a further subjective significance for me personally—a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it” (p. XXVI). He is referring to his reaction to his father's death. The Interpretation of Dreams is, as we know, also a lengthy working-through of his relationship with his father. And Freud's relationship with his father, to suggest a connection with the quote from Lévi-Strauss, also involves power. But what interests me here is the fact that only after writing it was Freud able to think clearly about this fact.
What is the nature, then, of a process that expresses a thought, unknown to the author, by means of thoughts that have been elaborated at length and with difficulty? This question leads us from a relational to an intrapsychic level to query whether, in investigating the latter, the question of writing psychoanalysis for publication does not take on another meaning.
In addition to the texts written for publication, we are also well acquainted with Freud's letters; these contain a number of observations, at times confession-like disclosures, about Freud's writing. An example is the letter of 3 December 1897, to Fliess. This letter is of great interest because it compares Freud's difficulty in writing at that time both to a dream in which he was in Rome, walking the streets and surprised that the street and shop signs were in German, and to his difficulty in getting to Rome, linked to his infatuation “for the hero worship of the Semitic Hannibal”. But let us look at the description of his difficulty in writing:
Probably it was not an auspicious day, however; the new idea which occurred to me in my euphoria retreated, no longer pleased me, and is now waiting to be born again. Every now and then ideas dart through my head which promise to realize everything, apparently connecting the normal and the pathological, the sexual and the psychological problem, and then they are gone again and I make no effort to hold onto them because I indeed know that neither their disappearance nor their appearance in consciousness is the real expression of their fate. On such quiet days as yesterday and today, however, everything in me is very quiet, terribly lonely, I cannot talk about it to anyone, nor can I force myself to work, deliberately and voluntarily as other workers can. I must wait until something stirs in me and I become aware of it. And so I often dream whole days away. [p. 284]
As can be seen, daydreaming takes the place of writing, though it is certainly less fruitful.
Writing, in its actuality, is strictly bound to solitude, and when one is unable to write one experiences a different kind of solitude, in which “all is silence and terrible loneliness”. I will return to this point below. From this passage and others it is apparent that Freud wrote in spurts, when he felt that the pressure within him had reached the end of its gestation, the right moment for its release. Freud experienced periods in which he was incapable of elaborating anything, which alternated with others in which his ideas linked together, building Auffassungen1 that became highly persuasive to him and subjectively true.
Then it would happen that, in writing, these ideas appeared to be lost, and perhaps the writing just lay there, incomplete or unable to be completed. At length, in a new burst, he would sit down again at his desk and rewrite the work. An entire space had to be recovered and filled between the “vision”—of which he spoke explicitly as early as 1895—and his other writings. [“During an industrious night last week, when I was suffering from that degree of pain which brings about the optimal condition for my mental activities, the barriers suddenly lifted, the veils dropped, and everything became transparent—from the details of the neuroses to the determinants of the consciousness” (letter, 20 October 1895, p. 146). He adds, “only in attempting to report it to you … the whole matter became obvious to me”.] The difficulty lies in the shift from fantasy to writing and to scientific writing. (At any rate, Freud often speaks of the connection between fantasy and scientific creativity, as, for example, when he speaks of the metapsychological “witch”.) Here Freud points out something about the function of writing that I would like to dwell on: this is the bridging function between two representational systems, which, in my opinion—and also as described by him—exists between the systems Pcs. and Cs. and not between the Ucs. and the Pcs. The first system is one of both thing- and word-representations, typical of the Pcs.; the other qualifies the Cs. and concerns word-representations only. Freud says little about the censorship between these two systems, although at the end of chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) he indicates its importance. The whole of chapter 6 of the same work also seems to be devoted to the fundamental description of how the Cs can accommodate configurations of thought that are characteristic of the Ucs.
In the metapsychological essays, attention is mostly centred on developing an explanation of the unconscious system's rules and on the transition between unconscious and preconscious. But, as we know, from then on Freud was reluctant to speak about the functioning of the barrier between Pcs and Cs. [Note, for example, the fact that one of the “lost” essays that was to constitute Metapsychology was devoted to consciousness (C. L. Musatti, Introduction to Opere di Sigmund Freud, vol. 8, pp. XI ff.) and the editor's note to Metapsicologia (ibid., p. 3). There remains, however, the important treatment of Section 6 of the essay on “The Unconscious” (Freud, 1915e) and the further references, identified in the notes. For the characteristics of the “conscious”, for the description of ways of becoming conscious, and for its role in constructing the theory, see An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), which contains a great many observations on this subject, often made in reference or in passing. For a more systematic description, although this, too, for the purpose of developing the description of the unconscious, see Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g, esp. ch. 4) and The Ego and the Id (1923b).] Also, as late as 1938, in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), Freud was to state “the starting-point for this investigation is provided by a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description—the fact of consciousness” (p. 157).
However, our task here is to observe, investigate, and discuss an activity belonging to that very system (after the introduction of the second hypothesis, this activity is even more difficult to investigate).
Up to this point, I have attempted to illustrate several fundamental issues about writing in general and in psychoanalysis in particular. Thus we have looked at the auxiliary characteristics of writing (mentioned by Plato), the symbolic characteristics, expressing relationships of power, connected to the Law and the father (through Moses, Freud, and a Nambikwara chieftain), the need for material solitude, and the need for an inner permeability that acts as a safeguard against loneliness. But we have also observed the existence of a relational aspect, between author and reader, and another, more specific one, between author and, shall we say, the psychoanalytic Journal as a group. This has allowed us to glimpse a critical condition that goes beyond our immediate scope, belonging, as it does, to our times and pertaining to the difficulty in the constitution of the subject—or of a new way of being subjects—in our culture. We should note also that this is an obvious contradiction, since something as exquisitely individual as subjectivity is manifestly codified, in all its possible modalities, by culture.
I will now add another probative element to this consideration: a great many of the manuscripts that are sent to the Rivista are not conceived primarily for print but are intended for presentation at meetings between colleagues (Institutes, Congresses, etc.); only later do they become articles. Sometimes it happens that the greatest resistance encountered by the editorial board occurs when the author is asked to change the style of his text from that of an oral presentation to that of an article. On some occasions it has been objected that it is not permissible to interfere with personal style—a sacrosanct objection, provided we do not confuse style with genre.
I would like to attempt a definition of some symptomatic characteristics of this conduct. Compared to writing an article, oral communication, such as a paper given at a Congress or read to a group of colleagues, may present less difficulty for some, while others find it more difficult. The proper compilation of a bibliography, the accuracy in quoting a text, the straightening up of grammar and syntax would seem to be for many a vile task. We can modify the guidelines for authors to make them clearer and simpler but I do not believe that this is where the problem lies. On the one hand, the rigid rules of written language—which, however, become more elastic and yielding the more one uses them—cannot be disregarded past a certain point (e.g. correct syntax and vocabulary). On the other hand, we cannot fail to observe certain conventions or norms according to which the boundary between quotation and plagiarism is established through the use of conventional elements, such as quotation marks and the page number that the passage is quoted from. But our authors are all persons with a long experience of studying and reading; if only by reading, they must have learned not only how to write, but also how to recognize the rules that govern it. No, that is not the problem. The problem is that the other person, the addressee of communication, is present during the oral communication and absent when we are writing. An author writes for himself and does not need to verify (for himself) the origin of an excerpt he is quoting: he knows that he knows it. The problem, then, arises from the fact that the written communication—since writing, even if it is not meant to be read, is a form of communication—must be precise in order to convey even a limited effect. But what does “precise” mean?
I think all of us have on occasion scribbled a note for fear of forgetting a dream, part of a therapeutic session, or something we had to buy, and we have done it in an evocative manner rather than in detail. Likewise, I think it has happened at one time or another that we have then been unable to reconstruct exactly the sequence of that session or have found ourselves staring blankly at four hastily scrawled words, unable to overcome repression.
Writing with clarity should prevent this from happening. We cannot expect the power of evocation to be completely preserved, and we must acknowledge that repression proper has perhaps been substituted by the repression of the affect. The effort is worth making, however, since this may render certain contents, otherwise forever lost to consciousness, accessible, as Freud, too, reminds us concerning negation (1925h).
The fact is that the Cs is part of the ego, but it functions according to its own rules. For example, it does not have its own mnemic systems; the representations it receives can enter consciousness because, on the one hand, they are afforded attention (a little-studied function). On the other hand, other functions—pertaining to another system—contribute to the creation of representations by cathecting traces deposited in the various mnemic systems. It is not without significance, then, that reading is a system that uses visual perceptions to induce word representations and that writing constitutes the translation of sets of word representations into visually perceptible material signs. We could perhaps say that writing is a substitutive activity by means of which the ego devises an artificial memory for the Cs. The theory is not new, but it deserves reconsideration, if we clarify that in this instance attention must be projected outward and activate perception, and that affects and representations once again go different ways.
Come on now, it could be objected, what are you getting at? What secret can be unveiled through the study of writing, and of psychoanalytic writing in particular? And these bits of metapsychology that you bring up, isn't their time over?
I shall deal with the last question first, not by addressing its substance, but, more analitico2, by linking it to solitude and to the crisis involving the Individual nowadays. Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology is, in its entirety, a monument to the ability on the part of the conscious of representing what it will never be able to perceive directly: the enigma of the body from which the ego itself originates, the enigma of the id, the secrets of the unconscious in the systematic sense of the term. These enigmas and secrets constitute not only a theoretical puzzle; each individual must discover how to recognize this puzzle and how to become acquainted with it within himself, in the terms that best suit him, if he wishes somehow to become a conscious subject. So it is perhaps not a coincidence that the so-called crisis of metapsychology is contemporary to the crisis of the individual in western society.
Let us now return to the two kinds of loneliness—one terrible and the other necessary for the material act of writing—referred to by Freud.
Winnlcott's “The Capacity to be Alone” (1958), which instinctively (and therefore preconsclously) comes to mind, began as a paper delivered to the British Society of Psychoanalysis in 1957. In this fine piece of work, Wlnnicott pursues ways of describing the capacity to be alone from a Freudian and then a Klelnlan point of view and then rapidly proceeds from a “three-body” to a “two-body” relationship, which is more congenial to his thinking. The paper is very short but, as often is the case with short works and short dreams, full of implications and meaning. It must be noted that Winnicott accepts the Kleinian hypothesis of an ego that, although immature, already exists at birth: on the basis of this, he argues that “the ego immaturity is naturally balanced by ego-support from the mother. In the course of time the individual introjects the ego-supportive mother and in this way becomes able to become alone without frequent reference to the mother or mother symbol” (p. 32). This is based on the assumption, which many disagree with, that the mother “in the early days and weeks, was temporarily identified with her infant, and for the time being was interested in nothing else but the care of her own infant” (p. 36; italics added).
This paper could be discussed at length, but what I wish to emphasize here, besides the idea regarding the ego which I have already mentioned, is that (with little comment), Wlnnicott links his concepts of individuality and of the individual to the capacity for being alone. It is likely that the basis for this can be verified, but only if we restrict the concept of “the capacity to be alone”. What does not appear, or is absent from Winnlcott's theorizing, in this paper at least, is the notion of a subject. Now it seems to me that individuation and subjectlvlzatlon are two processes that need to be kept distinct, and that the former is necessary for the latter. But subjectivization is not strictly necessary for daily life and at any rate heavily depends upon the structure of the personal equation that results from overcoming the oedipal conflict and working out the infantile processes during adolescence.
Such a connotation of subject is clearly different and less sophisticated than in Lacan and personally leaves me with the impression that the hidden goal is that of the disappearance of the subject. On the other hand, I believe we can imagine the subject as complex, uneven, lacunal, in continual remaking, but also supported by the functioning of the ego and its conscious areas, which, even if reduced or dramatized, remain nevertheless the sole light guiding us in the darkness of our quest.
In this context, let us once again reflect upon the vicissitudes of writing from the time it is first learned, as well as on the vicissitudes of psychoanalytic writing.
One of the extraordinary things we have a chance to observe about writing is the phenomenon whereby children (whose complex inner world we are acquainted with, thanks, in part, to psychoanalytic research, and whose enormous learning capacity we constantly witness) not only have to make a great effort to learn to write, but are unable to write in the full meaning of the word. Not until adolescence, at the earliest, do children learn how to write, and then only a minority truly become capable of writing. Yet, children are capable of extraordinary thinking.
Cesare Musatti spoke (and also wrote, I believe) of having learnt to write in this sense at around the age of eighteen, when he suddenly understood that he could actually write what he thought and, moreover, could even reflect upon what he had thought by rereading his own writing. Musatti also jokingly maintained that every psychoanalytic congress and every piece of psychoanalytic writing has the same theme: what is psychoanalysis? In that paradoxical style he loved, he thus expressed a truth that we are all acquainted with: psychoanalysis is a totality, and chopping it up into small pieces kills it. But it is a totality because it is a discipline, and a construct, that reflects the unity of the individual and the uniqueness of the subject.
Writing psychoanalysts, from this point of view, is not an impossible undertaking; rather, it is a need that demands to be attended to, a condition of psychic structure. It is also to be understood in the multiple sense, as in the expression “writing one's own psychoanalysis”. Each person has his or her own psychoanalytic “theory”, and his or her own analytic “history”—a vestige perhaps of the Familienroman3. Hence the difficulty of our task as editors and readers: we can pretend we are evaluating a text, but we inevitably find ourselves faced with the possibility that the author will not play along, loudly asserting that it was he who was evaluated and not the text.
Paraphrasing a famous saying, we could say that the area of the page is the projection of the psychic apparatus' extension. No other derivation is likely. The psyche is extended, but does not know it (Freud, 1941f [1938]).
Thus we find ourselves trapped between two apparently contrasting considerations. On the one hand, it is necessary to write psychoanalysis. On the other hand, writing psychoanalysis is impossible, just as it is impossible to represent, at a conscious level, the uneven, rent, contradictory, and yet unique complexity of the psychic apparatus. And it is likewise impossible to convey psychoanalysis through writing.
Writing in psychoanalysis is therefore concerned with limitations and gaps: limitations of the individual psychic apparatus as well as of the written page and of writing itself, and limitations of logic and reason; notwithstanding distortions and rationalizations, links are effected in order to cover up the discontinuities of the conscious psyche. How rare it is to come across an article that states that a problematic situation has been encountered and then admits that no reasonable solution has been found! How difficult it is to identify a phenomenon and declare at the same time that our eyes are new enough to see it, and our psyches are too old to comprehend it!
The solitude of writing permits a tragic exercise of intellectual honesty that shuns conspiratory solidarity and tolerates a conscious reflection upon oneself, as occurs in another state of consciousness: sleep. It is a narcissistic exercise, an asocial task, that opens up to the social only in wakefulness and in exchanges with readers and colleagues (although it continues to preserve its asocial dimension). Any text that is written only for the sake of writing and not reading is, for me, something analogous to a dream; thus it is often linked to the daydream, as a creation of the compromise that thwarts the realization of material writing.
But this itself becomes a big headache when we are dealing with a task that we term editorial. We certainly cannot enter into the dream, but only evaluate how well a piece approaches social communicability.
It is for this very reason that I believe that, just as consciousness has at its disposal a number of indicators that allow it to identify the contents necessary to undertake its tasks, so the Rivista, too, must have a structure that consents to the identification of its material contents. Just as the conscious, by applying a label of origin (“Made in Germany”), identifies the existence of a particular content and establishes, for instance, that it is a dream (i.e. a psychic event concerning something that occurs in sleep), or a memory (i.e. something that can be conceived only by locating it in the past), or a fantasy (i.e. a thought that is not concerned with perception), so the Rivista must be able to recognize whether a text falls into the category of pure speculation, or is a description of a remembered state or event (e.g. the recollection of a session), or is something that is in and of itself totally inconceivable but can nevertheless be interpolated for the sake of continuity.
The woe of what we actually do (the meticulous proof-reading, the laying out of a text, the not always felicitous communication with authors, the relations among the editorial group members) takes on a dimension, or a breadth, that should, I believe, be occasionally considered, in order to recognize the Utopian scope of this work and reflect with some self-irony on the omnipotent and indispensable illusions that lie behind it.
NOTES
1. Auffassungen: concepts.
2. More analitica: in analytical fashion.
3. Familienroman: family romance.