I’m assessing and weighing up a large tome that has just been published with the assistance of the Ministry of Public Education: Psicoanalisi, arte e letteratura: Bibliografia generale 1900–1983 [Psychoanalysis, art and literature: a general bibliography 1900–1983] by Stefano Ferrari (Parma: Editrice Pratiche, 1985). An incredibly vast repertoire, containing almost seven thousand entries and accompanied by meticulous indexes: names, works, themes . . . in short, it is an exceptional tool and essential for anyone wishing to venture into the petrified forests where psychoanalysis runs alongside literature, firstly, but also art, cinema, criticism, etcetera. I can imagine the years of zeal and wasting away elapsed in libraries—and what libraries!—wearing out uncomfortable chairs and one’s youth; I can intuit the crises, the doubts, perhaps also the confusion in the act of discovering, as was described in the introduction, that after 1967–1968, “there has been practically no critic, theoretician, or historian of art or literature who, in newspapers, journals, or periodicals of different culture and humanity, has not dedicated space, to a more or less relevant and more or less explicit degree, to the theme of the relations between art and psychoanalysis. In addition to the traditional and still prolific thread of applied psychoanalysis, which continues to fill the pages of psychoanalytic journals (moreover increasingly numerous), there is now a truly unverifiable mass of other studies and interventions.” Thanks might be given to the well-regarded scholar who passed through this “unverifiable mass” and survived, and together with him, thanks might be given to the small publishing house which dared to publish the voluminous register.
In conclusion, a triumph? The testimony of an agreement made between psychoanalysis and art or literature, by now consolidated and peaceful? It would seem so, above all if one keeps in mind, after the first “applications” of psychoanalysis, the recent sophisticated orchestrations by critics and literati, who in these last years have read Freud, Jung, and especially Lacan passionately. Yet, on this immense production, by now diligently collected, a tenacious and often rather generic reserve seems always to have weighed, motionless. It is a kind of rumbling, a voice from below that continues to see in psychoanalysis a foreign, intrusive body and which can also be grasped, by contrast, in the demonstrative persistence of some of the scholars most involved in this agreement. Thus, the reader often has the impression of research that, increasingly elaborate and apparently exhaustive, is aimed at an ever-elusive object. Now, starting from within the psychoanalytic experience, I would like to try to clarify the meaning of this reserve, orienting myself through a point of view that does not seem to have emerged yet.
Analysis, strictly speaking, can be seen as a curious conversation in stages, in which the speaker—but also the listener—does not know (or should not know) where the conversation is going to end. In this situation of “double blindness,” a specific relationship between two interlocutors is delineated, through unexpected fragments, either verbal or nonverbal, which is always singular and radically different in relation to what could be assumed by both the established knowledge of the analyst and the anxious questioning of the analysand. This relationship condenses in itself, at every instant, the past, present (and future . . . up to a certain point) of personal occurrences variously layered and grafted together, which emerge with a blind force, almost groping. At the same time, these can seem evanescent, because they are born from a pratique du bavardage, as Lacan says, which is to say chatter—but how unusual!—at variable intervals and with deferred responses, by syncopation, without a real dialogue. Ultimately, the essence of analysis is here, in this curious apparatus, and it passes through the words and silences exchanged between two interlocutors.
At this point, a fundamental problem arises when it comes to giving an external account of an experience which is irreducible to all other types of dialogue or meeting hitherto contrived by men. Freud was the first to find himself faced with this difficulty, and with various fluctuations in approach opted for a narrative form of communication to some extent, which implied omissions, displacements, entanglements, and so on (this aspect of Freud’s writing has been examined very precisely by Mario Lavagetto in his recent Freud, la letteratura e altro [Freud, literature and more] (Turin: Einaudi, 1985).
The implicit basis of Freud’s operation was of course that it was possible to pass easily between the experience of the spoken word and the written word; that in this passage there were merely problems of expressive conversion and that the best way to resolve these was to be found in the literary tradition to which he adhered. Consequently, the singular chatter of psychoanalytic treatment became, in Freud’s writing, to his partial surprise, almost tales, narrative nuclei now more, now less elaborate. In this way, however, the analytic experience, predominantly oral, was received as the equivalent of a written text and as the ensemble of valid rules for the interpretation of written texts. This is confirmed by the frequent abuse, in recent years, of the term “text,” or the nearby one of “tale,” for almost any manifestation of analytic discourse. It is here that the implicit justification for any subsequent analysis of literary texts and works of art is rooted.
The first to turn in this direction was obviously Freud, and it is worth considering the reason behind the clear gap that can be seen between the disturbing grandeur of the real “clinical cases” (in particular “The Rat Man” and “The Wolf Man”) and the flatness which at times insinuates itself into the most famous writings of “applied” psychoanalysis, for example his essays on Leonardo da Vinci and the Moses of Michelangelo. Given what I have just said, it is not difficult to identify the reason. In the former, there remain abundant traces of the richness, of the rush, of the sudden which runs through the analytic dialogue. What speaks to us still today is precisely the disaggregation of different materials, their accumulation and chasing one another around new poles. In the latter, notions and definitions that emerge there, in those singular aggregates, are approximated to situations that are certainly related to those which arise in analysis, with common roots, but where the reordering effect of writing and aesthetic selection have intervened profoundly. We are therefore faced with different, nonhomologous planes—hence the sense of inanity which takes hold of us when faced with certain operational behaviors. To take a basic example: one can pursue in analysis every vicissitude of the so-called Oedipus complex, and here the Sophoclean tragedy has been an illuminating aid. The inverse is not true: the analysis of the character of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex is an artificial addition. A similar difficulty also arises in the most recent and detailed analyses of formal structures: a linguistic equivalence is always presupposed between situations which are not equivalent. To conclude: analysis proper is enriched, in Freud and after Freud, by surprises and accidents in the twists and turns of the conversation. The analysis of texts and works, whatever the level of intelligence or subtlety lavished on these, is constrained to remain in line at the check-out desk of the psychoanalytic library.
If I permit myself such a direct tone, it is because the cultural passage from the spoken to the written word no longer seems natural and exclusive with the introduction of electronic means of communication; its scope seems limited. At the same time, the peculiarities of the spoken word, up until now “preyed upon” culturally by the written word, come forth into the clear light. In Freud’s work, as in that of the psychanalysant literati who followed him, the privilege accorded to the written word is unreflective, almost absolute. Yet, while in Freud this privilege falls apart in the work of analysis, in the latter this is perpetuated in the most refined manners of the literary tradition. This also explains the weak reception of those who make this privilege the object of historical and anthropological research (among these, I will mention Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word [London: Methuen, 1982]).
Precisely this consciousness of what is radically new and different in the analytic experience—and which in certain ways is also archaic—could give meaning and fruitfulness to the wide array of studies involving psychoanalysis and art or literature. But it would do so on the condition of a true overturning of the object of examination. Analysis would no longer (or not only . . .) be disseminated into the boundless territories of literature, art, and various “humanities,” but rather give rise to curiosity, rhetorical scrutiny, and scientific interest in a mode of investigative dialogue which is probably the most significant innovation introduced into Western discourse after the “noble sophistry” of Protagoras and Socrates.