It has been said that this book is something closer to a memoir than a work of scholarship. I don’t quite understand the distinction, or rather, I’m not sure what the pressure is on the side of the reader that makes that distinction an important means of orienting oneself in the face of the question—what is this that I have before me? I suppose, in a way, being somewhat without that particular anxiety, I allow myself to blur the line between what is personal and impersonal throughout this work, but it must be said that in doing so, I take Freud as my model.
As Jacques Derrida asked in To Speculate—On “Freud” (1991), “how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a world-wide institution its birth?” (p. 531). Perhaps this question, this doubt even, could be transformed into a point of affirmation. It did. Isn’t it marvelous? No other institution is born of this same abyss and no other institution must wrestle with it so much as psychoanalysis. Freud is the unmoved mover. Psychoanalysis is one of the strangest but perhaps most astonishing of institutions and practices.
So my anxiety in this work is less about the problems of self-r evelation, nor the constraints of autobiography, but rather the life and death of psychoanalysis itself. It is simply a fact that Freud’s writing created a worldwide institution. It is perhaps also a fact that this psycho analytic institution is now in trouble. This historical juncture, over a century after its strange birth, is certainly my point of anxious orientation. While this work begins with the feeling that something of the nature of what is personal and passionate about psychoanalysis has been lost—in particular from the position of a once analysand, now psychoanalyst—rather than expound upon the idea of what has gone missing, which I do not think would take us very far, this work attempts to tell a part of the story of how one becomes a psychoanalyst.
This story cannot be told without saying something about my relationship to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy—that is my train-ing—but intends to use this dialog to show what in psychoanalysis changes the relationship between a subject and thinking, a change in the relationship we hold to knowledge on the whole. This also entails a shift in the love one maintains for precious interlocutors. In fact, I might wager that the former is only possible by virtue of the latter.
Divisions like the one proposed to exist between scholarship and memoir currently exist uncritically in psychoanalysis to a fault, in particular those drawn between theory and practice, or even between truth and falsity, as if memoir, for example, fell easily on one side or the other. I do not abide by this divide, and certainly not as one that is simply so, mapped with any ease. That being said, the incongruous hope of this piece of work is to force these two to work in tandem, and to do so through telling some part of the story of a psychoanalyst’s relation to theory in the process of trying to come to terms with what it means to practice psychoanalysis.
Lacan, for one, was often wary of certain false divisions, especially when they obscured a particular set of boundaries crucial to him and to psychoanalytic work; namely, the division between conscious and unconscious, between speaker and spoken of, between body and word, along with the enigma of the difference between the sexes. For Lacan, psychoanalysis uniquely forces a confrontation with these impossible, inevitable, divisions and barriers. He noticed that what a patient will come to say to an analyst that will have a critical effect on his or her life will be born as if from this gulf, this abyss.
Significant events seem to gather around these fault lines and highlight them, beyond all conscious intentionality, questioning most claims of ownership. The notion, dare I say hubris, that any given person would be able to sufficiently map a fault of this kind a priori is impossible. Such is the strange impossibility of psychoanalytic work. It is to these divisions and their unique personal elaboration that I am more wed than any contemporary means of orienting a readership.
So with this mind, and by way of an introduction to the work, I’d like to begin with a story that I have come to see as having an important structural relationship to what it was that I wanted to write in this book. In a conversation with the philosopher Alain Badiou, someone who we will spend some time with in this book, the joke of the three second Lacanian session came up: You walk in, barely utter three words, the analyst stands up, the session is finished. It is always one way of dismissing a Lacanian, to bring up an exaggerated version of the practice of cutting a session. Lacanian or not, the psychoanalyst in fantasy, and perhaps in humor as well, is always someone who either throws you out or keeps you forever. And certainly for some, it is difficult to tell whether it is in staying or leaving that one lives or dies.
The joke however, this time around, was meant a little differently. Badiou said that what he would like is to write a philosophical book equivalent to the Lacanian session. Being, Subject, Truth—finished. That was it. Done. This was all that was left for him to say. The sentiment for me in the face of this joke was not only laughter, but also lament. I wish that the joke were true. I wish that was all that needed to be said. I wish that the three-second session worked. Like jokes that play with the impossible, it is funny because we all share the impossible desire to be said and done. It is, in its way, a desire for death—interminable work finding its quickened end.
Badiou has spent far more than three seconds, a lifetime in fact, writing about these words. Perhaps the reason this joke struck me as it did was because his work does in fact cut in the Lacanian sense of cutting through—carving a new edge, creating a new surface. I found in Badiou’s work a theoretical clarity and it was a relief to see someone contemporary put psychoanalytic thought to such rigorous use. Badiou, through Lacan, distills the contemporary problems of thought in relation to philosophy, touching on everything from science and mathematics, to art, literature, and politics.
It would not have escaped me that even he, an idealized master who has found a way to cut, longs for an end. The joke, no less the wish— bound by this figure of death—is certainly the dilemma. And it is this dilemma that Badiou uses throughout to frame his theoretical system: the problem, as he calls it, of modernity. To my consternation, it was not from having escaped this dilemma that Badiou recognized it, which would simply be another fantasy that he who leaves is the one who knows. “Modernity,” Badiou says,
means not being able to choose reasonably in what concerns the relation between mastery and truth. Is truth disjoined from the master? … . But then it is entirely obscure … . Is truth conjoined to the master? But in this case, it becomes a sort of immanent terror, an implacable erotic transference … whether the master is sacrificed to an anonymous power or whether it demands we sacrifice ourselves for the love of him, it is the possibility of choice that vanishes (Badiou, 1998/2005b, p. 53).
Leaving this idealized figure or remaining bound to them is neither a choice. If the possibility of choice vanishes, what else is there to ask for than an end? Eternal categories, such as Being, Subject, and Truth, seem necessary once again. We must, Badiou pleads, find a way to think.
Despite a rich and hardly negligible history between Freudian thought and philosophy, the tie is an increasingly tenuous one. The problems of choice and subjectivity, certainly philosophical problems, were taken up in psychoanalytic theory by Freud in questions concerning love and desire, object-choice, the super-ego, and sublimation, to name just a few. Ironically, if Badiou brings these categories back to the table through a reading of Lacan, he does so quite without the psychoanalytic community. This book tries to lay the ground for a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and philosophy—a task much too large for what I wish could be the beauty of a short session.
Nevertheless, these categories, as Badiou named them—Being, Subject, and Truth—have their place in this work. It was in thinking about this joke that I found an important relationship between these categories and the dreams that I had decided to let act as the major organizing force of this work. The dreams seem to contain the joke’s very structure. Why these dreams? They are the closest I have gotten to anything like a cutting word, and, it is in their trajectory that I was able to find some means of conclusion. It was through them that I was able to approach this question of the life and death of psychoanalysis, therefore marking the trajectory of a certain path one takes in becoming a psychoanalyst.
This book addresses philosophy and psychoanalysis through the strange medium of my dreams. Psychoanalytically, dreams are, as Freud perhaps too famously said, the royal road, and being a psychoanalyst it is the only road I know how to take. Is this really the place to cross once again with this much older discipline? You’ll have to decide for yourself. Dreams, as we know, formally condense an almost infinite number of threads into an image, narrative, or sensation, in something not unlike the span of seconds, often with a biting sense of humor or punning. This determination provided me with a certain momentum that felt necessary and intrinsic to this work, a movement that went from theory to dream, and from dream back to theory.
Psychoanalytically speaking, this does not mean that the work or dream is closed-in, and just as the cutting short of a session brings it to an end, however quickly, it is also meant to provide or provoke the place of an opening. So it was in the process of writing about these dreams that I realized that they had some equivalence to what was a passing joke between someone I greatly admire and myself. Sometimes jokes can be the best of all possible interpretations.
This work revolves around three dreams and three figures. The first dream that you will read, the vase and the letter, situates a question using the image from the dream of a letter sealed inside the hollow of a vase. The letter comes to represent the attempt to secure an identity, most intimately that of being a psychoanalyst, beyond or before the constraints of the vacuity of that position—its impossible authorization. It is close to Badiou’s definition of Being as void found in this image of the vase as a construction around an interior emptiness. Badiou’s definition of Being comes close to the important place that the body holds in psychoanalysis, the body acting as a negative center for the subject with the importance of the letter of language that defines the cutting edge between a body and a subject. Speech is only a possible horizon thereafter.
Badiou’s magnum opus, Being and Event (1988/2005a), positions the classical philosophical question of ontology—the question of Being, of that which is—against what can never be accounted for by its ground, namely, the unforeseen or unforseeable event. It is Badiou’s way, to put it somewhat crudely, of reinterpreting the poles of objectivity and subjectivity, empirical ground and an ephemeral happening always subject to interpretation.
For Badiou, ontology is a concept that must be formalized. In particular, Badiou seeks to formalize the question of Being through a mathematical notion of absence or the void, close to the concept of a set in set theory mathematics. Being is a necessary point of emptiness without which we could not account for our system of thought. In the first dream, that point of emptiness, represented by the hollow of the vase, becomes critical to any understanding of the wish to be a psychoanalyst. To be an analyst is to endure a fundamental relation to absence and loss.
The second dream, the memorial of impossibility, addresses a certain problem concerning the Subject. The dream’s desperation, what comes to be represented by a memorial of the events of September 11th, is the desperation of a desire for a subjectivity that feels firm, even if that means, as it so often does, holding on to infirmity and trauma itself. Subjectivity can become a point of endless lament and just as the difficulties of life are easily transformed into melancholia, truth does not necessarily become a foundation for affirmation. Badiou’s work, perhaps above all else, is always directed towards the hope of this affirmation of the subject.
The subject for Badiou is something like an event that marks a constitutive break from the multiplicity or general heterogeneity of life, like a distinct sound emerging from a field of noise, or, perhaps better, like one purpose of erecting a memorial as a way to mark the importance of a day in an infinite span of time. The Subject is rare and precarious in its mode of appearance, and in that sense, close to Lacan’s concept of the subject as a subject of the unconscious.
The subject is not something that is merely given; it is not granted a priori. Another definition of the subject that might be fitting, if not controversial, would be the subject as continually constructed and reconstructed—this process having its relevance for both the image of the fallen towers and trauma itself. Of course for Lacan, the subject is always the subject of speech, who, rather than being the one that carries on in the blah, blah of day-to-day chatter, is instead the one opened out by the listening analyst and the unconscious determinants marked by that ear.
Memorials, far from existing in this place of radical opening, are more often than not a means of attachment to some past impossibility. The two interpretations are at odds in this dream. In actuality the first dream in this book (the vase and the letter) was dreamt second, and the actual first dream (the memorial) was partially misinterpreted by me in line with this cruelty of melancholia—particularly during the many years of analytic work that constitutes the space between the two dreams. It was an important misinterpretation, demonstrating something of the difficulty of situating a subject in relation to their unconscious desire. The refusal of any opening, a subjectivity that falters in and through misinterpretation and the wish propelling it, finds a means of reversal by virtue of what the second dream is able to mark. Perhaps one must think the void, construct the place of a certain kind of emptiness or absence, before being able to locate and take hold of this elusive subject—impossible without desire.
The retroactive force of meaning, what Freud called nachträglichkeit, is the impetus behind reversing their presentation to you. There have to be two times, two events, for Freud, whose retroactive effects he reads. This structure cuts through the past via a repetition introduced by the backward trajectory. The past only makes sense in reference to the future and the future anterior is the grammatical tense of desire whose essence is this moebius-like structure. Against what many assume is a fascination with digging up the past, here, we are clearing the way forward.
For Badiou, the redefinition of these concepts—Being, Subject, and Truth—under the influence of Lacan, also meant a way forward. It meant for him that philosophy could finally, hopefully, confront the problem of nihilism. A tension between nihilism and desire is certainly one problem staged in the space between these two dreams. As you will come to see, these dreams have a critical effect on my reading of philosophy, and in particular of those philosophers working in the aftermath of World War II, a time that certainly confounds the problems of negativity and the subject with a terror of annihilation.
So the dream of the vase and the letter allowed me to rethink the first dream, a process which changed not only my understanding of the memorial, but my memory of that time in analysis as well. It is in the third dream, the dream of A Book Called Instructions On How To Fell A Tree , after this movement back and forth, open and closed, through progress and failure, that I was able to imagine the possibility of psychoanalysis. The desire of the analyst to be a psychoanalyst was not there before, only after. This, it seems crucial to note, was the last dream to take place within the time that I was in analysis.
The work with these dreams speaks to the important place of unconscious desire. Dream objects that are also dreams of objects give a kind of pure formality to this unfolding elaboration. It is my hope that these dreams have something to say about these age-old philosophical categories, in particular, the critical relationship between a subject and his or her objects. The impossible tie between a subject and an object, a source of irrefutable splitting, cannot, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, be elaborated without getting closer to unconscious desire. I have taken the chance of doing so through the elaboration of these dreams.
It is time I said something about unconscious desire, perhaps the central category of this work. Unconscious desire, as the Lacanians have understood it—taking their departure from the idea of wish in the Interpretation of Dreams—is what creates the combinatory formula that structures the dream, or the joke as the case may be, which is always more formal than meaningful. Dreams were to take us to the very limits of the human, and, in a way, what is discovered is that desire is equivalent to this act: desire is a desire for transgression. What this means for Lacan is that desire cannot be reduced to the object, nor can it be entirely reduced to the subject either, holding a dimension in its own right that begins to define the space and organization of the unconscious. In this, it is closely bound to the Freudian drive.
Desire is not only that which pushes the limits of self or others—an interpretation that I think has unfairly given desire a fearsome Hobbesian character—but also that which is able to intimately trace these limits and how we’ve constructed and defined them for ourselves. The latter definition, for my purposes, is the more interesting no less more generous one. The search becomes intrinsic to the definition of desire both literally and figuratively, informing the aim of psychoanalysis.
Desire, for Lacan, cannot be separated from its appearance in language and images, in dreams and daydreams, in jokes and slips of the tongue, and of course in symptoms. Always short of the final transgression it seeks, desire is bound to its own means of representation. Symbolizing, to my ear, always bears this impossible movement of desire in an inimitable formal consistency. Without this structure, even without this inherent formalism, I don’t think it would be possible to create a dream. The portion of it that is unconscious, and no doubt will remain so, touches on the most obscure and formative aspects of the human psyche from archaic memories to infantile fantasies.
It is for this reason that I have chosen to structure this work based on the series of dreams coupled with transferences to important figures. I do so with the hope that this provokes the kind of reading of desire that will touch on its most elusive formal mechanisms. The concern with the life and death of psychoanalysis comes from a feeling that this way of understanding desire, this way of working with it, indeed at times even glorifying it, has been lost. Even further that the felt danger of working at such an extreme limit, which is the very limit of the human, is the fascinating difficulty that sustains the psychoanalytic act. At times it feels that we have forgotten the value of this kind of reading of desire, and even more so, the difficulty, the time-consuming and careful work of locating it in an analysis.
Serge Leclaire, in his book Psychoanalyzing (1968/1998b), has an astonishing reading of Freud’s desire through careful attention to the imagery, language, and the formal mechanisms, inherent in Freud’s dreams (1900). He uses the essay on screen memories (1899) which we know to be autobiographical, along with the biographical material of Freud’s life that follows his self-analysis (1985)—particularly that which comes to the fore in the letters with Fliess. Leclaire, going back over the early Freud, charts out the subtleties of Freud’s desire using its linguistic and what he calls phantasmatic or Oedipal components.
Leclaire notes the closeness of the word loaf in his screen memory to the word body in German, acoustically indistinguishable (Laib, Leib); Freud biting (beissen) into the loaf of bread shortly after snatching (entre-issen) flowers from his little cousin Pauline; and the people with bird’s beaks (bird, Vogel, is too close to vögeln, a vulgar word for the sexual act, to ignore) that carry his mother in a dream, her face the image of both death and beatitude, whose cause, he says, Freud no doubt imagines himself to be. It is, he says, the mother who smiles or fails to smile on her hero son. He follows the centrality of the botanical book torn or ripped (reissen) to shreds at the bidding of his father, like the flowers he ripped from his first love’s hands, Pauline, or, the devouring of his favorite flower the artichoke.
All of this, Leclaire contends, seems to culminate in a desire to write the book on the secret of dreams precisely as a fulfillment of it. Freud’s book of dreams folds in on itself: a book about dreams of writing the book about dreams. Leclaire finds circulating again and again the formula of Freud’s desire—to reveal, unveil, plumb, rip, tear, bite, pick, pluck. It is not such a far leap to Freud’s one major symptom, from the wish to tear into and reveal to his phobia of travel (from reissen to reisen), where indeed the incestuous link can be found when as a young child Freud glimpsed his mother nude on a journey (also Reisen).
Leclaire says, “at this point in the analysis, we can already see the outline of the profoundly intricate relation between book and woman, leaf and flower picking, picking (flowers) and eating … the way in which Sigmund relates this (screen) memory seems indeed to indicate what he made of this singular form of “reading”: an extraordinarily satisfying defoliation and transgression” (pp. 26–27). If Freud wanted to tear or rip the veil off the secret of dreams, the phantasmatic portion of that desire—by which I mean the impossible image of its Oedipal satisfaction, notably in an act of ripping into or devouring the object—suggests that we cannot follow Freud there. This end fulfillment of desire can only be death itself; oral incorporation wrapped in the nature of the phantasm. The discovery of unconscious desire, for Leclaire, is not synonymous with the image of satisfaction that one’s fantasy proffers.
When investigating the repression of an accident at a young age that left a scar on his jaw, Freud himself points to an intensity of fury and guilt around the birth of his brother Julius who died about the time of this accident. Leclaire feels this to be close to the consequences of the Oedipal phantasm: Freud’s “greediness that knew no obstacles,” in relation to his mother, against his brother, books, and cigars. The last, cigars, would return him to the scene of this original scar and be his final undoing. As he would write to Fliess, “moderation is the hardest thing for the child, as for the neurotic” (Freud, 1985, p. 365).
Unconscious desire is more closely allied to its formal mechanisms— from primary process to the logic of unconscious fantasy—which must be distinct from the content that these manipulate. What Freud reveals to us then is the secret of dreams as unconscious desire which, taken in itself, is not necessarily equivalent to revealing as in lying open like a book to be torn to shreds—what Leclaire calls the substitute that Freud’s father offered to Freud for his Oedipal phantasm. We know the difficulty with books Freud got into in his adolescence. What Leclaire emphasizes is that there is desire and there is the object that causes desire. Psychoanalysis centers itself on the importance of this asymmetry or divide. These memories of Freud’s are only a screen that betrays the wish, and the wish is but a cipher for a constantly renewed construction.
For Leclaire, as Lacan, desire is bound to the lack from which it springs—not having one’s mother as the object of haste. Leclaire will say that what psychoanalysis teaches us is that desire in this purest formal sense is a desire for transgression, a desire for a movement that goes beyond, but which cannot. So one must pass through the castration complex, encountering a desire that cannot completely accommodate itself to the object that seems to hold it captive. It is from this constellation that Leclaire iterates a series of consequences for psychoanalysis based on this reading of desire with Freud’s. I take these consequences as my own throughout this work and innumerate them here at the outset:
To grasp what psychoanalysis imposes on us, then, as Freud never tires of saying, we still have to get rid of many prejudices. And especially here we must rid ourselves of two major habits: first, the way of considering the tension of desire on the model of the appeal to a need turned expectantly in the direction of an object that would be the proper one to gratify it. Obviously, psychoanalysis proposes no such thing, for unconscious desire appears there as a formula, surprising in its oddity, often absurd, a composite like the figure of an Egyptian god … It is a formula, cipher, or letter that aims more at insisting, at repeating itself enigmatically than at saturating, gratifying, or suturing in some fashion.
The other prejudice that psychoanalysis leads us necessarily to renounce is … the notion of the distinction between a deeply hidden and truthful reality, on the one hand, and a deceptive appearance, a directly accessible surface, on the other. To be sure, the didactic opposition between manifest and latent content allows for a limited interpretation, thereby sustaining this prejudice. Yet, notice how in the course of our reading one and the same term turns out in fact, upon analysis, to support the truth and its veiling … . We cannot insist too much here on this fact, which is coextensive with the whole possibility of psychoanalysis, namely: there is no truth either before or beyond unconscious desire; the formula that constitutes it at the same time represents it and betrays it …
Finally, oddly enough, what appears at the end of an uncompromising analysis is unconscious desire itself as a formal construction and, as such, devoid of meaning but easily couched in a figure … in its phantasmatic composition … in its hieroglyphic concision. We therefore find at the end of the analysis a formal composition analogous to that of the rebus with which we began. But this formal composition also turns out to be the very essence of the latent thoughts that nothing, or almost nothing distinguishes from the manifest content, either in its terms or its organization. There could be no better illustration of the fact, crucial for analysis, that there is nothing beyond the text, or better yet, the letter (Leclaire, 1968/1998b, pp. 36–37).
For Leclaire, there cannot be a meta-discourse in psychoanalytic work. This does not mean that there isn’t a value to a psychoanalyst’s thinking through certain meta-psychological questions, certainly Leclaire does, but it is precisely in thinking these questions through to their very limits that one is always returned to the letter of the unconscious of which there is, as he says, nothing beyond. This letter is the closest we get to unconscious desire in its pure form, a fact which led Lacan to say something as absurd as the unconscious is structured like a language.
Truth, in this mode of appearance, is continuous with its surface manifestations. Not beneath or before it. Desire is equivalent to its constructed form (Leclaire would even say formula or composition). The meta in clinical work is prohibited. We no longer abide by a theory of abreaction and one should question the ultimate value of thinking in terms of manifest and latent content. Play at the surface, as we saw in the analysis of Freud, is coextensive with the psychoanalytic work necessary for elaborating on the question of one’s desire.
Too often in psychoanalysis desire remains abstract, banalized, or both—as in, he wanted to sleep with his mother, he wanted to kill his father, or worse, he had a sexual urge, he was angry—i.e., fundamentally meaningless statements. We suffer not from desire but from desire’s unarticulated specificity. It is desire’s absolute specificity that Leclaire sees as the result of an uncompromising psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis works by virtue of a respect for this unknown or Other desire which is brought to speech. Freud’s offhand comment that one learns to know when to stop interpreting a dream seems to me close to this ethic. In fact, it is in knowing how to stop that we are able to recognize something of the dream’s navel, the differently centered center of the dream. For Leclaire, it is this very tact with interpretation that mirrors a working through of the consequences of Oedipus—a confrontation with desire and its limits that is synonymous with its fullest articulation. It is this orientation that gives back to desire its medium, and so hopefully too, its means of moderation.
It should be said that despite the linguistic aspects of Leclaire’s reading, the body, affect, are not categories that are ever far off. If these words he maps have any consequence it is because they contain an indissoluble tie to the body, in particular, the body as experienced and imagined by the child Freud. It is these words that seem to retain their contact with this ineffable thing we call a body, hallucinatory intensity always one signifier of this revival. It is only this strange tenuous tie, ever-present in the world of words and dreams, which enables analysts to do their particular work of reading or listening to desire. No one, to my mind, illustrates this better than Leclaire. It is to his definition of psychoanalytic work as a work with the formula or structure of desire, tracing its tie to a phantasmatic object in all its most ardent and bodily particularity, that this work is constructed and bound.
Freud’s dream of self-dissection and his anxiety about having exposed himself so extensively in his book of dreams is a partially present anxiety for me. I am well aware of the reversing and traversing phallic imagery in my dreams, themes of castration, death, empty cavities, and the like. While this populates my imagination, is at the foundation of the work I do with patients, providing markers in any process of association, I am using these dreams less as reductive, interpreta-ble, indeed dissectible entities, and more as a provocation to thought, which, like the Lacanian cut, may be of use to gain some ground with respect to unconscious desire. Maybe I could have done without them. Less revealing in any case. But, the dream written about is something transformed, close to sublimation, out of a hallucination, which is the very possibility of thought.
If we take this further to include what Leclaire says about the nature of desire—it always supports the truth at the same time as it conceals it—revealing as knowledge is never the truth of desire. It is not an act of full disclosure. “As you know,” Freud said, “a beautiful dream and no indiscretion, do not coincide” (Freud, 1985, p. 315). This shifts the difficulty, as I see it, from the problem of my telling a dream to one concerning the reading of it. My hope is for these dreams, rebus-like, to provide some kind of key for a new reading of desire; that these dreams act as a way station beyond the kind of knowledge whose stasis is contrary to the intended object of this work. In the vein of what the Christian mystical philosopher Simone Weil says in Gravity and Grace, “it is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world. There is no impossibility in dreams—only impotence” (Weil, 1947/1952, p. 95).
Might these dreams allow us to come out of the dream world? To touch impossibility? To the psychoanalysts, I ask, give me this leisure. To the philosophers, I ask, tolerate a little intimacy. These dreams are bound by intellectual figures that may or may not give you the space you seek in knowing. But I am too acutely aware at most points in time, at all points in writing, that too much distance renders any truth arid and ineffective. So my voice is present. There is a degree of intimacy. But that voice makes its appearance as readily as it disappears under the weight of an academic dialogue—an obsessive undertaking of another’s thought.
Do I fail to be scholarly because I cannot quiet my hysterical disappointment? Fail because I cannot divest myself of this underside of discourse? Yes, I would say that I do fail, but that what is scholarly is another matter. For now, all I can do is give myself over to this play and this failure in order to learn once again how to live with psychoanalysis, with The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis. To all of my readers, I ask, give me your patience and tolerate a little dislocation. As in love perhaps something will come of it.