Book Review: Quartiers aux rues sans nom (Neighborhoods of Nameless Streets)

Browsing through the six short but dense essays that make up Dominique Scarfone’s Quartiers aux rues sans nom, the reader drifts between psychoanalytic and poetic reverie. While strolling through transitional areas, in between the external and internal worlds, through the cracks of rigorous scientific theory and unconscious intuitive practice, the reader is invited to think in a manner that puts his thought to work far away from traditionalism, dogma, or bureaucratic routine.

The title essay, “Neighborhoods with Nameless Streets,” is about the psychoanalytic method. Here Scarfone describes some unconscious psychic lands as gray areas, badly mapped, where representations are transformed by secondary repression or erased, much as the citizens of Venice and Prague once erased street names to fool invaders. Nonetheless, streets still existed and one could find one’s way. However, the psychoanalytic approach eventually leads us to other kinds of regions. Something is “presented” that has no link with psychic representations. Streets here were never named; in fact there are hardly any streets, just some uncertain traces on footpaths. In the absence of words, both analyst and patient are confronted with their infantile aphasia. Transference emerges where words are missing: close to an action, it has to be embodied to become a living understanding of a state and an experience, rather than of an intellectual comprehension.

“Lunar Suite,” the longest and most personal text in the book, is paradoxically based on the threadbare question “Is psychoanalysis an art or a science?” Using a clinical vignette, Scarfone illustrates the process of creation, rather than construction, when confronted with the unforeseen. Allowing us to enter his intimate experience, he reveals childhood memories that echo with his patients, their infantile experiences, and his blind spots. We see him at work concerned about an intense transference that leads to an impasse and finally an enactment. He illustrates this unexpected irruption into the transferential storm, setting the analytic scene truly ablaze. The analyst is confronted with the paradox of having to respond without responding. In dreams, sessions, and theories there is always an opaque core, an irresolvable umbilicus. This is why psychoanalysis is neither a totally empirical method nor an interpretive art.

In the third essay, “What Does Psychoanalysis Work Through?” Scarfone examines Freud’s concept of working through (1914), a distinctive aspect of the analytic work. The author refers to Winnicott, Jean-François Lyotard, and Hannah Arendt in a sophisticated, kaleidoscopic manner. He pinpoints the differences but also the similarities between their understanding and Freud’s initial idea that working through is an abreaction of affective charges.

Scarfone reminds us that for Winnicott (1974), in “Fear of Breakdown,” remembering is more about experiencing for the first time something that has already happened but remained unregistered. Through “the use of an object” (Winnicott 1969) we are subtly led to realize the overlap between working through and the subject’s use of the analyst. Both processes have to be experienced by the patient in inevitable solitude. Lyotard emphasizes the analyst’s passibility (an inherent fundamental passivity more passive than passivity), his listening with “the third ear” to the signifiers and the important word “through” (durch) as if it meant digging a passage. Arendt’s views on labor, work, and action lead Scarfone to resume his conception of analysis as follows: a new experience with unpredictable consequences, a cultural human action conducted through language, a unique, irreproducible, limitless product, perhaps a kind of work of art.

The fourth essay, “What Is Announced,” examines the limits to representation. In the New Testament story of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary by the archangel Gabriel, Scarfone emphasizes the combination of sexuality and speech. The symbolic impregnating language, charged with magic, seems to become a substitute for action. We are confronted not with an evocation but with a “presentation.” The author sees different factors that could enlighten the artistic and religious emotion surrounding the theme. The Annunciation is often rendered in paintings alongside scenes of the Incarnation and Christ’s Passion, thus defying temporal order. But there is more. On the one hand, the spectator is facing a primal scene. The Origin’s mythical magic is presented to him visually in the “actual,” ¹ beyond any chronology: origin is not simply the initial moment. On the other hand, the sexual mystery is preserved under the veil of language. Scarfone considers the spectator as being in a chiaroscuro, unprepared infans state, exposed to adult sexuality, seduced, and having to deploy a never ending sublimation.

He then asks whether the dream is a representation of desire or of fulfillment; he favors the latter. The words of Mary and the angel are compared to those in dreams and are considered to be not representations but traumatic residues.

Continuing this line of thought, “The Annunciation of the Dream” digs more deeply into Freud’s interrogations regarding the limits of representability in chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams. Scarfone questions Freud’s analogy between words in dreams and words appearing on the banners of ancient paintings as being a contribution to intelligibility. He points out that the banners were often written in Latin, sometimes from right to left and high on the ceiling. They were therefore hardly seen and added nothing to figuration or understanding. The author explores another line of thought: babbled or written words in dreams and in paintings are treated like “things” having a presence.

Dream work and the work of mourning operate in opposite directions. While dreams negate the object’s disappearance and bring it back in an hallucinatory mode, as a presentation, the task of mourning on the contrary is to lead the psyche to admit the loved object’s loss, and to think about it.

The author refers to Altichiero’s Annunciation, a painting in which between the angel and the Virgin there is an oculus, a round window through which a blinding light often shines during the day, obliging visitors’ eyes to adjust. Scarfone draws an analogy between the irruption of sunlight and the “word made flesh,” a dimension of soldering between finitude and infinity, operating as a lived experience rather than a mere evocation.

In the last of these essays, “Toward the Before?” ² Scarfone relates a touching childhood memory of his grandfather, an amputee, and makes us travel between space and time. He reminds us that in some cultures the past, because it is known and can be “looked at,” is in that sense in front of us. By contrast, the unknown and unforeseen future is behind us. Using a metaphor of parallel worlds, he explores the temporal links between, pregenital and genital, civilization and barbarism, and concludes that psychic temporality has no before or after, no succession, but a simultaneous “always already there.” Scarfone agrees with Arendt: human thinking occurs in the breach between past and future. Arendt says that thinking must brush aside “frozen thoughts,” an idea that Scarfone sees as resembling Winnicott’s notion of destruction in “The Use of an Object” (1969). The potential destruction appears without anger and has an instinctual source. The latter surges forth from the temporal breach between past and future. For the author, instinctual activity pushes toward neither the past nor the future. It surges from the breach between them.