Abstract
I write to speak when my partners in conversation are not with me. My voice won’t carry that far, so I write to them. They are many, in truth. Some are still around, and some have left the planet. I’m not sure how far back to go in assembling these people. As Jerry Garcia sings in Morning Dew, “Where have all the people gone, my honey? Where have all the people gone, today?” “There’s no need for you to be worryin’ about all those people. You never see those people, anyway.”
Yes. I never see those people anyway. I’m speaking of the ones who are truly gone. They live as an audience of beloved ghosts, both shadowy and close, when I write. Lillian Young was my high school English teacher in Los Angeles. Short of stature and stylish in her way, she commanded great respect from her students, whom she addressed as “friends.” “Friends, what is Roethke’s language doing in the first two stanzas of this poem?” “Friends, how do we make sense of the difference between Ellison’s naive protagonist in this scene with the trustee and Bledsoe and the tone of the narration of the scene?” I write for Mrs. Young, in the vain hope that she’s still reading my stuff and offering her trenchant comments in the margins, and is still teaching somewhere, somehow.
There are others who lurk in that ghostly backroom offstage, such as my father, who didn’t read a lick, by which I don’t mean he was illiterate, only that he had no interest in what I had to say. He couldn’t muster the desire to listen well. As sometimes happens with those who don’t listen well, we might care especially intensely that they would.
Most of us have such assemblages of people we have loved and with whom we still speak, if only in our heads and at times on pieces of paper or, more commonly now, on computer screens. For me they form, together, a kind of ideal audience, that group that live in the shadows because they are dead, with whom, therefore, I can have the kind of timeless conversations that populate my dreams: usually hushed, muted, gestural, a kind of spending conversational time together in emotional slow motion.
There is also an element of “If you could see me now” in my relation to this ideal audience. This is how I sound. This is how I put words and sentences together. This is what I care about. These are my commitments. This, in short, is what I desire.
Writing ought to sound like speaking, which doesn’t mean that it is speech. Yet throughout the history of Western thought these two activities have been pitted one against the other. Socrates distrusted modes of representation—art, poetry, writing in general—because, he argued, they were something other than authentic dialogue, and their products could be disseminated promiscuously, irresponsibly, far removed from the writer’s intention and purpose. (Perhaps what is happening in our contemporary moment regarding the voluminous proliferation of memes and misinformation is exactly what worried him about written texts.) Derrida, being distrustful of what he called the “metaphysics of presence,” attempted to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing. In the classic deconstructive move, he reversed the opposition and put writing first; he argued, that is, that writing is logically prior to speaking, that the latter is dependent on the former. Whichever we might prioritize, it seems to me clear that our attempts to represent ourselves, our thoughts and commitments, involve each of us who writes in a project of giving shape to the inchoate, the hitherto unformulated. This is a project of emergence, of articulation that, as Charles Altieri (1996) observes, “involves not only a modification in language but a modification in selves who have to interpret why they find satisfaction in it and who have to indicate what consequences might follow from that act of identification” (p. 84). I am modified by how I say what I say. Will I now identify with what I have just said? Will I take action based on that identification? It’s far less a matter of accurately representing what is already in my mind, and far more a matter of creating on the spot, not only giving verbal shape to my thinking in real time but also, and more essentially, making new thought in real time.
And here, at least as far as psychoanalytic writing goes, is where my more immediate audience comes in. When I write psychoanalysis, I write directly to analysts, in the rhetorical mode of direct address, from me to you. “I was struck years ago, when I was a first-year candidate at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, with an idea that gradually I have come to believe has universal significance for any practicing psychoanalyst: the psychoanalyst inhabits her role as analyst with a specific desire that is all the more hidden from view when it is satisfied.” This is the first sentence of my recently published book (Wilson 2020). Many of us have our favorite examples of what is loosely known as first-person narration in which a reader is either explicitly addressed or whose presence is implied, and a conversation is commenced right off the bat: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born . . .” (Salinger). Or “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me . . .” (Sterne). Or “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance . . .” (Ellison).
This mode of direct address is not the only way analysts write, obviously. But for me it is the most compelling way to write. In so doing I am immediately implicating an interlocutor, a partner in conversation, a witness to my testimony. I employ my singular writerly voice, inevitably. This means that the grain of my voice has impact by way of the visceral—it’s like sending an old-school letter in the mail. It has shape and substance, is addressed by me to someone else, and travels some distance before it arrives at its destination. My script is unique, and my message, once the letter is opened and read, is personally revealing. My addressee is implicated by this message in some way, large or small, and may be called upon to reply, to recognize the author of this message—me—and my impact on them.
But psychoanalytic writing is not so simple as sending a letter in the mail. This is because what I (I want to say “we” but don’t want to be presumptuous) write about, what I offer—and honor—as lyric testimony to my experience, is about my work, what it’s like to be an analyst. It is also, often, about my reading of other analysts’ work. This kind of writing, then, is about the time I, and they, spend with patients. It’s about that part of human existence (not some other part). I’ve often thought that analytic writing amounts to love letters to psychoanalysis as a kind of spirit or soul, though now I think about it more prosaically: analytic writing is an expression of love for our patients, our respect for them, our general amazement and gratitude that they entrust us to care for them in such a risky engagement of what is often the deepest intimacy that they and we experience.
For me, in the end the question of audience—my partners in conversation—is not straightforward. There are my beloved ghosts who hover like holograms in the background. There are my colleagues, who may or may not read what I write or care about it if they do. And there are my patients, both past and present, without whom there would be no psychoanalytic writing from my pen, and to whom I am eternally grateful.
