Introduction

“How does it feel to work on something so theoretically regressive?”

This is the first of two issues of American Imago to focus on the transferences underlying biographical creation. It is the fundamental premise for nearly all that follows that during the writing of biographies such transferences unfold as latent narratives that provide much of the motivating force for the biographers' manifest texts.

Biography is still seen by post-structuralists as a bastion of the conservative, and in consequence the genre has largely been excluded from their discourses. The ubiquity of transference in the biographer's work therefore presents something of a paradox: the resemblances between (counter) transference phenomena and post-structuralism's proto-philosophical and formalist programmatics are striking. Transferences—re-enactments with contemporaneous figures in adult life of relations experienced with our original (customarily parental) objects—problematize identity and agency, confuse absence with presence, create slippages in time and place, substitute obsessive allegiances and actions for memories, claim gratification in repetition, regress rather than advance, and, while bound in these circularities, reintroduce the loves and hates of earlier and more primitive psychic stages. Thereby (re)appear, in and behind the mirrors of biography, blurrings of boundaries between self and other, and reflections that problematize author and subject, past and present, sex and gender—not to mention those presuppositions so central to post-structuralists, interrogations of empirical evidences and the established interpretive communities and discourses arising from them.1