Introduction

This is the second of our two issues on transference in biography and psychoanalysis. As in our first issue (Winter 97) our chief focus here is on biographers' autobiographical narratives—narratives describing the effects of (counter)-transferences on the biographers' relations to their biographical subjects. Three of the six articles that follow recount such experiences: Fred Karl (countertransference as a reverse mirroring that leads to new views of his subject, Franz Kafka); Nancy Rubin (unexpected repercussions in the writer's life from hidden correspondences with biographical subjects); my own story (biography as family romance). Leigh Gilmore's fourth contribution is harder to classify: a partly-Lacanian discussion on the relations between biography and autobiography through journalist Mikal Gilmore's haunted relations to his brother, the executed murderer Gary Gilmore.

Testimony before theory has been our order of presentation throughout this series, but the distinction is obviously something of an artifice. There is no writing about (counter) transference unshaped by theory. Our emphasis rests on our belief in the powers of autobiographical retrospection to recreate the phenomenology of lived experience more directly and freshly, the better to reveal previously repressed materials—“phenomenology and psychoanalysis” remain “the two major systems promoting introspection.” (Schepeler, 124)

The complementarities of the two theoretical articles in this issue, by the interpersonally-oriented Adrienne Harris and the more (Anna) Freudian Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, also go to the heart of our enterprise. Young-Bruehl writes on the further contributions psychoanalysis might make to biography; Harris on what biography might contribute to writing psychoanalytic case history. As it happens, these are very close to the twin aims this symposium was founded on: the hope that biographers, with all their narrative art, would offer new ways for psychoanalyst