Preface

As used most famously by Felix Deutsch (1959), the phrase “mysterious leap” refers to the process known in psychoanalysis as “conversion” whereby thoughts in the mind express themselves through the body. This meaning of the term serves as an implicit point of reference for the essays that follow, though I have chosen it for the title of this issue of American Imago as much for its symbolic resonance as for its literal appositeness. If, moreover, one adopts a monistic perspective, in which the brain is understood to be an organ of the body, of which the mind is ultimately the subjectively experienced epiphenomenon, then the notion of a split between psyche and soma that requires overleaping comes to seem less a self-evident truth than a highly problematic assumption, albeit one that retains its power as an evocative metaphor.

Our lead essay, Anne Golomb Hoffman's “Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?” exemplifies the clinically informed yet intellectually rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry that I am ideally looking for in a submission to this journal. The leap in question for Hoffman is that between body and language. Drawing on her own expertise not only as a literary scholar but also as an analytic patient, Hoffman explores how “a reader's experience of textuality” is inevitably grounded in his or her “experiences and fantasies of the infantile body.” The “fluid interchanges between subject and object, text and body,” she notes, “form part of both analytic and literary experience.” Hoffman locates the “personal roots” of her meditation in a surgical procedure she underwent several years ago, the removal of a “tubular organic vessel” inside her body that resulted in the “loss of access to precisely the absorption in textuality” that had been central to her professional identity.

From this starting point in her experience of both mental and physical pain, Hoffman leads her readers on a quest through the writings of Freud, especially The Interpretation of Dreams, in