Preface

The task of an editor can be likened to that of the dream-work, at least insofar as one of my aims is that of secondary revision—that is, forging a unity out of the often heterogeneous assemblage of materials that make up an issue. In this instance, I fear I have been less than fully successful. Although I toyed with the idea of giving this number the title “Traces and Echoes,” it seemed in the end to be the better course simply to play my strongest card, namely music, except insofar as the elastic word “meaning” can be stretched to encompass the concerns of Anne Golomb Hoffman and Sharon Talley with the body and literature in their respective contributions.

Fortunately, since both Hoffman and Talley are making their second appearances in American Imago under my editorship, I can incontrovertibly claim them as “my” authors, and I therefore hope they will forgive me for confining them met-onymically to this Procrustean bed. (For those who want to go back and read or reread their earlier work, Anne Hoffman's “Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?” was featured in our Winter issue, while Sharon Talley's “Following Thoreau's ‘Tracks in the Sand’: Tactile Impressions in Cape Cod” led off our Spring issue.)

No less fortunately, the quality of the papers by both Hoffman and Talley requires no apology. Indeed, to those who aspire to publish their work in our pages, I can give no better advice than to emulate these essays, which are exemplary in their intellectual rigor, lucidity of exposition, range of scholarly reference, and the profundity of their engagement with psychoanalysis. Hoffman takes us through nothing less than the history of concept of the body as an archive, from the rise of the “science” of physiognomy in the eighteenth century, through the iconography of hysteria in the photographs of patients at the Salpêtrière, to Freud's conception of hysterical symptoms as an archive of unconscious meanings. For her part, Talley sets her