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At this past Thanksgiving dinner my nineteen-year-old daughter, Tamar, said to me “Mom, was there any image at your dream seminar which you found interesting?” Pausing for a moment, I responded “The dreamer said, she is in Alaska, that it's snowing all around.” Tamar immediately began to play with the words: “Alaska, I will ask her—snows, knows, no's—so mom, what is the question? What is it that she knows? and doesn't want to know? Is she being stubborn and saying no to knowing something? And mom, the dreamer must have been born in Boston because she pronounces ‘I will ask her’ with a Boston accent.” Tamar smiled with pleasure. I will come back to this anecdote at the end.
When Stephen asked me three days ago to respond to his paper, I protested vigorously. “Stephen, please find someone else who is knowledgeable in Lacanian theory. I am just beginning to wrestle formally with his ideas.” “Oh no Doris, Stuart and I feel that is just the reason why we would want you to comment.” I had read Stephen's paper once before and was taken with his intelligence, his erudite grasp of the material. What, however, interested me mostly was and is the growth that his patient Don has sustained. My focus was and is on the nature of this growth. What is the source of this healing process over three years? Is it “the result of an interpretive process that consists in something that liberates the patient to speak for himself, and in doing so, to make the discovery that he had been suppressing speech before to the language of desire?”
My interest in Lacan has been intensified as I have reviewed and tried to understand my own analytic experience. I have had two analyses. My first experience was of the ossified, rigidified sort where the concentration was