Film Review

Cast Away and the Creation of the Dialogic Other—the Apostrophe

… Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lee,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

…

In Robert Zameckis's Cast Away, a volleyball becomes—I'll explain in a moment—an apostrophe. Since those of us who practice clinical psychoanalytic therapy are in a manner of speaking also apostrophes, we may feel a curious identity with ‘Wilson,’ as the volleyball is called by Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks).

By apostrophe, I do not refer to the upwardly displaced comma inserted in contractions, that word form our English teachers once warned mustn't be used in formal prose. In fact, the more general meaning of apostrophe is as a rhetorical term referring to something that is used to represent something else that is absent or gone. It was Lacan's contribution, or maybe his trick, to partially reference what these days we call defense mechanisms as Greek rhetorical terms of art. Condensation and displacement are famously viewed by Lacan in the rhetorical dimension as metonymy and metaphor. In drawing our attention to this, Lacan's observations serve us well. After all, for Aristotle and his compeers, it was in rhetoric and poetics that we most nearly encounter what we now call psychodynamic psychology. If we take a bit of time to explore other rhetorical devices used by the Greeks, we come across apostrophe.

Transference implies apostrophe. As a transference apostrophe, the analyst substitutes for some aspect of the absent parent. That is, what the patient says is regarded as partially responsive to what the patient interprets the analyst to be saying or thinking. The patient responds to the presumed discourse of the unconsciously constructed parent. The parent is apostrophized as the analyst. Enough said. Now, back to Wilson and company.

The story of Cast Away is simple enough: a modern executive—his modernity undersco