Introduction to the Wilde Analyst

We last met our colleague Joel Miller in On the Arts in 2007 when he copped to “Owning It” (Miller, 2007), a moving exploration of his intimate experience with pieces of art: viewing them, making some, taking them in intrapsychically, what was meant as well as what it took to buy them, and beyond. There was a fearlessness (and unselfconsciousness) both in his experience and in the way he offered it to us that was bracing.

This new work of his belongs to that “beyond.” A background imprint of the earlier piece is visible as Joel Miller now invites us into his encounters with Oscar Wilde and into the process of his writing as it becomes a series of sketches. He writes:

I like the advice Pauline Kael, former film critic for the New York Times, gave to Roger Ebert, “I go into the movie, I watch it and I ask myself what happened to me.” … [W]ith each encounter with Oscar, be it his writings or a biography, I am recording what happened, and write my review of that encounter. (Miller, 2013, p. 95)

Each of these sketches is quite different from the other, yet when layered they become a multi-dimensioned entity much greater than the sum of its parts … as indeed it does for those of us in a psychoanalysis, on both sides of the couch. The patterns and parallels with and for psychoanalysis that Joel Miller finds are, once again, bracing:

So impressed was Andre Gide with Oscar Wilde that they met daily for several hours each day for two weeks. Gide recorded those glorious, private, and life-changing conversations of what happened to him in his diary, and ultimately, symbolically, tore out those pages. That act of tearing out became a palpable silence rendered as poetry, his homage to those days with Oscar, his review of what happened to him, and his ultimate refusal to have it destroyed by the dissection by others. (Miller, 2013, p. 95)

It was terribly important for Andre Gide to protect the intimacy of what sounds so much like a psychoanalytic encounter with Oscar Wilde. We can only