The Author of the Story

The story in question is that of the patient as a «case»; not a clinical diary, sketch or insightful exemplum, but rather the story of an analysis. My aim is to reflect upon the transformation of words into words — that is, from the words of the patient who narrates him/herself, to the writing of the account in which the patient is narrated through the forms, affects and emotions of transference and counter-transference. In this work, the beginning and end are the easy bits; it is the course linking them which is very difficult, for a number of complex reasons

The first act in the writing of a case is the transcription of the sessions of analysis. Once set down on paper, once obliged to take a written form, these transcriptions immediately become texts and consequently documents, and as such are totally binding. Nothing can have been different to what is said there; nothing can henceforth be removed or modified.

Furthermore, an accurate transcription is already a form of narrative account, or it can easily become so. Now reader of his own text, the analyst inevitably remains imprisoned by it. And, as with a literary text, one finds here that which John Banville has so incisively described with reference to any fictional character or hero:

People will insist on believing in the reality of fictional characters. Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, Leopold Bloom can seem more vividly real to us than the real people among whom we live our lives. The pact the reader makes with the fictional text is a mysterious and fascinating one. No matter how hard the novelist presses upon the reader's credulity and willingness to suspend disbelief, the contract holds (Banville, 2008).

The mysterious pact comes into play immediately. What just a moment before one has chosen to write down from amongst a number of different possibilities becomes, upon rereading, the sole reality and truth. It is so binding and inescapabl