Ephemera—Unfinished Thoughts on Psychoanalysis, Poetry, Endings, and Death: Commentary on Caston

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but of what is this stuff of dreams? Deep and desperate longings, haunting memories, and the light of creative imagination. These all are at once both transient wisps of inner experience and yet the very stuff of life, as real as experience can ever be, as central as our identities, as permanent as our lives.

Yet each dream and each life must come to its own end.1 Joseph Caston, in his study of closures in psychoanalysis and in poetry, turns our attention to those ends, to where Eros and Thanatos wrestle openly, with death foreshadowed. Starting implies stopping, as living implies dying. Our own inconceivable endings become approachable by looking at the endings of those of our creations we have learned to love, psychoanalysis and poetry.

Before looking at their endings, it is fitting first to turn to what those endings conclude, the essential qualities that constitute psychoanalysis and poetry. It is fitting because, despite their different universes, the two share a common aim, that of reaching through words for the essence of personal being beyond words. Psychoanalysis strives in the name of therapy and science; poetry, in the name of art. Yet their direction is the same, and, similarly, their having to come to their ends reminds us of death no matter the distractions we struggle to conjure.