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Browsing through the six short but dense essays that make up Dominique Scarfone's Quartiers aux rues sans nom, the reader drifts between psychoanalytic and poetic reverie. While strolling through transitional areas, in between the external and internal worlds, through the cracks of rigorous scientific theory and unconscious intuitive practice, the reader is invited to think in a manner that puts his thought to work far away from traditionalism, dogma, or bureaucratic routine.
The title essay, “Neighborhoods with Nameless Streets,” is about the psychoanalytic method. Here Scarfone describes some unconscious psychic lands as gray areas, badly mapped, where representations are transformed by secondary repression or erased, much as the citizens of Venice and Prague once erased street names to fool invaders. Nonetheless, streets still existed and one could find one's way. However, the psychoanalytic approach eventually leads us to other kinds of regions. Something is “presented” that has no link with psychic representations. Streets here were never named; in fact there are hardly any streets, just some uncertain traces on footpaths. In the absence of words, both analyst and patient are confronted with their infantile aphasia. Transference emerges where words are missing: close to an action, it has to be embodied to become a living understanding of a state and an experience, rather than of an intellectual comprehension.
“Lunar Suite,” the longest and most personal text in the book, is paradoxically based on the threadbare question “Is psychoanalysis an art or a science?” Using a clinical vignette, Scarfone illustrates the process of creation, rather than construction, when confronted with the unforeseen. Allowing us to enter his intimate experience, he reveals childhood memories that echo with his patients, their infantile experiences, and his blind spots. We see him at work concerned about an intense transference that leads to an impasse and finally an enactment. He illust