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When I first heard the booming voice of Donald Antrim reading from The Emerald Light in the Air in an Artist/Scholar in Residence session at the APsaA meetings last year, I decided that every reader should have the experience of hearing a supremely gifted writer reading his story exactly as he meant it to be read. How better to learn the craft of making meaning on the page than by hearing how a writer makes his?
As I gazed around at the rapt audience of psychoanalysts, it seemed to me that their appreciation was palpable. The question and answer session focused on how Antrim's experiences as a mental patient figure in his fictional characters' struggles with grief, paranoia, and florid psychosis. Would it be possible, I wondered, for Antrim's appeal to psychoanalysts to extend to the psychoanalytic classroom?
As an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute over a decade ago, I found the experience of listening to analytic material in technique and case seminars almost always exhilarating. Each class session offered a new world of texts and contexts, and theories with which to think about them. I listened as an English professor, bringing the tools of interpretation from my own discipline to the study of human texts.
I thought more than once about Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener in these seminars. Humbled by my own fears and limited knowledge of the field, I wondered if I was an anxious Bartleby, preferring not to learn from the cases themselves but instead standing in line to show how much I already knew about the subject. Others joined me, and sometimes an entire class left the patient's story to the side as they searched for answers to the most difficult problems.