The Unseen and the Unheard in Fiction and Memoir

As a psychoanalyst one cannot help but ask, What is the difference between “memoir” and “fiction”? Between memory and fantasy? Evolutionists would suggest that memory has evolved in order to help us survive. However, nature, in its relentless pilgrimage toward some as yet unknown mecca of evolution, rarely follows a straight path, and has never been free of imperfections. Thankfully, it is not only the fittest that survive. Imperfections, in fact, are nature's artistic idiom. A modus vivendi between Catholic Destiny and Agnostic Chance. Perhaps it is these imperfections in the evolution of memory that make fantasy possible. Indeed, fiction may well be the accidental by-product of memoir!

The writers Chris Abani and Zadie Smith, invited speakers at APsaA's 2016 University Forum1 (with the psychoanalyst Stanley Coen as chair and the psychoanalyst/poet Alice Jones as discussant), held in New York on January 15, have produced a body of work that very naturally inhabits the stateless territory between psychology and art. Like the immigrant families they come from, their writings travel back and forth between continents, races, ethnicities, cultures, and all the conflicts and trauma that abound in these spaces of human experience. For this occasion, Abani presented an essay titled “Painting a Body of Loss and Love in the Proximity