Writing Psychoanalysis

Literature, Flaubert said, is a perpetual orgy. For many that may not be so, yet for some it is ever true. How has it been that so vital a part of life is slighted by psychoanalytic attention? Such little recognition of the place of passion for language in shaping a person's mind is particularly ironic in an endeavor actualized through talk, a field brought to life by a great and gifted writer.

Psychoanalysts know well the centrality of the body in a mind's coming into being, the ego “first and foremost, a bodily ego,” as Freud declared (1923, p. 26). We recognize the significance when we see a contented baby at its mother's breast look up to its mother's eyes. We understand when we watch an infant's fascination with the hand at the end of its outstretched arm, discovering its power to move that hand. In our study of the place of the body in a child's coming into being, however, too much do we leave language acquisition as if lost on the side.

For some, learning words, learning to use and play with words, is as exciting and significant as any other growing power. The several stages of bodily investment we group under the rubric of sexuality and deem uniquely central in a child's self-definition may be too narrow a view.

Sensuality might be a more fitting word, one that includes sexuality but leaves room open for the love, indeed the passion, for language that marks the character of many who become ardent as both readers and writers. The import of body and that of language overlap, with even the ideas in words early involving physical pleasure. In an unpublished talk, the poet Robert Pinsky offered an illustration. He reminisced about his delight in the sensation of words in his mouth while a child, such as his experience of the crackling texture of words like “knuckle.” For some children, a love affair with words has full force as part of their growing love affair with the world. I know firsthand of what Pinsky spoke.