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After Guérir du mal d'aimer (Recovering from the Pain of Loving) in 1998 and Avant d'être celui qui parle (Before Being Someone Who Speaks) in 2006, Jean-Claude Rolland now invites us to join him on another rich and difficult psychoanalytic journey. The path we follow, while constantly referring to Freud, crosses those of other renowned creators, artists and poets, who are called upon to illustrate—along with clinical material from patients—the singular way of “seeing” that animates psychoanalytic treatment, with what Rolland calls “the mind's eye.”
The title of the book refers to Shakespeare's Hamlet, where in act 1 scene 2, the eponymous hero says, “In my mind's eye, Horatio.” Jean-Claude Rolland borrows this phrase to describe the sudden emergence in the transference of images and words that come from the past. Thus he draws a parallel between psychoanalytic treatment and artistic creation. According to Rolland, what the two have in common is that they both “set free the Titans of childhood from the chains that reduce them to silence and obscurity and, in so doing, free the individual from ignorance of his or her origins” (p. 13; all translations mine).
Rolland proposes that an image, visible or invisible, lies somewhere between language and the negativity of the unconscious and stands in contrast to them. The interplay between image and language can be detected in the treatment process. Dreams are where images and language are woven together. The language of dreams can be at once a primitive language that is decorative, a secret language to be interpreted, and an aesthetic language of love that should be heard and shared. Rolland writes that “the dream talks to the object of which it speaks” (p. 50), and that analysts must “see themselves in what they are hearing” (p. 54).
Primitive language readily becomes action, giving way to drive impulses; the language of logos, by contrast, brings into play an element of renunciation. The two forms of language are combined th