Drafting a Self

I first realized writing was important to me as an undergraduate, when I decided to major in literature. I had planned to study biology, in line with my family's expectations. But I realized that I felt most alive when I was reading fiction. For me, studying literature was an act of self-assertion. When I turned away from my college's Science Hill and toward the Humanities Center, my own voice—not others' expectations—guided me for the first time.

Central to the literature major was literary theory, which is writing about writing. Literary theory studies how thought, communication, and language form meaning. These inquiries spoke to my young adult preoccupations of identity, abstract thought, and relationship, which would soon lead me to psychoanalysis.

The language theorist Roland Barthes postulated that each piece of writing contains multitudinous meanings, and each act of reading constructs the meaning anew. Writer and reader construct textual meaning in a dynamic and mutual process. Analogously, Roy Schafer conceived of psychoanalysis as making meaning of the self through storytelling. Analyst and analysand together listen to and craft coherence from the events of the analysand's life. In this way, they act as both readers and writers, forming a narrative of the patient's identity. This narrative is in constant flux, as the person acts and interacts in new ways each day. These concepts resonated with me as I considered my own identity. As I learned that the author does not predetermine the text, I was also learning that my family did not predetermine my selfhood. Rather, I had some input into the question of who I was.

The idea that textual meaning transmutes was revolutionary and destabilizing. But in destabilization, Barthes found a special type of pleasure he called jouissance. Detaching the text from its essentialist meaning

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