Edges of the Voice in Psychoanalysis

I'm thinking about the edge of what you can hear.

Psychoanalysis has always been conditioned, foundationally, on distance, because human living itself necessarily involves traversing spaces—I mean literal physical spaces—to get things done: whether it's to take shelter, obtain sustenance, find love, or simply talk. Some distance is traversed, always. And given that analysis is a human endeavor, we too must grapple with the fact that my body in space is located in a place other than where your body is located; the analyst is in a different place than the analysand.

We mediate this distance between bodies, between, that is, each of you in relation to each other and me in relation to you, in any number of ways. We might shoot a glance to someone seated in a row nearby. Or send a quick text to bridge this gap, to communicate something. I might shout across the BART tracks at the Rockridge Station in Oakland if I see a friend. If they hear me and I succeed in catching their eye, we wave to each other. “How's it going?” “Good. How about you?” “Fine.”

Distance allows for the creation of an edge, a limit, and therefore a space that can serve to demarcate inside and outside, here and there, sameness and difference, the one and the many. The entire field of lived experience—ground, sky, objects, living beings—exists in a holistic surround that we sense proprioceptively as we look, speak, and move about within this space. We tend to throw ourselves in front of ourselves automatically, procedurally, as we progress within this holistic surround. We

take entirely for granted, usually an