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What makes a story unique? And why do some so draw us in, touch something in us, yet remain hard to pin down? And what has this got to do with psychoanalysis? This beautiful collection of essays explores stories and fiction, considering how, if they are successful, they express something that evades being put any other way, through the experience we undergo in reading. Rizq is an author well known to the British Journal of Psychotherapy and this volume brings together several papers previously published in the Journal along with several others, all exploring the territory of what a story is and does, in the words of Josh Cohen in the Foreword, which
resists equivalence or substitution’. She brings those stories into contact with psychoanalytic texts—Winnicott, Freud, Laplanche—not for interpretation, so much as to see what sparks emerge from the exchange, what creative resonances are heard.
She opens with an introductory piece on Wordsworth's poem We are Seven: here a little girl is questioned by a clumsy, literal-minded adult about how many children there are in her family. She tells the questioner that she is one of seven children; he argues with her: two of her siblings are dead so surely there are only five? The child holds out against the adult, asserting her truth: ‘We are seven’ . Rizq goes on to reflect on Ferenczi's paper Confusion of the Tongues between Adults and the Child, where Ferenczi objects to the ‘prevailing sovereignty of the Freudian analysts whose interpretations … too readily violated the reality of the patient's experience’ (p. 15). In the background here, Rizq has in mind the long and troubled relationship between psychoanalysis and literary criticism, where psychoanalysis has placed itself as ‘the master discourse’, holding a superior knowing position and asserting its right to interpret. This opening exploration sets the tone for the essays that follow, asking us to listen in to the experience offered, rather than to ‘know’ .
So Rizq sets