Psychoanalyst, Artist and Critic

THE PSYCHOANALYST IS SOMEWHAT like Racine who enclosed the irrationality of passions in a concise, chaste, rational dramatic form that reflects, for us, the measured harmony of Louis XIV's Versailles Gardens. This pattern of a rational presentation of the irrational created, for Racine's audiences, an intolerable tension relieved only by the final deaths, suicides, and painful enlightenments of his tragedies.

The psychoanalyst also attempts to define the irrational through a rational, fictive structure. When he succeeds, it is because the living organism has performed for him, and he is called upon to rearrange and interpret the vagaries, inconsistencies and contradictions in that performance. His problem is mainly one of language: to assemble from his particular experience sentences that are, or lead to, generalizations. The deeper semantic problem of determining what anyone means by anything he says, or says he does, further complicates his work. It would be easier if people thought and spoke mathematics.

When the psychoanalyst attempts to practice his craft of rearrangement and interpretation without the living organism before him, he is at a disadvantage. This is most evident in the criticism of literature, when he analyzes the impulses, drives, and preoccupations of dead writers by studying their works and words and the commentaries of their contemporaries. At the heart of the dilemma is an assumption that the family history, letters, notes, essays and diaries of the writer provide revealing insights into his neuroses and they, in turn, provide insight into the form and content of his work. The assumption is deceptive, and often leads to unsound critical conclusions. Once made, it generates a misleading double vision in which criticism becomes a psychoanalytical conclusion, and a piece of fiction is treated as though it were a man.

One of the meanings of "fiction" given in the Oxford English Dictionary is "the action of 'feigning' or inventing imaginary