The Sculpture and the Dust

EARLY MORNING SUNLIGHT streaming though the casement windows illuminates tiny flecks of dust that float suspended in the air of my consulting room. The particles glisten and dance before diffusing. In the dust, the stony, chiseled face of the man who never laughs nor cries as he sits across from me, transforms into a baffling, fluid silhouette that undulates behind a sepia of sparkling sea-foam. I imagine that it must always be here, this magical dust from the seashore of endless worlds, but on many other days the dramatic structure of that ever-emotionless face on the other side of the room is so clear and so poignant that I am tricked into feeling that I know not only who shares the room with me, but also who I am as agent of that sharing.

I suspect that most of you who read what I have to say, especially those among you who are analysts, share with me a special pride in the sculptures that you and your patients fashion over the countless sittings that comprise a psychoanalytic treatment; after all, for over a century now we psychoanalysts have chiseled and sanded the words of our theories into a stone-solid likeness of the human psyche, an icon crafted of insight and interpretation, a sculpture carved in meaning, knowing, and understanding that we have turned, smoothed, and polished with such care that we see in it only the singular image of our conscious reflections. Leaning forward in our analysts' chairs, fist against furrowed brow, elbow gouging into knee, we have cast ourselves as the ever-vigilant champions of thought, masters of the art of transforming unconscious into conscious and of reintegrating the dissociated. Scattered around us on the workbench, dozens of tools for our craft sit, readied for use at any minute: dream interpretation, genetic archeology, analysis of free association, of transference and countertransference, of parapraxes and derivatives, of resistance and defense, of identification and projective identification, of the here and now and