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What is ring composition, and why should analytically-oriented therapists care? Analysts have always had a deep and understandable fascination with applications of psychoanalysis to allied fields, including literature. The enrichment that comes from such interdisciplinary work can be reciprocal-we can learn from other disciplines, in addition to offering our vantage point to them.
We have an exciting opportunity for such mutual enrichment in this new theory that many previously unappreciated works of literature (including very ancient ones, from all over the globe) are organized by the little understood structure of “ring composition.” It is structured as a sort of circle, or mirror image. The central meaning of the text is placed at its center. The second half mirrors the first half, in reverse order-e.g., A, B, C, D, C', B', A'. The full richness of the text is apparent only when the reader grasps the interplay between the corresponding sections, which may be linked thematically, through plot, through reversals, or (in the Book of Genesis, for example) through rare words that are used only in those two sections of the entire work.
Ring composition has been understood only the past few decades. Mary Douglas was a social anthropologist at University College, London, who died just after her book was published. She used her academic speciality to discern the similarity in ancient narrative structure across many widely separated societies in the Middle East, Greece, and China (among others). Douglas repeatedly found that when literary critics derogated some ancient epic as lacking a clear literary structure, ‘such repudiations of structure are like signposts saying: “Here lies a hidden ring composition”’ (p. 101). It is not restricted to ancient literature, however. Douglas argues that Laurence Sterne's 1767 novel Tristram Shandy shows elements of ring composition. It appears likely that ring composition reflects a particular cultural world-view, that may not always be f