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Toward the end of her book, The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber asks, “where does analysis happen?” (p. 126), answering that it happens primarily in the consulting room. This question is the aim of Lieber's book, and in weaving together strands of experience, writing, novels, dreams and her analysis, she finds an answer: analysis can happen anywhere that we encounter ourselves and our desires through speech and language. But mostly Lieber searches, “… in texts, I have always worked with texts, that is to tell me something about myself: my forms of protection, my desire. This is then, iteratively, the only way of coming to know anything about anyone else” (p. 129).
With this emphasis, Lieber points to the role of writing in psychoanalysis. And in this case a writing that she hopes will bring her to the end of her treatment. This book is her testimony to her analysis, it is to be her writing, her discovery, and contain within its pages her cure. Writing obviously was intrinsic to Freud's discovery (or creation) of psychoanalysis, particularly as he moved through various interlocutors, perhaps most famously beginning with Wilhelm Fliess, who we have come to apprehend through the collection of Freud's desiring and agonizing correspondence, a correspondence made all the more poignant by the destruction of Fliess's letters. Fliess's presence is marked by absence, a gaping hole that makes Freud's desire ever more present to us as he waits, responds, cajoles, and confesses. A transference that launched a thousand ships. The object a, as a Lacanian would say, that moved Freud to write his cure and ours. Freud's interlocutors, these intense libidinized friendships that Freud could make and break, each one being where “analysis happened,” left us a treasure trove of ideas and developments, unwritten passions and circulating desires that enabled Freud to bequeath to us his official version. Meanwhile, an unofficial version lay buried in his correspondence and gave us testimony to just