“When I Was a Fish”: An Experiment in Different Ways of Reading

In this essay I'm going to experiment with two different ways of reading a short story that Meltzer wrote in his book about the aesthetic conflict, The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Violence and Art (Meltzer & Harris, 1988). I'm interested in how the story can be read with a view to understanding what it communicates of Meltzer's theory of the aesthetic conflict and also how it can be read in a less intellectual way to see what it evokes of an aesthetic experience. When taken together, these two ways of reading the story combine an understanding of an aesthetic conflict with an experience of beauty.

Before we go to Meltzer's story, let me turn briefly to some of the literature on psychoanalytic writing styles. In recent decades psychoanalysts such as Jordan-Moore (1994), Renik (1994), Tuckett (1993), and Widlocher (1994) have questioned whether a standard academic writing style is the best form in which to communicate, in particular, intimate clinical experience. Ogden (1997, 2005) has been demonstrating how the form of our writing helps to create an experience for the reader rather than simply offering a discussion “about” an experience. I have experimented (, 2006) with using different writing forms to evoke clinical experience. Stern, in discussing an article by Pizer (2005), describes being particularly moved by Pizer's lyrical writing style and states that psychoanalysis needs two forms of writing, each requiring a different kind of immersion from the reader. In the more traditional style of psychoanalytic writing, the commitment of the reader is to a “powerful and sustained intellectual effort” (2005, p. 86), while in a more aesthetic style the reader needs to first allow herself to be affected by the writing's more allusive quality and bring her thinking to it later. Stern's delineation of these two types of immersion brought to my mind the experience of being on a difficult trail on a beautiful day and feeling the live