You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Better without an author, without a poet,Or having a separate author, a different poet,An accretion from ourselves, intelligentBeyond intelligence, an artificial manAt a distance, a secondary expositor,A being of sound …
… he himself is the ghost of his own father.
In The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye (hereafter AECE), Benjamin Ogden and Thomas Ogden propound an interdisciplinary way of thinking about the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is put on the way sound and, secondarily, sight, function in the practice of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, conceived as language, vocal narration, and shared reverie. Their extended essay, however, depends on something they never explicitly explore: who is the author of this book?
What is absent in their manuscript seems very present, even if unconscious to its authors. The text has a metafictional “auteur,” a composite of the Ogdens, pére et fils. The evidence of this homogenized “ghost writer” doesn't appear until after the introduction, and is identified as “the PLR.”1