The Purloined Self

You are all, I'm sure, familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's famous story, The Purloined Letter. A document of vital significance to the resolution of a crime is left sitting totally in the open, in the most obvious location; indeed, so obvious that no one thinks to look there. It is hidden by being exposed. I wish to make much the same point about the data of psychoanalysis: that is, the most “hidden” data is often sitting right under one's nose. The data of psychoanalysis—I would claim—is simple, almost banal. Patient's fantasy elaborations of their experience are often quite elaborate and dramatic, but the experience which underlies the phantasmagoria may be disarmingly familiar. Please note that this is an interpersonal perspective, placing primary emphasis on intersubjective experience. From this perspective, fantasies—however imaginative or striking—are not considered to be the motivating force of distortion. Rather, they are seen as an effort to grapple with distortion, which can be defined as experience mystified by anxiety.

Ask an analysand who has completed a successful analysis what it is that he/she has learned. The response tends to be rather diffident. Post facto rehashes of psychoanalysis tend to be obvious and cliché-ridden, glosses of the therapist's favorite metapsychological musings. Well, it is not very comforting for us to thind that we are merely Apostles of the Obvious. We prefer to believe that, in exercising our craft, we are arriving at something really buried down deep: arcane and ominous. This is what has been called the “Rumpelstiltskin Fallacy,” Rumpelstiltskin being, as you surely remember, the evil and vengeful dwarf who vanishes when his name is known. So, depending on our metapsychological bent, we unearth infantile experience (or fantasy of experience), early evidence of