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This small, well-crafted book lets us into the final weeks of Dan Gunn's six-year analysis in Paris with a Lacanian-influenced psychoanalyst. It does this through the means of a narrative diary of his last days interspersed with his ruminations about his experience and his life. The diary and the reflections complement, expand upon and, perhaps more importantly, play with each other in a highly intelligent and richly comic way. Make no mistake about it, this is both a comedy of manners and a deeply engaged enquiry into the nature of the psychoanalytic process. In particular, it opens up the question of whether analysis can ever be ended, or whether it simply changes scene, leaving behind the physical analyst, the real consulting room, and making use instead of an internal relationship. Of course, we know that this is how analysis works, that the real analyst and the analytic setting serve to bring about an internal-world process, but the strength of this book is that it shows how hard it can be to divorce the two when the time to finish arrives.
Gunn, Professor of Comparative Literature at The American University of Paris, is offered a sabbatical in Italy, and wonders whether it could be the right occasion to end or at least have a break in the analysis. He asks his analyst and gets no response - just as he has had no response to any query as to where he is in his analysis at any time. He decides to press on:
And so, one session in mid-September, after he pulls back the curtain and shows me through to the consulting-room, I don't make my usual way directly to the couch and stretch out. Which means that he, who never sits down in his armchair before I’m settled, remains standing trying not to look surprised.
I plonk myself on the uncomfortable Louis-something chair where I squirmed my way through the early sessions some five and a half years before.
‘I was wanting to ask you about my finishing here at the end of the year?’ I try to add an inflection so that this will com