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Leslye Russell's essay on the fläneur and the analysand hints at a missing word following the ellipsis in the title after Search, and that missing word is author, as in the title of Luigi Pirandello's classic theatrical piece, Six Characters is Search of an Author. In Russell's extended analogy that compares and contrasts the peregrinations of a street-walking fläneur to that of a freely associating analysand on the psychoanalyst's couch, both are attempting to claim a distinctive life authorship. What makes the fläneur and analysand analogous is delineated in seven sections of Russell's essay, sections that by title and content weave the essay's argument. Tracing, first, the historical backgrounds of each ‘wanderer’, Russell explains the origins of the fläneur, and the analysand. Both are steeped in European sensibilities of literature and psychoanalysis: Walter Benjamin and Edmund White for the former, and Sigmund Freud for the latter. It is Russell's epigraph for the essay that defines succinctly the fläneur:
A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city Without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.
And the origin of the analysand, steeped in the history of psychoanalysis, is suggested by Anna O., Freud's famous patient whose milieu is not a city, ‘but a psyche within a room, within a building, within a professional world’ [Russell, p. 30]. Thus, the distinction is made and defined between outer and inner worlds, physical and psychical worlds, walking cures and talking cures respectively.1 Russell observes that the fläneur experiences a distinct pleasure in a wandering, strolling, exploring activity, acknowledging, however, the capability for melancholia. What the analysand brings is