Introduction

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.

This book is based on articles, lectures and seminars belonging to the last dozen years. Only four of the thirteen chapters have appeared before in English, and those have been significantly revised from their original publication. Collecting together work from just over a decade has been like casting a net off the stern of a moving boat. What sort of catch would I haul aboard? I was not at all sure, but I wanted to see what was in the net, and what relation the different species might bear to one another.

There turns out to be a dynamic running through the book, between specifically psychoanalytic thinking and existential matters of life and death. The relation between psychoanalysis and what lies beyond its own specialised confines has always been important to me, and it is not by chance that the likes of Vermeer and Raphael, Augustine and John Locke, cognitive scientists investigating memory, Sophocles, Rilke and Seamus Heaney turn up in these pages. Freud remarked that if one were founding a college of psychoanalysis the curriculum would need to include such subjects as ‘the history of civilisation, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material’ (Freud, 1926a: 246). This is not just a pragmatic question of needing to know what patients are talking about. It is to do with the place of psychoanalysis in relation to other fields of knowledge and modes of understanding. Science, art, literature, religion, philosophy and psychoanalysis are all aspects of mankind’s attempt to understand itself, and give meaning to existence. In a paper not included in this volume (Parsons, 2005) I have pictured Freud’s encounter with Michelangelo when, during his visit to Rome in 1901, he went to see the Moses. He could not help recogn