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February 22, 1983. WHY ISHMAEL, AHAB, WHY MOBY DICK? Jose Barchilon, M.D.
Dr. Barchilon stated as his aim the study of Moby Dick in an attempt to learn what unconscious forces polarize the novel and motivate its characters. Freud was aware of his debt to writers and patterned his case histories on the novel. Rapaport saw the novel as the model of our modern psychiatric case history. Based on that similarity, this study focused on what, how, and perhaps why we react as we do aesthetically to that great pre-Freudian novel. Dr. Barchilon believes that because a novel is a consistent, harmonized whole, analysts can easily reconstruct metapsychologically the underlying wishes, conflicts, and compromise formations of the characters. The derivatives in the manifest tale are structured, layered, and publicly symbolized much like those in symptom formation and psychopathology. It is Dr. Barchilon's thesis that here there may be common denominators between unconscious processes and mental functioning in general which extend what we can learn from purely private manifestations of the unconscious, such as neuroses. An important part of our aesthetic reaction is rooted in our awareness (however dim) of resonances between our psyche and how successfully and accurately an author has approximated those natural processes, i.e., the subtle compromise between what is