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There is great value in this book, which in its gentle insistence on “the inherently liminal nature of psychoanalysis” (p. ix1) can remind us of what psychoanalysis initially was, is, and can continue to become. The author’s opening address lays out the stakes and the territory in no uncertain terms:
Psychoanalysis may well have sprung up from unoccupied spaces in the mind that remain inaccessible to thinking. And yet, human imagination has often endeavoured to give shape to such areas of blindness that may have been suppressed, dreaded, denied, or dimly recognised. Such indeterminate spaces may be undecided, unknowable, ineffable, and often create an experience of impotency. Such affective states press for their own language and what erupts is a language of the
Liminal is defined as barely perceptible; relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process; unless otherwise noted, page number citations are referencing: Kaul, N. (2022). Plato’s Ghost: Minus Links and Liminality in Psychoanalytic Practice. London: Phoenix.
Page 148unconscious. This may often interact with what has come to be recognized as the language of psychoanalysis. [p. xv]
In the clinical situation, the challenge we face at any given moment is whether, or to what extent, these eruptions will be contained in a process that furthers, rather than impedes, the work of the analysis. The latter, Kaul notes,
[is] quintessentially paradoxical in that it is both an acknowledgement of the ineffable, and an attempt to give it form…. This paradoxical state generates a grammar that is at once an attempt to estrange the quotidian as well as to make acquaintance with the alien and unknown. [p. xxxii]
This grammar and its idiomatic expression are often enigmatic, incomprehensible. Try as we might to discern, intuit, or even assign and create meaning to what is unconscious or unrepresented, we may never escape to the surety that we have discerned true certainty or knowledge.
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Fr