The Writing Cure Emma Lieber,  Bloomsbury, 2020,  160 pp., £80, hardback, ISBN 9781501360169

Published online: 10 November 2022

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Situated at the interstices of the experience of analysis and reading, Lieber’s The Writing Cure emerges along these two vital axes. Her book unfolds unconscious productions garnered from her analysis and from reading widely of literary and psychoanalytic texts. She draws on works such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Dan Gunn’s account of his Lacanian analysis, Wool-Gathering (2002), as well as from Freud’s letters and numerous literary texts, to create a structured narrative that is both personal and theoretical.

Lieber’s book speaks selectively to the details of her psychoanalysis (at the time of writing her analysis was ongoing), because, as she explains, to write of an analysis taking place over a decade is an impossible task. This book is not an argument, nor it is a summary of her analysis. Lieber uses the artifice of a letter to create an homage to language itself, playing with received language from memory and from her history of reading, finding repeating signifiers, puns, and paradoxes. The book she is writing, she tells us, is not the book she intended; it is a letter to her analyst. Yet the book does not read as a letter in any conventional sense. Lacan defines the letter along the lines of the Real, as the material substrate of all language, spoken and written, itself beyond meaning. In his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” in Écrits (Lacan, 1966/2006), he shows us that the letter arrives at its destination without our knowing it through a symbolic circuit read and enabled by others. Lieber refers to these texts and knows that the letter of her book embodies and carries these echoes.

Lieber says her book will have posed the question: Am I an analyst? It is the question concerning final formation for any Lacanian analyst. Since the unconscious does not work in linear time and she has posed her question in the future imperfect