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I’ve been thinking of the time my daughter Lois read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith, 1943) for the second time. She ambled into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner and, dreamily and in all earnestness, asked, “Did the book change or did I?” “Both of you did,” I said. The book, with all its letters in exactly the same place, nary a period added or subtracted, identical in visual form, changed because she changed. In experiencing it differently because she was different, it, in all its literal sameness, became different.
It was in this mood that I read Unfinished Business; Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, Vivian Gornick’s (2020) short gem. It’s not about psychoanalysis per se, but boy does it radiate with analytic sensibilities. Listen to her opening sentence: “It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question.”
And isn’t this exactly so, that most of our time with patients (or as patients) is so much more about revisiting a story than it is about an initial telling. A person remembers something with me for the first time, and although I’m paying attention to how I feel as I hear it, I can’t help but hear it as plot; content. It is in the re-remembering where all the action is, as the experience is turned over and over in memory, like honing a stone, first with this affect, then with that affect, sometimes with no affect at all, sometimes with this fact included, sometimes with that fact omitted. Such is the currency of our work and, being who I am, not only an analyst but a chronic re-reader, I heard much of Gornick’s writing through this lens. Gornick re-reads D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers three times, identifying with different characters (hero, mother, lovers) upon each reading. She re-reads Colette, first experiencing wisdom, next experiencing vacuum. She re-reads