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The theme of “writing psychoanalysis” is at once clearly delimited and quite broad. However, before dealing with the more specific question of writing psychoanalysis, the main focus of this paper, I would like to make a few observations on the broader issue of writing, that is, the problems that writing itself, from its very origins, has posed for mankind. It must have been a truly ecstatic moment when man understood that a concrete fact - a mark on a tablet or a rock, a carving on a tree - could be linked to a thought. No activity is more consistently symbolic than writing and no activity more consistently recalls the original reality of the symbol, in both its material and psychic make-up.
Narrowing the field, I will give only two examples drawn from our two main cultural roots: ancient Greece and Judaism. Indeed, these two cultures - or some of their important representatives - have dealt, in quite different ways, with the problems and possibilities offered by writing.
The classic reference point of the Greek tradition is a text by Plato on writing. I have taken the liberty of citing it at length because, at least two passages, concern us quite closely. In the first,