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“It is not that our vocabulary is scanty and its deficiency should be remedied: faced with the voice, words structurally fail”
/Mladen Dolar A voice and nothing more (2006)
The Swedish psychoanalyst, poet, author, editor and literary critic Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson (often referred to as UKON) has been a productive writer for thirty years. Mostly poetry, but lately a novel as well as a collection of essays. His most recent book touches upon one of the most central yet surprisingly untheorized parts of psychoanalysis; the voice. Thinking about how central the voice is to analysis (as in the two other impossible professions) the scarce number of books and articles on the subject is striking. You have the voice of the superego, of conscience, in hallucinations, as a possible transitional object, in different aspects of silence, as central to how many symptoms are formed and manifest. In Freud, we don´t have to look far even though we won´t find a theory of the voice. Think, for example, of all the tongue-clicking, stammering, groaning, spluttering and speech loss that we encounter in his patients. All the interpretations based on co-sonance. It´s the talking cure and an art of listening – not only to signifiers – but to the voice. There is of course much written on many of these particular aspects, like auditory hallucinations, for example, but little explicitly theorizing the voice. The analyst who paid most attention to the voice was Jacques Lacan, who promoted it, together with the gaze, to one of the drive objects or paramount embodiments of object a. But, like writings on the myth of narcissus, while the gaze is often theorized, the first so lively and central positon of the voice has turned strangely silent.
UKONs book don´t remedy this lack in theory or offer a thorough psychoanalytic investigation of the voice. His book ”Röstautograferna” is a lyric essay that combines a poetic fluidity with short essayish investigations that are dropped like topics are in a good conv