Who Are You?

Writing is relational and, regardless of its conventional form, always highly personal. I am talking with you. You in my mind? You out there in the world? Is there a difference when it comes to expression? According to French essayist Roland Barth, “Writing occurs … at the instant when one cannot locate who is speaking …” (“Textual Analysis of a Tale of Poe,” in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, p. 97).

Yet writing as time-transcending and history as time-recording melt together.

Who? As you silently read these words (and perhaps imagine them being spoken), how to specify the identity of their speaker? Someone out there? A voice in your mind? A loose overlapping of the two, modulated by memory, fantasy, floating phrases? To paraphrase Winnicott, it is always a speaker/listener. Approaching the world of the analytic exchange with neither memory nor desire, nevertheless you are simultaneously bound in the nets of a verbal language you didn't create, and freed into something else through them. Dial down the past and future as you will in your quest to hear more fully, to eliminate them even temporarily only returns you to the sheer apperception of our animal nature, so how best to help the patient? I tell myself you neither created your language(s) nor its (their) writing conventions but through a second hatching have come into them in both your internal and external realities, and where did all this come from?

The mother tongue, some say. Original skin contact gave way to the bridge of sound, new uses of the tongue and throat, which you quickly sorted out into phonemes in your primary mastery of that complex music. Your auto-erotic babbling and cooing became the core connective tissue of relationship by means of which you survived. The smile, then “mama,” evoke love. Language, although it preexists the individual and facilitates his or her appearance as such, is by its very nature relational; words/sounds are addressed to the necessary Other so that the mind can form and grow. For there to be a one, there must be an other, therefore others, and it is the music of speech that gives birth to emotion. Of course, most of this “music” transcends writing: juncture, rhythm, pause, stress, pitch, as well as body language.

But that is language as speech. What about the later development of writing, typically executed alone (except in unusual cases such as the “exquisite corpse” experiments of the Surrealists)? Writing and speaking blend and separate in a rhythm peculiar to the individual. In the consulting room and through the subsequent practice of written reflections, the analyst tracks this rhythm in part by following his or her own ghosts, the peculiar figures bridging the internal and external worlds, what Rilke refers to as the angel or messenger.

What is this message but who you are. Writing is not the simulacrum or passive registration of speech but its abrogation. Speech is time; writing like photography kills history, thereby making it possible in fantasy. I want access to this fantasy to help me push deeper into the relationship with my patient. Any such moments of understanding must be tentative, contingent, glimpsed in passing no matter how vital to the analytic process. In other words, speech and writing, although based in language, function somewhat as strangers, the kind encountered on solo walks down a country road. Our strictly nonverbal encounter throws me into a state of profound ambivalence. There is a message; what is it? Relationship is fraught. Listening cannot be pure, separated from interpreting. Traduttore, Traditore! Voilà Hermes, god of the no-man's land in between, deliverer of ambiguous messages, interpreter, trickster. Finally, let the Bohemian-Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke, in “The Second Elegy,” speak:

(in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. S. Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library, 1995, p. 339).