Speak with your own voice
My analysis is beginning to go into that dark place we all have and feel scared to talk about. Transference, of course, is developing at the same time and I am beginning to feel a kind of tenderness for this man, similar to what one might feel for a father figure. This is enhanced by the fact that I am telling him things I have never told anyone, things bottled up within me for a long time. The fact that I cannot see him while I talk really has an effect on my memory, and episodes I thought were not stored within me suddenly come up to the surface. Quite scary sometimes (I fear a passage a lÄôacte); but also quite productive.
I enjoy writing my clinical diary. I am the kind of person for whom analysis can work. I am not afraid of confronting the fact that I may have been lying to myself for a very long time (a requisite for undergoing analysis, I think); I am not afraid of digging down or of spending a long time and much money in this activity.
When little breakthroughs occur, it seems to me that, somewhere, some order has been restored. The intensity and acute self-consciousness make colours more vivid. I mean it literally: the reds, the blues, and the greens. It is amazing what the strict, law abiding symbolic order can do to someoneĶ
Analysis is also supporting me to establish a more useful parallel with art. The fact that I have found what probably will be one of the most important texts for my PhD also helps. JCFAR’s Special Issue 2000, entitled “In the place of an object”, is a collection of essays and images that think about psychoanalysis. The works of the exhibitions address Jacques Lacan proposition that the work of art occupies the place of the analyst. Art and analysis are not the same, I know. The analogy requires careful work and consideration. There is a wealth of literature out there exploring this and I am just beginning to tap into it (Samuels, JCFAR, Lucy Holmes’s work, Parveen Adams…). I think however, that the exploration of the correspondences between the two is a useful way of building an understanding of seduction, of calling it into presence, of allowing us to glimpse a strategy for considering the effects of seduction (in Alan Cholodenko’s words), the fact that it leads everything astray, including the little Spanish researcher interested in it.