Regarding the Author as Patient

ficant than how he says it, fantasies are more significant than events, the unexpected always more significant than the expected, unless one's expectations were generated by a theory that rejects ordinary assumptions and intuitions. Genius and madness share techniques. And so on. The metaphor has been heuristic and certainly productive. And yet like most metaphors, even as it directs our attention towards certain truths, it distracts us from others. There are important differences in the aim and the form of the two ventures, in the texts and the contexts. Imagine a poet or a novelist on the analyst's couch, generating a text, furnishing material for the psychoanalysis, while the analyst listens, occasionally takes a note, keeps track of the slow progress of the minute hand, and now and then asks a question or, more rarely, ventures an interpretation. Imagine the same writer alone, writing, generating another text, furnishing material, he hopes,1 for the literary critic, and for his private vision of the common reader, the person who knows nothing of deconstruction, but who is guided by an instinct to create for himself; out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.2 Rather than reviewing what these events and their products and consequences have in common, I would like to discuss a few of their most fundamental differences. First, the writer and the patient have different aims and different audiences. Likewise the psychoanalyst has different aims than the literary critic, and looks to different audiences. Second, there are differences in the texts themselves, and in the tools (and liberties) available to the interpreter, partly due to the differences in the aims of the speaker, and partly due to differences in the form of the relationship between the two parties

Aesthetics · Art · Deconstruction (building) · Epistemology · Genius · Instinct · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Nothing · Psychoanalysis · Reflexive pronoun · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications