But if, as Freud says, we repeat only what we cannot remember, what is the
psychoanalyst or literary theorist doing when he learns a method of analysis that
itself involves a repetition of certain skills?
A method is only a method because it bears repeating; and yet from a psychoanalytic
point of view it is repetition itself that is the problem, that signifies trauma.
This is one of the paradoxes that Christopher Bollas and Malcom Bowie examine in
their differently eloquent and intriguing books. Embarrassed alike by the subtlety
and complexity of the work of art and of the patient, can the theorist and the analyst do more than repeat what they already know? Is theory always more of the same,
just Where The Tame Things Are?
If theory is, by definition, what we already know, what are its prospects?
The future, after all, is the place where our prejudices will exist.
psychoanalyst or literary theorist doing when he learns a method of analysis that
itself involves a repetition of certain skills?
A method is only a method because it bears repeating; and yet from a psychoanalytic
point of view it is repetition itself that is the problem, that signifies trauma.
This is one of the paradoxes that Christopher Bollas and Malcom Bowie examine in
their differently eloquent and intriguing books. Embarrassed alike by the subtlety
and complexity of the work of art and of the patient, can the theorist and the analyst do more than repeat what they already know? Is theory always more of the same,
just Where The Tame Things Are?
If theory is, by definition, what we already know, what are its prospects?
The future, after all, is the place where our prejudices will exist.
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