Meg Harris Williams

On psychoanalytic autobiography

This article considers how one might define ‘psychoanalytic autobiography’, using statements from theorists of ‘life-writing’ and extracts from autobiographers (some of them psychoanalysts), together with their own commentaries on the genre. The focus is less on content and more on the nature of the art form, with a view to noting analogies with the psychoanalytic process. These analogies are to be found, in particular, in the qualities of transference dialogue; in the art of transformative or communicative projective identification; and in the contrast between self-indulgent and constructive types of memory. Psychoanalytic autobiography is seen as a mode of remaking the self – not omnipotently but through exploratory self-analysis, frequently following the familiar pattern of loss and rediscovery. It entails a special imagined relationship with the unknown reader, and a sense of being guided by a detached observational eye equivalent to that which Bion terms the ‘third party’ in a psychoanalytic situation.

The true voice of feeling: Lear's pilgrimage

The injunction at the end of King Lear to ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ appears almost too easily said, by contrast with the tempestuous emotionality of the play as a whole. This article considers the role of poetic language and poetic structure in defining an essentially nonverbal or preverbal quest for identity, taking Lear and Gloucester to be the children who are father to the man. They represent complementary aspects of the baby or young child who is struggling to internalise its mother upon weaning and achieve a mode of symbol-formation. ‘The true voice of feeling’ is a quotation from Keats differentiating ‘true’ from ‘false’ art, and the babys struggle is related to the poets.The injunction at the end of King Lear to ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ appears almost too easily said, by contrast with the tempestuous emotionality of the play as a whole. This article considers the role of poetic language and poetic structure in defining an essentially nonverbal or preverbal quest for identity, taking Lear and Gloucester to be the children who are father to the man. They represent complementary aspects of the baby or young child who is struggling to internalise its mother upon weaning and achieve a mode of symbol-formation. ‘The true voice of feeling’ is a quotation from Keats differentiating ‘true’ from ‘false’ art, and the babys struggle is related to the poets.

The oedipal wound in two stories by Kafka: The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor

Kafka read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis but believed there was no ‘cure’ for what was essentially the problem of living. As always with creative artists, the writer is his own psychoanalyst, and the actual process of writing is his means of self-revelation. The aim of this paper is to consider, in relation to two stories (The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor), Kafka’s use of this background oedipal conflict with his father or received values (the ‘law’) as a springboard for the type of wound that results in creative writing. The wound for him became a kind of personal myth, and was also associated with other painful stimuli, including his tuberculosis and his troubled love affairs, but above all with his identity as a writer. The writing process and the ‘faith-value’ it demands is an underlying metaphor behind these narratives of Kafka’s ‘dream-like inner life’. There are parallels here with Bion’s psychoanalytic philosophy of ‘suffering’ and ‘psyche-lodgement’.Kafka read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis but believed there was no ‘cure’ for what was essentially the problem of living. As always with creative artists, the writer is his own psychoanalyst, and the actual process of writing is his means of self-revelation. The aim of this paper is to consider, in relation to two stories (The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor), Kafka’s use of this background oedipal conflict with his father or received values (the ‘law’) as a springboard for the type of wound that results in creative writing. The wound for him became a kind of personal myth, and was also associated with other painful stimuli, including his tuberculosis and his troubled love affairs, but above all with his identity as a writer. The writing process and the ‘faith-value’ it demands is an underlying metaphor behind these narratives of Kafka’s ‘dream-like inner life’. There are parallels here with Bion’s psychoanalytic philosophy of ‘suffering’ and ‘psyche-lodgement’.

The infant and the infinite: On psychoanalytic faith – Bion, Meltzer and Kierkegaard

This paper discusses the meaning of psychoanalytic faith as a useful developmental concept, which applies to the therapeutic process in the consulting room as to other intimate educational experiences. Faith is a concept which has been little considered in relation to psychoanalysis, partly owing to semantic confusion with ‘the Faith’ as in religious or psychoanalytic dogma, and partly owing to the difficulty of defining or describing what it is, outside accepted jargon. Yet, faith is traditionally the gateway to experiencing the unknown – a psychoanalytic goal-demanding negative capability. It is suggested that philosophy and poetry, where the concept is more familiar, can provide psychoanalytic parallels for this particular type of learning from experience. The viewpoints of Bion, Meltzer and Kierkegaard are taken as contributing to a picture of how, in the psychoanalytic session, there may be a developmental encounter between the infant (patient) and the infinite (the transference process, rather than the analyst as a person).

Mirroring and attunement: Self-realization in psychoanalysis and art

This book is a welcome contribution to the theoretical background that lies behind the current interest in the nature of reciprocity in the relationship between analyst and analysand. It is an attractive book in its own right, its keynote sounded by Rilke’s interpretation of the medieval tapestry of the Lady with a Unicorn that is housed in the Musée de Cluny and is here printed on the book’s cover: