by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

How does psychoanalytic case writing further its aims?

On writing, Hélène Cixous (1991) says: “I am the awkward sorceress of the invisible: my sorcery is powerless to evoke, without the help of your sorcery. Everything I evoke depends on you, depends on your trust, on your faith.” Your trust, your faith. You, Reader. That what I write finds its hook, pierces, somehow, but not so piercingly that you turn away, at least not completely.

Like psychoanalysis, the best writing seduces. That is, it leads one away. Reading Cixous, I’m enthralled, breathless—wanting for a path, a resolution.

But captivated as we are, writing that demands that we follow deprives us of certainty, revealing the surplus of possibility opened out at certainty’s limit. This is something like the paradox of falling forever while held, in Solmaz Sharif’s words, like “a newlywed securing her updo / with grenade pins” (2016). As with writing, psychoanalysis disorients in order to open, patient and analyst alike.

A patient said recently, “I didn’t come here to feel good.” To touch the other-than-good, we describe the space he gets stuck in in between words, a space fitting nothing but the stuff of its selfsame derivative. I get sucked in and stuck in the space between words. He stumbles pausing, “I don’t know.” Pause. What’s there? I say. “No. I don’t. Know.” Ok. He says, “no, more.” No? More? No! More? No more? “Don’t no.” Stop. We have a foundation in stopping—I think a fermata in music, a pause stabilizing a state over time—terra firma. Don’t no = yes? Hermenaut that I am, has my insistence on explication tightened our knot?

But I’m falling for the desire to map the map of descriptive inconsequence.

Pause.

Does this type of impressionistic description advance analytic understanding? Is it that object relations and metapsychological structure are needed to explain our terrain? Or could it be, rather, that the terrain’s descriptive logic advances its own becoming? The social anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993) calls a “taskscape” a pattern of “dwelling activities” comprising our rhythmized—that is, temporalized—and interrelated “perceptual engagement[s] in the world.” Because describing is inherently temporal, a taskscape that includes description (as with analytic elaboration and the work of après-coup) is itself in rhythmized interrelationship with the subject so described, such that describing alters the taskscape via accretion. To produce analytic effect, it is then enough to engage with case material in writing.

Yet if case writing and its subject are so inter-implicated, what of verifiability, that an inside and outside obtain, delimiting our work so we can look and point and know about it? Empirical demand reorients toward certainty: that’s Saint Thomas’ finger in Christ’s wound, the disoriented faithless reaching into the cut as if the beyond in point of fact remained. We are here already. Faithful, certainty’s limit gives way to possibility. Case writing that sustains our not-knowing provokes further analysis, such that not-knowing becomes the wound a patient hooks—is the index of the possible—if a therapist believes.