Reading-together as a transformational practice : the potential role of literary fiction in the work with non-neurotic analysands
In this thesis, I explore the subject’s construction in relationality, first by presenting a theoretical framework built from concepts drawn both from literary studies and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches. In the first part of the thesis, I explore how the literary work has the potential to facilitate the actualization of otherness both in the text and within the reader. To illustrate this contention, in Part II, I explore the affective tone of the short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel García Márquez. In Part III, I elaborate theoretically on the potential benefits of using literature as a therapeutic medium with non-neurotic readers. I explore how the reading of short stories may contribute to the stimulation of the non-neurotic reader’s capacity to memorize and to remember while promoting and strengthening her/his capacity for symbolizing previously unmetabolized or unrepresented emotional experiences. I argue that reading and discussing stories in the context of analytically oriented sessions may lead to the co-construction of subsequent narratives that may be transformational for the reader’s non-neurotic psychic structure. In the fourth and last part, I argue that the intersubjective inbetween space that might emerge from the encounter of an analytic dyad with the story by García Márquez could potentially facilitate the important task of supplying new ways of thinking, feeling and expressing, while simultaneously potentially producing “dream” material that may contribute to the enlivening of the analysand’s non-neurotic conscious and unconscious life. Finally, I contend that the reading of literary fiction may initiate in non-neurotic analysands a transformational movement: first, from an internal “mycelial bath of non-figurability” to the strengthening of their representational capacity; and second, from an emotional apathy to the extension of the analysand’s affective cartographies.
Psychanalyse Reading Psychoanalysis Transformational practice Unrepresented mental states Self-narrative