{"id":168571,"date":"2024-09-18T10:00:23","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T14:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168571"},"modified":"2024-09-19T16:49:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T20:49:17","slug":"dreaming-within-the-text-notebooks-on-herman-melville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/09\/18\/dreaming-within-the-text-notebooks-on-herman-melville\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From Six Drawings<\/a><\/em> by Robert Horvitz, a portfolio published by The Paris Review<\/em> in 1978.<\/p><\/div>\n

The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst\u00a0<\/em>Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication\u2013Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.\u201d The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients\u2013and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated entry, 1974<\/b><\/p>\n

Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self\u2019s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological\u00a0speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are\u00a0the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about\u00a0them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that\u00a0analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with\u00a0the object.<\/p>\n

The style of the obsessive-compulsive, for example, is in the nature of a closed cognitive and active world. If obsessive-compulsive behavior is memory, what is being recalled? It seems to me that obsessive-compulsive behavior is a mimetic caricature of rigid mothering. It is caricatured self-mothering which [may] recall [interpret] the mother\u2019s handling of the child.<\/p>\n

How else can we account for the shifts in disorders if we don\u2019t take into account the paradigms which generate them? Insofar as we know that patterns of mothering vary historically, can\u2019t we assume that each disorder remembers the primary object relation? Indeed, why else does psychoanalysis go back to childhood when presented with conflict? Because it is understood by most to be functionally derivative of infancy.<\/p>\n

The only problem is that the philosophical assumptions of this hypothesis remain unappreciated, to wit, all disorders speak the individual\u2019s past and they ultimately speak the subject\u2019s interpretation of the past and therefore are a form of remembering. The advantage of this to the person is to value his disorder as a statement<\/em>, not simply a dysfunction. This is the difference between the hermeneutic and functional traditions of psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

A symptom is a way of thinking. Remembering is a way of thinking. Symptoms are some form of the subject\u2019s thinking about himself. Psychoanalysis is a way of two people thinking together about one person\u2019s thinking.<\/p>\n

A patient brings a mood, thought, confusion, a blank\u2014collages of himself\u2014and the analyst provides the space. The therapeutic alliance is simply: we are thinking and working together. The transference and countertransference: we are feeling for each other together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1974<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican literature\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

American writers speak the true self, while the country doesn\u2019t listen. Melville tries to identify\u00a0with this American false self\u2014the external explorer and conqueror\u2014but fails and the true self\u00a0breaks through.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1974<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAhab\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is absolutely essential is to keep in mind that Moby Dick is an invention, a projected\u00a0object. The horrid irony of Ahab\u2019s effort to break through the \u201cpasteboard mask\u201d is that he is\u00a0the object behind the mask! He is the originating subjectivity. Does Melville make this irony\u00a0specific?<\/p>\n

The five phantoms loosed in chapter 47 are the loosening of Ahab\u2019s internal objects: or the\u00a0objectivization of internal selves. Rage permits the dissociations to be loosed though never\u00a0integrated. Rage\u2014especially in the search for the whale\u2014is a loosening of or an exorcism of\u00a0internal objects. The whole point of the trip is to exorcise the phantoms and to put them into\u00a0the whale.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1975<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is one of the ironies of existence that you can love the other only after you have lost the other. With ego development the fusion with the other is lost, a necessary precondition for recognizing the other\u2019s separateness, but nonetheless a losing of one\u2019s [fused] self.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1975<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMelville\u2019s ethics\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a time when the other is sought outside, as a deity, an idea, or history, Melville\u2019s hero points\u00a0toward the struggle to find other as the unconscious self. In a sense as man has destroyed culture\u00a0(collective dream\/play space) he then assumes the responsibility of it and comes to a point of\u00a0wisdom: culture always reflected him; he created it, it came from him. The sacred, profane,\u00a0shared, etc., all experienced as outside; Melville says we must experience an inside other.<\/p>\n

Thus he has in Mardi <\/em>and in Moby-Dick <\/em>a transitional metaphysical and psychical moment between other as outside (the whale) while Melville gently proves it to be inside the self. It is important to see this as Melville\u2019s ethic. Outside, there is neither solution nor absolution; nor is either ever possible. Insight, the seeing into the self, to witness and behold the other as inside is the shock of re-cognition that Melville asks of us. It is the venue of the psychoanalyst as well, but the psychoanalyst after Freud\u2019s metapsychological works processed the other and ethically disowned it.<\/p>\n

Free association, which was a way of access, against the resistance of man, became a means of disowning the other by processing it. A novelist like Melville searches inside himself, comes to the point of seeing and holds the fundamental fact of the internal other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

December 10, 1975<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOn good interpretation as poetry\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is the form of an interpretation that is most effective. We must know that our best\u00a0interpretations are poetic in their structure and delivery, so that the form holds words in such\u00a0a way as to deeply <\/em>affect the patient. In the same way, poetry rather than prose gets to us in a\u00a0deeper way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

January 22, 1976<\/strong><\/p>\n

Out of the debris of our dying culture (early twentieth century) comes a new mythology and a\u00a0new language. We see this early in Baudelaire who finds the symbolic inside the city; we discover\u00a0it in Barthes (Mythologies<\/em>) who creates a new mythology. It is godless. It is ordinary<\/em>. As Barrett\u00a0points out in Irrational Man<\/em>, cubism is the ontologizing of the banal object, because out of the\u00a0debris only objects are left.<\/p>\n

The psychoanalytical experience is, in free association, the use of the ordinary (i.e., trivial language) to remythologize the person, to find his myth, his culture, through<\/em> the debris. From the debris of his own words, which up till now he has found barren, a wasteland, he discovers meaning and then his own myth.<\/p>\n

The analyst is the person, par excellence, who carries the person through the wasteland of\u00a0the self, and who holds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Where has the debris come from?<\/p>\n

From an explosion in the nineteenth century of human value and belief. We are commodities, objects-to-ourselves, defined by use or function.<\/p>\n

The death of culture. Debris. Playing with debris (Dadaism). Creating a new language.<\/p>\n

The analytic process: death of the old self; debris and the sense of dislocation; playing with the debris; searching in anger, despair; through reflection, finding one\u2019s self.<\/p>\n

Barrett says that before man is a being, he is a \u201cbeing-in\u201d (111): taking Heidegger\u2019s point about Being in the World. In modern man this Being in, or the essence of our being, has been\u00a0lost. It can be re-found in psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

In Coleridge\u2019s \u201cDejection: An Ode\u201d and in Marx\u2019s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts<\/em> we see man expressing his sense of loss of being-in the actual world<\/em>. We have seen this earlier with\u00a0Pascal, though in his situation it was as much the losing of a spiritual world: being in a world of\u00a0spirit. Being-in spiritually (mythically) and Being-in actually (materially) have been severed. It is\u00a0this loss which writes the \u201cWasteland\u201d and founds existentialism.<\/p>\n

Out of this comes man and world as debris, cut up in Dada and Joyce, and now a new myth of man emerges. What is the new man?<\/p>\n

The silence of the patient comes after despair over the word. They have said, perhaps, a great deal, but begin to have a feeling of despair over the word. This despair sponsors a silence; it is\u00a0silence in the face of the unthinkable; the absence in the core of a person over a truly spontaneous\u00a0sense of being-in the world. Their speech has been a narrative account, a construction, often\u00a0beautifully or bravely rendered.<\/p>\n

The patient of today can speak only for so long. Speech is an effort. It is an attempt to hold off the void. (Pascal.) The silence denotes emptiness and the absence of the other. The analyst must be absence coming eventually into presence through holding.<\/p>\n

We focus on the mother as the cause, but in fact, she is all that is left of one who gives meaning, breathes life into the other, and so we focus on her. She can never make up for the void in the culture. Our search into this relation, solely, is a misdirected one.<\/p>\n

Character and creation. Our being does have voice through character. To hear it is a task,\u00a0painful, awful. It is the voice of our emptiness yet through the transference\u2014the analytic paradigm\u2014our character changes.<\/p>\n

In Moby-Dick<\/em> the myth explodes (capitalism, Protestantism). We are left with Bartleby, mute\u00a0among the debris\u2014dead letters. The Confidence-Man<\/em> remythologizes by manipulating the\u00a0ordinary into the fantastic. He picks up debris and maps the fantastic.<\/p>\n

After 1914 man learns, according to William Barrett, that the solitude of being a self is irreducible regardless of how completely we seem to be part of a social milieu. Man is no longer contained in a social fabric. But with our patients the tragedy is that each must fashion a life out of a wasteland.<\/p>\n

In the sixties, politics, group movements, the therapies, communes, etc., were all attempts to fashion cultures. The Beatniks (Kerouac, etc.) were the first.<\/p>\n

It is silly to say \u201ccounterculture\u201d as there was no culture there in the first place.<\/p>\n

Each of us carries within our own debris. It is our past: a past not held within a familial, social, and cultural container to be given recurrently back to us. We don\u2019t know our past. We only have images, memories, pictures etc. We bring this flotsam to the analyst who gathers the pieces; he\u00a0gives form to our content\u2014if we can trust him to do this\u2014we find our past. This is the analyst as\u00a0the transformational object<\/em>: the one who gives form to our content and thereby transforms the\u00a0content itself, by giving it meaning.<\/p>\n

Out of the debris of our past emerges our own mythology. Why have I been so moved when on one bright day I witnessed from a 10,000-ft. peak of the Sierra Madre a tiny train thousands of feet below crossing the California desert? Why should this experience be so close to me, seem to hold me? It was a question, in fact, that I had never asked at the time. Its essence evaporated into the diversions of my life, though now and then I recovered it.<\/p>\n

In analysis I found two things about myself. One was that, as my father had gone off to war\u00a0when I was three months I did not see him until I was nearly two. I was overly eager not to see\u00a0my mother disappear as well. At nursery school, it was my fate to stand up high on the steps of the\u00a0slide\u2014not to go down\u2014in order to watch in the distance for the first sight of my mother who would\u00a0come to collect me.<\/p>\n

So being up high and searching for something vital and joyful was part of my personal idiom: the creation of my myth of significance and order.<\/p>\n

The other mythical object was the train, which has always filled me with sadness and, strangely, contentment at the same time. So it was in my analysis that I discovered that it was by train that I left my birthplace and my father and also it was to the train station that every day my grandfather took me to see the train go by. Perhaps he did it out of his own love of trains or perhaps it was because I indicated my desire to see trains and he, in kindness, facilitated this wish. What the myth of trains gave to me in analysis, with the understanding of the essence of the aesthetic experience on the mountaintop, was how an experience visualised for me a deep myth: searching for recovery from my mother, longing to be reunited with my father. The experience of looking on the mountaintop was<\/em> me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May 9, 1976<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMetaphysical psychology\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is it the eventual affirmation of the negative? Is Moby-Dick <\/em>an affirmation of brotherhood, through the destruction of isolated fanaticisms? Ishmael lives to share a narrative with others, unifying men through discourse, while Ahab uses men to fulfill the fantastic demands of his private culture.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November 4, 1976<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOn a character serving in a restaurant\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am watching a young woman who is the waitress (wife) in an artificially lit Italian caf\u00e9 that serves sandwiches to the English. The surroundings are without character, rather like the set of a television film, suggesting its impermanence. There is little here, except the come and go. The first time I ate here, she paid me no attention\u2014flung the food on the table. Yet, tonight, I have discovered her use of herself as a character. She dissociates from the surroundings, defying the anomie by being a character. She throws her hands through her hair, punches out the orders, laughs or teases the locals\u2014yet she is totally self contained. I find this interesting as I am reminded of Marx\u2019s theory of alienation. She deals with it all by laboring her character: it\u00a0<\/em>becomes the surrounding of the self, and she looks no further.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe text dreaming\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The text would have to undergo an experience of its own dream. Like the dreamer, the text would have to be confused. It is not simply the author who has the dream as the dream elements are already in the text at hand. With Stubb\u2019s dream I must see what holds up to the dream and then what occurs after the dream.<\/p>\n

The point is to establish the composition of the dream space, in literature or in life. It is an area of<\/p>\n

1. Wonder or terror
\n2. Actualization
\n3. Enigmatic meaning
\n4. The place where the thinker is the thought of himself, or, the thinker the participant in the thought<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The dream in literature must be a region of wonder, separate from yet reflexive to the rest of the\u00a0text. It must be the dream\u2019s text, as it must use and pit itself against the text, in order for us to\u00a0consider it as a dream. A space in relation to the context of events in the fiction. Is it an allegory\u00a0within an allegory?<\/p>\n

What is the difference between a vision and a dream?<\/p>\n

I am concerned with a text which has a dream, a moment when the continuity of its presence of mind is interrupted by a dissociation in its consciousness, in a space that I have called the dream space. The text can have its own dream if at this moment the cumulative experience of imagery-making, of plot construction, of characterization, breaks down into a self-reflexive dream process. This is rather like a breakdown, but a breakdown of a very special kind. In such moments the author yields, under the demand of the text\u2019s unconscious logic, to the text\u2019s (and his) need to share a dream with each other. (So, the author shares a dream with his text!) We could say that this moment will be more available in the modern novel, where the author already has found an intimacy of rapport with the text, where he uses more the idioms of his own internal psychic structures than the conventions of literary creativity. Even so, few authors\u2014as Poulet insists\u2014achieve a level of sincerity toward their own text. I should say, an intimacy where the text is the container of unintegrated subjectivity, and where the author\u2019s Other is not an alienated moi<\/em>, but\u00a0a subjective object.<\/p>\n

To the person writing or dreaming, writing (or textualization) and dreaming are processes\u00a0of thinking about being, not products. We must, as E. Said argues, reacquaint ourselves with\u00a0writing as a process, not a finished product.<\/p>\n

This can also happen because an author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text; though the experience of the dream will be in the textual space, will use the history of the text for the dream material, and, as such, will be the text\u2019s dream. If an author, like Melville, yields himself to the text, then we can say that the text will dream him, or dream about him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

April 26, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMelville\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The core fantasy seems to be of a desire for an object to be plundered. In Moby-Dick<\/em> this was the whale, but this leads to annihilation. In \u201cBartleby\u201d there is a desire for the experience to be provided by the other (the employer), with a dead ending in the brick-wall prison. In \u201cI and My Chimney\u201d there is an attachment to the object as inanimate and under the fantasy control of the self.<\/p>\n

What can we call this cluster? It is a private phantasy: an autistic phantasy that materializes within the fiction, but isn\u2019t made explicit as such. In \u201cBartleby\u201d it is addressed to the other. In Pierre<\/em> what do we make of the episode when the character crawls under the rock, to be born again? Is that another cluster? Is the fictional space a place where Melville can have this phantasy? An autistic voice?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May 2, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMelville\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Literary perversion.<\/p>\n

Idiot event.<\/p>\n

Burlesque.<\/p>\n

Are there certain fantasies of the text that are not thoughts per se but ritual enactments of\u00a0ego structures? Deep memories, paradigms, of the subject\u2019s experience of the other?<\/p>\n

Is an allegorical personification a character? Insofar as this structure speaks structurally, it is.<\/p>\n

The idiomatic arrangement of character structures is the voice of character: the interpretation of self.<\/p>\n

Does character speak in fiction more uniquely as the other becomes a phantom (death of God) eliciting a mute yell from the subject\u2014as the voice of character? All character is utterance to an absent other, and with the death of God, this absence provokes deep language cries.<\/p>\n

In some characterizations\u2014especially sagas\u2014we must ask, What is left out? The character may be noble, set against a surrounding world that is very violent. This is the split-off voice of character, which in the nineteenth century is joined to the self. Character defends the self against the internal world.<\/p>\n

How does character relate\u2014i.e., to us, the objects around it? Such use, does it reveal idioms?<\/p>\n

The absence of a specific character language, particularly the person who seems to be strong and induces our projective identifications, creates a dream space for us. Character is the container of the reading subject’s pure self. We are Other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May 3, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCharacter in fiction\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Does character in fiction depend on what the hero deals with or transforms? Where are the\u00a0events of being? Character has to do with the idiom of transformation: an interpretation of\u00a0the self. Where is the locus of transformation in fiction: in the author, or, is it yielded over to\u00a0character?<\/p>\n

What is the relation of character to the author\u2019s use of character?<\/p>\n

Character in fiction is a type of speech which may or may not occur in fiction. It is an interpretation of the self. If it is only a rhetorical device, it will only be interpreting the self as a\u00a0rhetorical act. However, if the self experiences an internal world and relating, then character\u00a0speech may occur as a reading of that self.<\/p>\n

Rhetorical versus psychological character.<\/p>\n

How do we experience the character in fiction? Or, how do others [other characters in a\u00a0novel] experience the character in fiction? He is set up in others and in the reader. Is the text, the\u00a0Other for the character? Does it reply to him or hold him?<\/p>\n

Does character reflect the mental process of the text? Is character an interpretation of being\u00a0inside the text? Where text is the psychical process, does character interpret this?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCharacter\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Character in a text expresses something. Invariably, it is the discourse of structure, of handling by a self, and is a different hermeneutic. A character may say \u201cI love you\u201d but the formality of his being may say \u201cOnly at a safe distance do I love you.\u201d This speech is the discourse of character and is a subjective interpretation of the self rather than the professed themes uttered by the subject. Think of Heidegger\u2019s notion of the existence-structure of the self. Ishmael and Ahab transform the subject \u201cI will hunt the whale\u201d in different ways. Their style of handling is an interpretation of the self. It will speak fundamental paradigms of transformation of need, desire, fear, etc., of instincts and relating to the object. When an author releases different characters into fiction he is releasing varying ego structures in himself, different selves, to personify aesthetics of being.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Aesthetics of Being: Character as Discourse on the Self.”<\/p>\n

We cannot decenter character from the crucial reality that there is an interpretive presence in character. The structures of character are idiomatic internalisations of self-object (and self as instinctual presence as object) relations. These are matters of choice. Ishmael and Ahab make choices derived from their different ego structures.<\/p>\n

By releasing character the author uses different styles of transformation of desire and relating to the other.<\/p>\n

In fiction, each character embodies a character memory.<\/p>\n

Does any of it have to do with the experience of the text? In the sense that an author may\u00a0release his internal world into the text, characters are different modes (ego structures) of\u00a0handling and interpreting these themes. This handling (transformation) is the aesthetic of\u00a0character.<\/p>\n

Ego structure. The infant experiences the mother. On the basis of the infant\u2019s experience of\u00a0the mother he makes choices about handling the mother.<\/p>\n

In Moby-Dick<\/em> Melville puts one ill and one healthy ego structure alongside one another, in the juxtaposition of Ahab and Ishmael.<\/p>\n

The mother\u2019s handling of her infant is an aesthetic and points the way to her notion of the baby\u2019s body and self. Her handling complements the baby\u2019s emergent ego (handling) functions. As the mother handles instinct and impulse, so the baby internalizes her paradigms. This is the internalization of an interpretation of the self.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMetaphor as secret\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Metaphor takes a word which applies to one thing and transfers it to another because it seems a\u00a0natural transfer. This occurs in Melville\u2019s pyramid fantasies where clusters of metaphor sequester\u00a0hidden meanings. The chimney has hidden spaces and is a metaphor of secret places. Such an act\u00a0is at the root of fiction. Keeping the source a secret, yet communicating from it. Is it some deep\u00a0ego structure that finds symbolic equations for itself?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Undated, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCharacter versus subjectivity\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Character is memory. It is an aesthetic of being that forms and transforms experience\u00a0according to an unconscious hermeneutic. It is mute in the sense that the receiver is\u00a0absent (except in analysis) and the subject who enacts his character is blind and deaf to\u00a0his aesthetic.<\/p>\n

In a sense, character reserves an interpretation of being that may be at variance with the\u00a0person\u2019s subjective notion of their essence. It is a clash between the discourse of character\u2014which speaks through the aesthetic of being\u2014and the voice of desire: the subject\u2019s play of the\u00a0imaginative possibilities of self.<\/p>\n

This is, perhaps, best illustrated in a person who is (as existent-structure) a certain way. He handles himself and others in a certain style. A syntax of being and relating. Now, all this\u00a0may be unknown by the subject and, indeed, at wild variance with his own \u201cinternal world\u201d or,\u00a0at least, his experience of the world.<\/p>\n

It raises the question: What is subjectivity? Or, can there be a genuine subjectivity without hearing from the discourse of character? I think the discourse of character is a mute speech. It means \u201clistening\u201d to one\u2019s silent speech, almost as if we bear with us a shadow self who prints in an aesthetics of being a dialogue with an absent object. In psychoanalysis, this absent object may reappear in the transference.<\/p>\n

In fiction, at least the modern novel, character may exist alongside consciousness; in\u00a0particular, the consciousness of the author \u2026 or the world of the novel. What is the discourse\u00a0of the self? Does the consciousness of the author grapple with the violence of character; or, is\u00a0it remedied by superficial placing in indexical tongues (sociological matrices) rather than as\u00a0an idiomatic\u2014unconscious\u2014discourse of the ego: the impersonal self?<\/p>\n

What novels do I know of where the subject grapples with character? Moby-Dick, Crime and <\/em>Punishment<\/em>. It means a conscious confrontation with the mute determinacy of one\u2019s idiomatic discourse. Character is autistic, in that the receiver of the discourse is absent (the object of all characterological defenses) and the language is, thereby, a dead language. It is the fact that character is a dead language\u2014a language no longer spoken between the original speakers\u2014that gives critics the sense that character is conservative, or inhibiting.<\/p>\n

Most novelists understand only the effect of character\u2014that is, linking it with mute determinacy\u2014and this principle is then reprinted in a novel, in social terms (cf. Goffman), but that is not the truth of character, which is deeply enigmatic and aggravating.<\/p>\n

Many novels are an attempt to escape the enigma of character by a manic-omnipotent staging of character, giving to themselves a control over character\u2014\u201ccharacterization\u201d\u2014that is a denial of the very experiences of one\u2019s character.<\/p>\n

Recent psychoanalytical studies of the self\u2014in particular, the borderline and narcissistic\u2014are concerned really with a patient whose primary speech is character, whose \u201csubjective\u201d life is\u00a0blank or chaotic and who refuses to be informed as a subject, of themselves as a character.<\/p>\n

Character is destiny if understood, and fate if not understood.<\/p>\n

Few authors permit this determinacy to be with them. Their act of omnipotent creation defies destiny. Yet some writers do: Melville, Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

December 15, 1977<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDenial and paranoia\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

A patient denies memory and both severs and dissolves linking, so he has no internal, accrued\u00a0sense of self. He has no tradition upon which he can rest. His unconscious motivation is to deny\u00a0the absence of a transformational object and to reject what is<\/em>, to use the semiology of the self as\u00a0a reproach to the other, who must feel guilt.<\/p>\n

But, the attack on linking leaves him without structured psychological means of living-in-the-world. To survive, he uses paranoid vigilance\u2014to scan the environment\u2014instead of psychic insight, to know the self. Hence, paranoid thinking is a defense against anxiety surrounding survival of the self, that occurs when there has been an unconscious subversion of psychological insight. That is why he is not concerned with knowing himself or with insight, but only with how I feel about him and whether he is in trouble or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and writer whose books include\u00a0<\/em>The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and <\/em>Meaning and Melancholia, among others. This extract is adapted from<\/em> Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks, 1974-1990<\/a>, which will be published by Karnac Books in England in October.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAn author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2518,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68416],"tags":[68795,67827,4083,16388,952,17144],"class_list":["post-168571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","tag-christopher-bollas","tag-featured","tag-herman-melville","tag-ishmael","tag-moby-dick","tag-psychoanalysis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville by Christopher Bollas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 18, 2024 \u2013 \u201cAn author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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