The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 42, #2 Summer 2004

Scientific Meetings
38th Annual Freud Anniversary Lecture
Reading Fiction and the Psychoanalytic Experience:
Proust on Reading and on Reading Proust
by Warren Poland, M.D.
May 12, 2003
Reporter: Rachel Blakeman, J.D., C.S.W.

Dr. Warren Poland illustrated the similarities between the emotional and inner psychological experiences of the active reader and the analysand. He escorted the audience through the journey undertaken by an engaged reader of the masterful works of Proust (to whom he refers as "Freud's literary complement") and illustrated its symmetry to the excursion embarked upon by the analyst and analysand.

Dr. Poland began with a discussion of The Rambler, Samuel Johnson's allegory on truth. Unable to survive among mankind once "confronted by Prejudice and Passions, wounded by Imprudence and Sophistry and Vanity and Obstinacy," truth retreated back to the gods. Truth returned to the world with more success as fiction, cloaked in a "loose and changeable robe, like that in which falsehood captivated her admirers." Dr. Poland eloquently related this allegory to psychoanalysis and its endeavor to unveil the truth with one simple, yet powerful statement: "At times, truth may be approached more readily when she arrives draped in robes of fiction." By acknowledging the "seductive deceits of fiction," analysts recognize that the cloaks of fiction offer conduits to truth that may not otherwise be uncovered. Although the depth of psychic change attainable through analysis exceeds that which is possible through active reading, based on experience, analysts must acknowledge the power of reading to effect change.

Dr. Poland discussed the birth of psychoanalysis and Freud's focus in applying what he learned from his self-analysis to the therapeutic setting. However, Freud's interest in the extension of the analytic investigation to the study of culture remained unfulfilled. Dr. Poland described one limitation inherent to applied analysis that contributes to the dissatisfaction with analytic readings of fiction; the fictional text is unchanging, unable to respond to interpretation or to free associate. However, Dr. Poland detailed two advantages to reading absent from the clinical engagement. First, the constancy of the text allows generations of readers to reinterpret and assign meaning to a fixed literary work. To the contrary, in a treatment setting, only the analyst and analysand share and gain understanding of the experience. The second advantage, as described by Proust, is the safety afforded to the reader whose solitary engagement with the text fosters the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. In contrast, for the analysand, the presence of the analyst, "a responsive other, alerts resistance," engaging the defenses and rendering emotional engagement more difficult to attain.

Illuminating the similarities between two contemporaries, Freud and Proust, Dr. Poland described the atmosphere in which these two geniuses were immersed. "When Freud and Proust were each crystallizing their discoveries, sensuality, inferiority, femininity, mesmerism, dreams, and the unconscious were pervasive popular themes." For Proust, reading "'is for us the instigator whose magic keys open deep within us the door to those dwelling places into which we would have been unable to penetrate'" (Proust 1994, p.36).
Dr. Poland reported Proust's ideas on the psychological power of reading, examined "A la recherche" and related the ending of this work to the termination phase of an analysis. He began by pointing out that those engaged in reading or analysis let a part of themselves go, giving that part over to another (author or analysand), and then selectively reintegrate that which is ultimately taken in and digested from the other. Dr. Poland then looked at Proust's 1905 essay on the nature of reading in which Proust "like Freud emphasized inquiry and opening rather than education and indoctrination." Proust valued the power of reading to incite and stimulate the reader, not to teach or indoctrinate. Inciting the mind is also at the heart of the analytic situation. It is not just the importance of Proust's perspective on reading that Dr. Poland emphasized, but also Proust's movement from his initial identification with and idealization of Ruskin, to the individuation and differentiation of his own ideas.

Proust articulated numerous similarities between reading and analysis, including the potential power for reading to reintroduce "'a lazy mind in perpetuity into the life of the mind.'" Dr. Poland also detailed the concerns shared by Freud and Proust. He paralleled Freud's concern about interminable analysis with Proust's assessment of reading interminable as "characterological passivity." Both Freud and Proust recognized the power of resistance and the dangers that defensive submission substitute for the active engagement that leads to growth. In addition, Proust grappled with the question of authority and as Dr. Poland articulated, "while the author (or analyst) has significant partial authority, it is the reader who keeps the inner last word." The author and analyst do not indoctrinate the reader or patient to adapt a new worldview, but rather "shape the possibility of its opening." Ultimately, the reader and analysand integrate the emotional engagement or experience into their own inner world. The central goals of both reading and analysis are to incite "a mind to activity, not to passive reception. Incitement of a mind from fixed knowledge and fantasy to ever more open possibilities…."

Dr. Poland then focused on the reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and the issue contained therein: the potential for change and growth resulting from the working through of the partial loss of self in an engagement with another. Proust, like the analyst, draws the reader into the story, fostering a regressive state where shifting identifications and obscuring boundaries are possible. Ultimately, Proust leads the reader through a journey, ending "in a manner like that of the termination phase of a successful analysis: waking succeeds dreaming, ghosts are recognized, new self images are sharpened, and the traveler has new strength to turn passivity into personal activity."

Contrasted to reading a case report, Dr. Poland likened reading Proust to the actual analytic experience where in Proust's volumes the reflections on reflections engage the reader in the protagonist, Marcel's experiences, so too does the patient draw the analyst into the patient's stories. "Analyst and reader are ever oscillating, in and out, experiencing and becoming detached." Dr. Poland follows this journey to the end of Proust's last volume, as well as to the termination of an analysis. With their respective endings comes a new understanding, the changes in the present recreate the "mind's sense of past relationships, 'casting them in an original creation'" (Proust 1981, III-p.73).

Dr. Poland demonstrated the processes by which both reading and analysis effect change in all the active participants, author and reader, analyst and analysand. An author translates a fantasy into writing and leaves the reader to retranslate the fantasy and integrate it within the reader's own inner psychological experiences. Similar to the author, a patient translates emotional experience into spoken words and the analyst retranslates the verbal communications several times before translating them into an interpretation, allowing the patient to digest the interpretation by yet again retranslating. Dr. Poland addressed the difficulty of translation and demonstrated its limitations with the title of Proust's work, illustrating that which is lost by the inevitable impossibility of a precise translation. As Dr. Poland articulated, in both psychoanalysis and reading, it is within the spaces between the written or spoken lines that allow for meaningful engagement leading to "new openings and growth." To this end, both writers and analysts must assume that the impossibility of precise communication is inherent in every translation.

In closing, Dr. Poland focused on Marcel's experiences in the twelfth volume of the work, where Marcel's character change is illustrated in his recollections of memories and a recognition that "the enjoyment of the earlier memory was pleasant but wasted." The transient reminiscence is digested by Marcel and worked through so that Marcel demonstrates "what analysts might call insight." The new appreciation of his past and an understanding of his own agency within the past, present and future, as in an analysis, opens doors for Marcel to effect change. "Marcel now realizes that all of his search-his working toward, his working out, and his working through-were preparation that made possible his own more freely self-determined life." Marcel, narrator and Proust come to relinquish idealizations of others, bringing with the loss of what was wished for "a wider range of new possibilities in life, broadening ways of living, of feeling, [and] of dreaming." The engaged reader, incited by the book and the journey within, like the analysand nearing termination, "comes to know anew both the experience of opening and awakening and that of the sadness of loss, the grief when a shared universe closes." Upon completion of Proust's literary masterpiece, a successful analysis and Dr. Poland's lecture, the reader, analysand and listener are "awaken[ed] to life."

Rachel Blakeman, J.D., C.S.W. is a psychotherapist in private practice. Ms. Blakeman earned both her Master's and Bachelor's degree at Columbia University and is currently a candidate at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. In addition, Ms. Blakeman completed the institute's two-year psychodynamic psychotherapy program. Prior to becoming a social worker, Ms. Blakeman, a graduate of Boston University School of Law, practiced corporate law in New York City. In addition to her private practice, Ms. Blakeman owns and operates "Protect-a-Bub", a stroller sunshade and rain cover company.