"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."

― Sigmund Freud

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Analysis. I sit behind an analysand, listening, but what I hear vanishes over the days, weeks, months, years, of the work, only to reappear at unexpected moments in the treatment. What reappears comes back as a form of speaking: the analysand says something and there is a link to what was said before- two years, five years ago. I speak and what I say links to something I have wondered about for a long time but never said. Something I have heard becomes audible to the analysand then, open to question, revision, erasure and writing over, a layering of interpretation.

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I see that this work of analysis infiltrates everything I do: printmaking, poetry, and teaching; the unconscious is alive in me both inside the consulting room, and beyond it.

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As a printmaker, I continue to explore the endless possibilities of making monotypes and monoprints, photopolymer prints, relief prints, transfer drawings, gelli prints, intaglio and letterpress.  I also make small editions or one of a kind artist’s books.  To give you a sense of my process, several years ago I drew the roofs over the town of Quillan, in France, and brought that drawing back with me to rework as a print.  I simplified it, transferred the drawing onto a copper plate, etched the lines with a needle, dipped copper into acid, making a plate to fix the lines, and another plate to add the shadows.  Once the plates were ready, I inked them, wiped them, and printed them in succession, one over the other.   The images created this way comprise a series that conjures what I am after: an invisible history of seeing made visible within the work.

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Poetry erupts from silence into precise language that carries as music, musical sense and sound: marks and erasures break here/ no, here/ cut the line to say impossible things. Depending on where the line ends, I write, erase, revise, listen again. I listen to my poem and the work of other poets in repeated readings and consultations. I revise, and revise many times.  This process leads me to hear things that I would never otherwise hear, and to follow music in language and make something strange on the page.  Writing fiction, for me, is a long process of finding that music on the page in another form; whatever character or story I stumble into in my writing takes its time emerging in this form.  I am always seeking to write the unsayable, to find words for what is beyond my own reach, to create something in language that upends our ideas of how language works- through the fictive experiences of characters that are of me, but not me. 

 

I teach seminars on psychoanalysis at the Lacanian School and with FLi (Freud, Lacan Institute in Ireland).  I consider the question of a transmission in the work of psychoanalysis- on the couch, through supervision and, increasingly  in teaching. Truth is, perhaps, a moment that cannot lay a ghost to rest. What is this insistence, and what is ghostly about it? Truth leaves a trace, a trail, through the effects of speaking.  Psychoanalysis, based on speaking, becomes a way to transmit the unconscious case by singular case. The question is what is most alive in the unconscious in our time, what calls out for new formulation and response? Psychoanalysis is a radical practice, making a place for what has been outside of knowing, of language, of history, and what is even think-able. My students, the psychoanalysts of the next generation, ask questions I do not ask. I follow them into the future of psychoanalysis.

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