From this angle, psychical writing is radically different from the systematic writing of the philosopher but it shares something fundamental with the writing of the Dichter. As pointed out by Jonathan Culler: ‘The attempt to understand how we make sense of a text leads one to think of literature not as a representation or communication but as a series of forms which comply with and resist the production of meaning’ (Culler, 1975, p. 259). Like this psychical writing, poetic writing creates forms, which are the expressive medium for experiences that exist prior to, or outside, the verbal language and that resist the production of meaning. The psychical text that appears in an analytic session and the literary text both challenge the logos of the philosopher because they produce forms before producing meaning. As a consequence, they generate a written text irreducible to the record of a spoken text.
The dialogue that Derrida undertook with Freud and psychoanalysis rests partly on this premise, that there is an ‘impossibility of reducing a text as such to its effects of meaning, content, thesis, or theme’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972a], p. 7). In Plato’s Pharmacy, Derrida has shown how this poetic writing is condemned by the philosopher, the writing that Plato condemns in the Phaedrus – a poetic writing that Derrida describes as this ‘essential drift, which is proper to writing as a structure of repetition, a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility or from consciousness as ultimate authority, orphaned and separated since birth from the support of the father’ (Derrida, 1982 [1972], p. 376). Gradually, the drift of the analytic dialogue ‘approaches the inscriptive strangeness and autonomous monumentality of the written text as described by Derrida’, noticed the American clinician Evan Bellin (1984, pp. 27–28). Freud’s elaboration of the psychoanalytic session is the invention of a situation, which reveals the patterns of a primal writing through the speech of an asymmetrical dialogue. A task of the analytic work is to get through the barrage of verbal meaning so that the unconscious text of psychic reality can be played out in the session.