According to Sharpe, ideas are first expressed through psycho-physical experiences that could be described as a writing of the erotogenic zones and it is only when the bodily orifices become controlled that ‘words themselves become the very substitutes for the bodily substances’. Speech is therefore secondary to a bodily writing of ideas and Sharpe goes as far as considering that ‘speech in itself is a metaphor’ of this more primal mode of thinking. She writes: ‘Speech secondly becomes a way of expressing, discharging ideas. So that we may say speech in itself is a metaphor, that metaphor is as ultimate as speech’ (ibid., p. 203).13 Individual metaphors invented in the analytical encounter are not ‘a façon de parler’, they reveal a primal writing of the body’s orifices. As eloquently phrased by Jacobus: ‘Sharpe’s model makes bodily continence the price paid for language and language itself a form of materiality. (…) Words assume the qualities of substitute substances. They function as projectiles, weapons, gifts, or magical performances. Speech (utterance) becomes metaphorical “outer-ance”’ (Jacobus, 2005, p. 6). It is this emphasis that Sharpe places on the bodily concreteness of the psychic traces that haunt speech, that reminds me of some of the key intuitions of post-structuralism.14
I believe that the specificity of a psychoanalytic writing comes from the attempt to give an account of the back-and-forth movement between speech and writing: the movement from the word-presentation to the thing-presentation that is at stake in the dream-work or in analytical- work. The practice of psychoanalysis does not reveal a Being of the unconscious, nor even an entity of the psyche but, rather, unconscious processes: rational thinking is supplanted by unconscious determinism, the logos of the discourse is supplanted by the pathos of transference and resistance.