To set language to work in a way that can convey the subjective construction of a memory has appeared as a new challenge for both Freud and the writers of modern fiction: the challenge of a formal research that aims to transcribe internal images into a text that is not a recording of an object’s external reality but a description of the transformation of an object into an internal representation.
‘For I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort’ (Letter to Fliess of 1 February 1900, in Masson, 1985, p. 398). In his conquest of unconscious territories, Freud did not use observation or experiments but a form of writing that models an irreducible otherness at the core of the subject. From this angle, psychoanalysis could be described as a literary science: a science whose knowledge is archived through a textual form.