The child analyst Laurent Danon Boileau explained that the knowledge contained in clinical cases also came from the discrepancies between the reality of the analytic dialogue as it happened and its written transcription. Indeed, he argues that a significant aspect of the cure comes from the evanescence of real language in the session, and this evanescence can be apprehended through the effort of the analyst to reinvent the analytic dialogue through his counter-transference (Danon Boileau, 1980, p. 23, my translation).3 A strict empiricism of data would perceive a weakness in the written transcription of a session and could be tempted to register the reality of the dialogue using, for instance, a tape recorder. On the other hand, the fruitfulness of the method described by Boileau comes from its imperfections, because in those imperfections something of the evanescence of verbal language can be registered.
Following Freud, the field of psychoanalysis has accumulated an empirical knowledge about its practice that is expressed in the form of texts. This peculiar textual empiricism is something that lies at the heart of the bond between psychoanalysis and literature. Through the endeavour to describe mental processes, the psychoanalyst faces a very similar problem to that encountered by the creative writer or ‘Dichter’:
the problem of inventing a form of writing to describe our inner minds. Edmundo Gomez Mango proposed that Freud perceived the fundamental link that unites literature and psychoanalysis through Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Gomez Mango, 2012, p. 325). According to Freud, at the root of both these creations there lies a child’s wishful phantasy, and through their writing, the poets compel us ‘to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found’ (Freud, 1900, p.263).
Like neurotic symptoms or dreams, all genuinely creative writing expresses unconscious thoughts, but unlike symptoms or dreams, in literature this movement has a verbal formulation. The creative writer invents techniques to write psychical reality. Hence, the inventiveness of the Dichter can help the psychoanalyst by enriching the kind of textual empiricism that is so peculiar to its discipline. The cathartic effect produced by reading works of fiction can be understood in light of the creative writer’s capacity to invent a form of writing that is able to express unconscious thoughts. ‘In my opinion’ writes Freud, ‘our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tension in our minds’ (Freud, 1908 [1907], p. 153).