James Strachey, in his paper called Some Unconscious Factors in Reading, further explored the unconscious nature of this liberation. He identified a sadistic oral component contained in the act of reading: the reader is the son ‘hungry, voracious, destructive and defiling in his turn, eager to force his way into his mother, to find out what is inside her, to tear his father’s traces out of her, to devour them, to make them his own and to be fertilized by them himself’ (Strachey, 1930, p. 331). Strachey saw the act of reading as an efficient cathartic release of sadism and, according to him, ‘the facilities of reading offered to the whole population in modern life may, by providing the opportunity for a far-going sublimation of some of the sadistic components, actually contribute to a diminution of unmodified brutality’ (ibid., p.329). Thus, according to Strachey the act of reading in itself would generate unconscious transformations independently of the content of the text. It seems to me, that the great importance of Strachey’s paper comes from this point: to show how the written text cannot be reduced to language or meaning but is also a stage on which unconscious phantasies are being played.
In continuity with Strachey’s research, Anne Golomb Hoffman compares the act of reading with ‘the ongoing exchange of conscious and unconscious thoughts between analysand and analyst’ in a session (Golomb Hoffman, 2006, p. 401). Like the experience of reading, that of psychoanalysis exceeds the intentional exchange of information. They are both verbal experiences and yet they generate a type of transformative knowledge that exists outside of verbal language: a transformative knowledge rather than an informative knowledge.