Work in progress
Psychoanalysis
by Frans Tassigny
Proposition 1.
If there is a slumbering poet in every psychoanalyst and in every poet a psychoanalyst caught unawares it is because they both evoke an articulated language, that of the unconscious. For the first it unfolds in a rigorous closerous closed field and for the second it expands in lyrical and wild romanticism.
Proposition 2.
Chess masters possess the art of people who have none, psychoanalysts that of healing; poets that of enchanting. All three are confronted with their solitude; often in research sometimes in music and innermost joy.
Proposition 3.
There are no established poets and no street poets, only poets, full stop. On the other hand, there are no psychoanalysts as such. There are solicitors of the mind, mayors of the unconscious, pedagogues, teachers, doctors or theoreticians, but, they are in good lodgings.
Proposition 4.
Poets all belong or have belonged to a "wandering academy". For the most rebellious that of the aristocracy of the proletariat; for the others, let's say that they simply indulge in lyricism. Analyst apart from a few dissenters are keyed to established power rarely or never offering an ear to anarchy.
Proposition 5.
Supposing poets were in fact only false misfits surreptitiously hiding their dishonour unan ear to anarchy.
Proposition 6.
Supposing poets were in fact only false misfits surreptitiously hiding their dishonour under the mask of inconsolable gloom, society romantics and lyrical hucksters. Then, in order to repair the good they failed to bestow or the evil of their mediocrity, fully fledged analysts will be required to heal their imposture.
Proposition 7.
If analysts read Nerval, it is because he hung himself in the street providing them with an almost monstrous clinical case. Poets, on the other hand recall that he was Gerard Labrunie, stretcher bearer and poet at the time of the Commune when letters killed.
Proposition 8.
Maïakowski desired to live a double choice: that of renouncing the memory of his father and that of choosing the exact hour of his death. can you imagine an analyst elsewhere than in the shadow of Freud, succumbing to a cotton-woolly death on a couch maybe... P.S. Maïakovski's death was an outcome of a Stalinian purge and Freud's one that of an excess of cocaine?
Proposition 9.
Poets belong to a secret brotherhood: sea captains, night porters, circus folks... The latter are to be found proposition 8.
Poets belong to a secret brotherhood: sea captains, night porters, circus folks... The latter are to be found paradoxically in the dreams of the subject undergoing psychoanalysis, to be deciphered by the analyst. You will now understand the solitude of poets. One only understands real solitude and its weight when one is surrounded by friends who distract you from your creative awakening. Remember Milosz, when a friend expressed concern about his absence and asked him "Master, how is your solitude?" Because one is alone, always alone, everything aims at solitude.
Proposition 10.
The psychoanalytical process for Lacan is what epiphany means for Joyce, the labyrinth for Borges, the Madeleine for Proust and light for the Impressionists. All these concepts have had their Schools, a þre acknowledged friends, except perhaps the work of Arthur Rimbaud that will only emerge in the genesis of future man.
Proposition 11.
One must absolutely direct oneself from the author towards his work, that is to say: it is because a creator possesses a given personality that he produces a given work. But never, amongst the characteris to say: it is because a creator possesses a given personality that he produces a given work. But never, amongst the characteristic specificities of a text to outline the psychological profile of an author and to draw a series of conclusions, in a dichotomy of various preaching.
It would be vain to interpret the verses of Paul Panel "The black milk of dawn is drunk at sunset" as the gruesome representation of Auschwitz, the concentration camp where they were written; as also to call Ezra Pound a fascist as a consequence of a few interviews given during the war on Radio Rome where aesthetics and politics were cleverly blended.
Proposition 12.
If on the fingers of the hand, the painter maintains the palette with his thumb, the politician the forefinger of the agora, the craftsman the middle finger that builds, the musician the ring finger that sings out the soul of violin and the analyst the little finger of the Ear, then the poet is the palm where all come to meditate; as for the philosopher, he is the tool, the plume that vacillates stealthily subtle and transient.
Proposition 13.
The subject undergoing psychoanalysis mainool, the plume that vacillates stealthily subtle and transient.
Proposition 14.
The subject undergoing psychoanalysis maintains the great "other" in state. the latter as James Joyce on the banks of the Liffley is in pursuit of new epiphanies. And although his poetry is a sufficiently profound art to include everything, one dimension is lacking: mystery, enigma that only a great "other" can reveal.
Proposition 15.
The making of a poet requires a clean shirt every morning and no shame. The making of an analyst imperatively requires a social status, he is in need of a master, a recognised school of thought. Paradoxically for the analyst, the written word is prone to stage-fright leading almost to pride in commenting and producing in a rigorous and faithful manner closest to the chosen master.For the poet, the password is a tempest under a skull, for the analyst, it dithers on a comma.
Proposition 16.
Between psychoanalysts, there is alas the word reason. On the other hand, between poets, the concept of discovery which amounts to saying: a great poet is not only he who writes verse but he who finds and enhances the work cept of discovery which amounts to saying: a great poet is not only he who writes verse but he who finds and enhances the work of other poets. And it is mainly this availability that makes him great. They therefore acquire the capacity of outgrowing personal resentment which no psychoanalytical school has so far been able to do. On the other hand, psychoanalysts do not try to please, whereas poets major or minor try to catch the tune of the day living in the future of the work to come.
Proposition 17.
In the field of the Odyssey as the Ulysses of Homer born of the surf of the sea symbolising man with the thousand ideas and written in the dynamics of the tropical waves episode open to the sky of adventure, carnal links, knightly combats, the hero is only free in the epics of virile action, the great nomadic wanderings.
In contrast, the field of the analyst is an interior world with an economy of words, availability in a sedentary empty theatre like an inner oasis.
Proposition 18.
If poetry is a language in the highest meaning of the word, it is because it is the knot, the furnace, the vortex of logopeïa (significance of the woe in the highest meaning of the word, it is because it is the knot, the furnace, the vortex of logopeïa (significance of the word), phalopoeïa (originality of the image) and finally of meloeïa (assonance of sounds). It is this later quality which is rare as we can also imagine in the analyst with a difference: the poet perceives the "hymn of the world" and the analyst, the secret mechanism of the unconscious, the interior path of man.
Proposition 19.
If the poet lives the anxiety of the blank sheet and the analyst the ruin of an empty consulting room, it is because both live up to their art as an armrest for their solitude and not as an awakening of thought.
Appendix 1.
The word solitude and its concept occur episodically in these propositions because they are intimately linked to poetry, but, I am not really sure that "the solitude of the poet" is a form of punishment. If one "enters into solitude", it is no sacrifice, no calling,. On the contrary, its quintessence is Awakening, as in a Spanish inn for the pilgrim, the cure for a patient; it offers what one possesses in reality: The LIVED EXPERIENCE, as in life, we do not suffer from what we have brought rather from what we have been unable to give.
There is slightly nothing to negotiate nor to expire above all no nostalgia of solitude. Of course, most need solitude to produce a work "One must get lost within oneself" (F. Kafka) and it is difficult to outline the limits, often extraordinary indifferent. They lose themselves probably because they have gone beyond on the quest believing themselves to have a mission and a grossly useless one at that. There is never a mandate.
Rimbaud for sure had fully understood this (in Abyssinia), he had certainly gone beyond an art that he had fully circumscribed, a meteor in the matrix of the poet to come, he had therefore nothing more to prove: what is definite even in excess is not to be crossed out, is not to be started again. He had given too much too quickly, too far, the gap between the Verb and existence is neither an abyss nor a ruin, but simply a lived experience, the equinox of a dreaming mind.
Appendix 2.
Poets apart from a fether an abyss nor a ruin, but simply a lived experience, the equinox of a dreaming mind.
Appendix 3.
Poets apart from a few symbolists have no curiosity for the abysses. Psychoanalysis would worry about its genesis and would guide the subject out of the abyss whilst cornering him in his last defences, his uttermost confessions. The patient must therefore verbalise and go beyond his limits expressing unspeakable shame striving to live and live again that which has changed his entire life, his entire being reduced to the obsessional reflection of a trauma. His only life belt in the tempest is the psychoanalyst for sure who in the torment sets his patient adrift on the high seas, at the profoundest depths. Is metamorphosis now necessary, to displace the obsession, the fixed idea enhancing it with new colors.
Here is an alchemy of the deepest wound treated with all the seriousness of men of science. The psychoanalyst does not quibble with Satan, the Satan of his patients, hence a terrible harshness, a perfect austerity as he locks himself in the fantasies of his patient like a mother embracing her cancerous son to take his illness from him and restore his hope in life.
Appendix 4.
Poets are major, fully acknowledged or meteors, never prophetic.The advent of the Nazism was due in Germany to a need for a great spiritual leader, a sort of shepherd of the Germanic Soul. He was awaited in the work of the Romantics. Alas, the promised heaven turned into an apocalypse, the great leader into a bloodthirsty barbarian in the black masses of the holocausts.
Appendix 5.
Amongst the poets in love with a mythology linked to the elements, the most subtle are those who deal with minerals.
