[Automatic translation from Catalan]:
«Psychoanalysis in backwards» wants to evoke first of all the poem entitled «A l’inrevés» (In backwards) by Gabriel Ferrater, someone with whom Francesc Tosquelles felt very close, and not only because of the condition of Reus’ resident that they shared with.
Gabriel Ferrater’s poem is, in fact, a small psychoanalytic exercise, condensed into fourteen decasyllable verses, to distinguish the subject from experience and his self. The subject of the unconscious is not identical to his self. And Ferrater —a good reader of Freud and his Traumdeutung— knew it well enough. So, the poem begins with a first verse, «I will say it backward. I’m going to say the rain… », to continue releasing in twelve verses a series of moving images —«…the rain / frenetic of August, the feet of a boy / screws in the thread of the trampoline»…— and end with a last verse that could summarize very well the end of a psychoanalysis: «I will tell what it is fleeing from me. I’m not going to say anything about me». Contrary to what one might think, the true end of a psychoanalysis does not say anything about me, it says almost nothing about the self of consciousness, but it says something about what necessarily flees it, what necessarily escapes it, backward the self of consciousness, the self of psychology. And that is where the subject can finally recognize himself as a foreigner in his own world, as a subject, so to speak, exiled from himself, from his self.
I believe that we can find, both Gabriel Ferrater and Francesc Tosquelles —both exiles, although for various reasons— this common trait: a same condition of foreigner, of strangeness in relation to the self, to the identifications with which we too often confuse the subject. The irreducible difference between me and subject[…]
Miquel Bassols leave a comment
Read full text on screen
unsupported browser
Download full article (text in Catalan)
Read at Issue 50 :: July 2023 already in your bookstore, request a copy here and we will send it to you
