Book Review Essay: “(Re)Constructive Technique” A Review of “The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature Between Ideology and the Unconscious”

I can’t tell if it was entirely from within the text itself or from my acquaintance with Dr. Gorelick, but I confess that I read, in The Unwritten Enlightenment, a desire to be read closely by clinicians while remaining, itself, a book of literary criticism. In his dense and evocative introduction, Gorelick insists repeatedly on the specificity of his use of analogy between the distinct disciplines of literary criticism and psychoanalysis. Analogy makes use of both the similarities and differences between concepts and practices; it sustains their separateness, insists on this gap, even as it allows for the extension of thought as linking (Berlant, 2022; Bion, 1977). Thinking through analogy, Gorelick protests the instrumental reduction of both psychoanalysis and literature. In addition to refusing to collapse concepts and practices, there is no master discourse: each practice will inform and (mutually) construct the other. There is both a modesty in his recognition of the specificity and respectful separation of literature and psychoanalysis (where psychoanalysis is less a discourse or theory than it is a clinical practice) and an ambition revealed in the effort to construct or reconstruct psychoanalysis through literature (literature as the unconscious of psychoanalysis, as Felman [1989] wrote and Gorelick cites).

From the work of analogy between literature and psychoanalysis, Gorelick underlines that both are modes of address with a shared “ethics of inquiry at the limits of representation” (p.8). Gorelick’s initiation of his readers into this ethics of reading, and of “reading otherwise,” is one of the great services to thought that his book provides. The limits of representation, of course, evokes Lacan’s concept of the real, and it is this real that is the alpha and omega of an ethics of reading. The real, as it is excluded and covered over, engines ideology’s endless expansion and violence while at the same time ensuring that ideology and fantasy can never be collapsed. Paradoxically, as Gorelick points out, the subject’s fantasy is real. It is also this real that demands of both criticism and psychoanalysis that they engage in a process both critical (reading that which is censored and banished by a text) and creative, for it requires (re)writing as fragment this indelible mark of the real. This creative rewriting leads Gorelick to Freud’s concept and technique of construction.

I must confess that I have never known quite what to do with Freud’s (arguably[1]) late contribution to psychoanalytic technique. If I was once comforted by the common Lacanian supervisory prescription—“the analyst interprets, it is the analysand who constructs”—it seems that fewer and fewer prescriptions give themselves over to the same relief they provided in earlier phases of my formation when the analytic superego was at its most ferocious and supervisors’ words were often a necessary balm to keep going. Why, after all, did Freud feel compelled to write this paper late in his life and at the same time he was confronting the question of analysis’s interminability (Freud, 1937a, 1937b)?

This, then, would become the framing of the review of Gorelick’s book I had agreed to take up. It is, perhaps, a paradox, that I would ask of a book of literary criticism a question of psychoanalytic clinical technique, but it is in perfect fidelity to the direction Freud (1926) carved out for us. I would approach the task by reading along with Gorelick, his wandering itinerary through the myth of the Enlightenment as it was itself constructed by the eighteenth-century novel: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau’s Emile: Or On Education, Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I would read along with Gorelick, all the time holding up the question of construction and psychoanalytic technique, that the meshwork of branching texts might pose back to me some question of my own relationship to technique, of my own faltering and the ways it might be “signified otherwise” (Gorelick, p. 126).

Psychoanalytic Technique

Let us begin at the beginning—though the concept of construction and of historical truth will irrevocably trouble any notion of beginning—with some discussion of Freud’s own relationship to technique. But before the beginning, as with Sterne’s errant narrator and his digressive “broken sex machine,” let me add, by way of apology, my hope that the absence of any summary of Gorelick’s book, or of the eighteenth century novels I read under his tutelage, will not suggest that I think them unworthy of close reading and patient explication. We can only praise as we are able, and I am a clinician and not a literary scholar and would praise Gorelick’s thought, instead, by putting it to work upon my own. 

Returning to Freud, I would suggest his relationship to technique was cautious, making no claims to mastery or universality. His technique papers are quite wonderful—straightforward, digestible, wry—but more than anything, one is struck by Freud’s humility. He begins his

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The technical rules which I am putting forward here have been arrived at from my own experience in the course of many years, after unfortunate results had led me to abandon other methods. It will easily be seen that they (or at least many of them) may be summed up in a single precept. My hope is that observance of them will spare physicians practising analysis much unnecessary effort and guard them against some oversights. I must however make it clear that what I am asserting is that this technique is the only one suited to my individuality; I do not venture to deny that a physician quite differently constituted might find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and to the task before him. (Freud, 1912, p. 111).

Under immense pressure throughout his career, but particularly during these years of psychoanalysis’s institutionalization, to write a textbook on technique, Freud instead published papers, recommendations rather than rules, and many allowances for individual style like the one above. It is also noteworthy that Freud fully supported Ferenczi and Rank’s experiments with active technique and the many efforts to apply psychoanalysis in institutional settings such that one would alloy “the pure gold of analysis freely with the copper of suggestion” (Freud, 1919, p. 168). 

What of the stereotype of Freud the authoritarian who banished all analysts (precisely during this first period of institutionalization) who dared to oppose him? At the very least, one must grant that if Freud was authoritarian when it came to the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, this was paired with a noteworthy elasticity in his notions of psychoanalytic technique. It should also be noted that this was precisely reversed over the next two to three decades in the international (and particularly the American) institutionalization and formal transmission of psychoanalysis, where it came to be defined in terms of frequency of sessions, use of the couch, and other artifacts (the punctilious preservation of its forms, as Lacan would have it), without reference to an experience of the unconscious and the fundamental concepts that frame such an experience (Lacan, 1958/1966, p. 493). It was this misplaced systematicity that led to the greatest excesses of technical rigidity and sterilization in Ego Psychology with writers like Robert Langs (1973, 1974) and Paul Gray (1994). 

Construction and the End of Analysis

With construction, Gorelick invites us to shift from the systematization of intervention to the intervention that systematizes desire. For Gorelick, such an intervention begins necessarily with a prying. Of Crusoe and the psychosis of reason, he writes that literature must “pry open a minimal distance across which that psychosis can break with its self-enclosed self-certainty in order to find an addressee other than the rapacious, world-ending Other of its own desire” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 64). Later, in his conclusion, he writes of psychoanalysis as a practice that “pries a modicum of separation from the social link” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 141). Prying a minimal distance from monadic self-enclosure and from the social link, for Gorelick, requires an ethics of reading that dissolves the distinction between the critical and the creative. It is here, in this critical-creative practice that construction is authored, and it is here that the “invitation to think literature with psychoanalysis is most apparent” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 122).

Gorelick writes of interpretation and construction as twinned techniques. Construction arrests interpretation’s interminable spiraling, the infinite extension of interpretation and association, by presenting, “in narrative form, the logic which organizes and orients the interpretive chain” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 19). He continues, “Construction is the assertion of a necessary postulate, a counter-myth to the myth of the subject’s self-contained coherence, a psychoanalytic fiction that nevertheless speaks the truth—a narrative of the form of desire and its effects” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 20). This twinning of infinity (interpretation) and arrest (construction) raises questions about the direction of the treatment and the end of analysis.

Indeed, Gorelick has much to say about the end of analysis, and his comments thankfully rely little on worn formulas. For instance, glossing Freud’s comments that the drive will continue to operate after the analysis concludes, Gorelick writes, “An analysis thus terminates, frustrating as it may seem, when the analysand assumes its interminability” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 66). To assume the analysis’s interminability, to take responsibility for the unconscious and its effects, for which no ego, or theory, or theoretician is master, to refuse to exempt oneself from the inheritance of the present: this, for Gorelick, is the ethics of reading that is the end of psychoanalysis. From the modicum of separation, “this interstice,” pried through the practice of reading, the analysand might “turn upon and transform the social link” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 141). Gorelick writes:

It is not the desire for a new reality but an ethical responsibility to negotiate our inherited reality alongside others. We then might begin to imagine new forms of relation to other systems of thought, new ways of inhabiting the history of reason, other outlets for what it has variously foreclosed or repressed. This would be a future without telos or plan. An uncertain future, to be sure, but such is any future worthy of the name. (Gorelick, 2024, p. 64).

As with all the movements Gorelick traces, it begins with a prying and concludes with a torsive return. 

From the Beginning: Navel, Letter, Construction

From the prying of reading emerges this wrenching twinship of interpretation and construction, from the monadic self to the nomadic subject struck by the signifier, inheritance for which there is no exemption but only the transformation of assumption. The construction is the origin at which the analysis arrives rather than from which it departs. Dissolving the distinction between critical and creative, from within the ethics of reading, it is an authorial moment. “What matters is only the effectiveness with which it composes, in the form of the fragment, a total system of desire and its effects” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 124). With the fragment, I think of Nietzsche, and Blanchot, and Norman O. Brown. But nearer at hand, I think of Freud and the navel, which may have to do with the “from the beginning” of Gorelick’s assertion about the twinned methods of interpretation and construction. The navel, similarly, provides a point of arrest against the infinity of interpretation and association. In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) wrote:

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium. (p. 525)

I have always been intrigued and troubled by Freud’s suggestion of the navel. I handle analysands’ dreams in the manner Freud (1911) recommended, in other words non-exhaustively. While it is common enough for an analysand to continue to elaborate a dream thought in a subsequent session, it is much rarer for one to return to the manifest materiality of the dream itself. But I have long worried I would not recognize the navel, in its “unplummability,” were analysand and I to hit upon it.

Following the trail of a series of navels in Freud’s own dreams and screen memories, Serge Leclaire (1968/1998) described an analytic reduction to a “formula, cipher or letter” that aims only at its enigmatic insistence. He concluded:

Finally, oddly enough, what appears at the end of an uncompromising analysis is unconscious desire itself as a formal construction and, as such, devoid of meaning but easily couched in a figure: “to snatch away yellow flowers” in its phantasmatic composition, or, “people with birds’ beaks” in its hieroglyphic concision. (p. 37) 

Might these concepts of navel and letter be the history to which Gorelick’s “from the beginning” refers? What is the relation of these three terms? At first glance, they appear to be of a rather different order: the navel and letter, metapsychological concepts describing the workings of the unconscious; construction, a psychoanalytic technique. The former are discovered, the latter are made (or so it would seem). But let us turn now to Gorelick at work, and the construction he authors in the work of Tristram Shandy to further investigate their relationship. 

Gorelick’s introduction is an impressive piece of condensation, and although it does not read as unplummable like a navel, it certainly does present as a seed or germ (or haphae, to stay with Freud’s fungal analogy) already containing all that is to follow and filled with axioms whose signification will only come much later. And the first chapter working (and unworking) with Robinson Crusoe and the second with Emile and Philosophy in the Bedroom unfolds its mycelial elaboration masterfully. But it is the impossibility of Tristram Shandy, “the most typical novel in world literature” (Viktor Schlovsky, cited in Gorelick, 2024, p. 103) in the third chapter, that is the true test of Gorelick’s (re)construction of construction. 

After describing the novel’s impossibility and why this impossibility makes it the most typical novel, after linking this impossible writing to the drive, and sexual non-rapport, to the symptom (“hobby-horse”) and subject formation, Gorelick plots a series of seven traumas around which the plot circulates.[2] From this initial plotting of a series of traumas, he pries a systematizing construction: “Yorick watches as Walter copulates with Toby, his impotent phallus rubbing back and forth against Toby’s open wound without penetrating it, out of which friction and wound Tristram is born” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 123).

I initially found myself disappointed and restless as Gorelick wove his exposition of the primal scene of the copulation of Walter’s impotent phallus and Toby’s open wound, seemingly arriving in the familiar territory of masculine and feminine jouissance and the absence of sexual rapport. I realized I was wrenched between the muteness of the construction’s singularity (“absurd,” “devoid of meaning”) and the generic knowledge to which it was twinned. But in an excellent staging after a section break, Gorelick continues, “This leaves us with Yorick’s curious and essential place within the narrative’s fantasmatic structure” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 127). 

It is Yorick’s gaze, Gorelick points out, which frames the primal scene precisely as a scene. He writes:

We therefore locate him at the spectatorial position in the novel’s primal scene because, watching from the margins, Yorick disappropriates the family drama of its intimacy, shifting the otherwise unintelligible obscenity of the primal scene to the social scene. He is the vector through which the novel’s unspeakable, because purely fantasmatic, origin is made legible, made to be read, sublimated: given over to the work of literature. (Gorelick, 2024, p. 127).

Something turns for me in this “made to be read.” The navel, the letter: they are metapsychological constructs; they function axiomatically. They exist and are entirely illegible. They have to be made to be read. Enter construction. Navels and letters are not irreducibles arrived at but originaries made (Leclaire did, after all, refer to a “practice of the letter”). I suspect it matters very little our concerns about ownership (the analyst’s interpretations, the analysand’s constructions). What matters is that constructions are authored. 

Gorelick refers to Yorick’s presence as a vector for this “made to be read,” and he calls this sublimation. I am reminded of Lacan’s formulations of sublimation in his Ethics seminar:

One thing only alludes to the possibility of the happy satisfaction of the instinct, and that is the notion of sublimation. But it is clear that if one looks at the most esoteric formulation of the concept in Freud, in the context of his representing it as realized predominantly in the activity of the artist, it literally means that man has the possibility of making his desires tradeable or salable in the form of products. The frankness and even cynicism of such a formulation has in my eyes great merit, although it is far from exhausting the fundamental question, and that is, How is it possible? (Lacan, 1959–1960/1992, p. 293)

Something of the singular (the fantasy and its object, Das Ding) has been put into circulation, made to be read. But how is it possible? Moments earlier in the seminar, referring to The Direction of the Treatment, which was about to be published, Lacan rehearsed that the analyst must pay, with his words (interpretation), with his person (dispossessed in the transference), and with his judgment. He noted the scandalous nature of the analyst’s judgment, for he “is fully aware that he cannot know what he is doing in analysis” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 291). Of the realization of desire, what we might call the sublimated construction, Lacan wrote:

… that desire is formed as something supporting this metonymy, namely, as something the demand means beyond whatever it is able to formulate. And that is why the question of the realization of desire is necessarily formulated from the point of view of a Last Judgment. (p. 294)

(Re)Construction: Being Worked On by the Text

The question of judgement weighs heavy on me, and I would like to return now to the question of my own relationship to technique through the vector of Gorelick’s book. I might begin by noting that I am at a point in my career when the question of whether I am able to bring analyses to their conclusion begins to insist, no longer horizon but here and now. And about a month after agreeing to write this review and one hundred pages into Tristram Shandy my father died. I have gone back and forth dozens of times about whether I should ask for an extension or back out of writing the review altogether, but in a strange, no doubt symptomatic, decision, I elected to continue with the review as planned. Symptom or no, I am inclined to think that something of this review is still my business. Drifting from Sterne—although the centrality of death and paternity is well underlined by Gorelick—I was reminded of Rilke’s graceful (if still perhaps too masterful) letters of condolence, where he speaks, again and again, of the increase of tasks in the wake of the death of someone near to us, of the “higher responsibility” of the loved one’s death pressing us “more evenly and deeply into life” (Rilke, 2018, p. 11). In another letter, he wrote of the experience of death as a coming to our senses:

And this coming to our senses is nowhere greater than in the unique task imposed on us when the loss of the father at his advanced age impacts us: It obliges, in a way, to compose ourselves anew and to employ our inner capacities independently for the first time. (p. 39)

I quite like this subject-less obligation. It is from that elision, that hole, that the construction must be pried and authored. 

Glossing Freud’s formulation of analysis’s conclusion “if it gives the learner a firm conviction of the existence of the unconscious, if it enables him, when repressed material emerges, to perceive in himself things which would otherwise be incredible to him, and if it shows him a first sample of the technique which has proved to be the only effective one in analytic works,” Gorelick underlines a remarkably clear indication of what is transmitted in an analysis: “Conviction, sensibility, and the rudiments of technique” (Gorelick, 2024, p. 65). In reflecting on this triad in my own clinical work, I have the strong impression that I am far better at transmitting sensibility—both in the pedagogical sense of imparting an analytic attitude as well as in lending a certain assent to the analysand’s singularity of style—and the rudiments of technique than I am at transmitting a sense of conviction. And I began to wonder if this lack of conviction was interfering with the conclusion of analyses, and if the absence of conviction was tied very closely to the absence of construction from my technique… the failure to arrive at a Last Judgment.

In my eulogy for my father’s funeral, I said that I would miss his presence, and that his presence was his singular idiom. I said that my father’s presence seemed to ask little of you, and you could be. Unsurprisingly then, I also experience my own analyst as a hospitable presence. He, too, has offered little in the way of construction in my analysis. But a colleague and dear friend recently commented in our discussion after a conference in which my analyst had made an intervention, “And then there’s David, with his way of putting things in their proper place.” I must conclude that it is not the absence of construction that I encounter, but its Lethean withdrawal. And from that empty place issues forth an imperative for authorship. 

I am grateful to Dr. Gorelick for the ethic of reading he initiates us into and for this opportunity to read his words and to be read by them.