Citation

Civitarese G. Int. J. Psychoanal. 2008; 89(2): 279-298.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Institute of Psychoanalysis, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1745-8315.2008.00019.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Losing oneself in a story, a film or a picture is nothing but another step in the suspension of disbelief that permits one to become immersed in the ‘novel’ of reality. It is not by chance that the text-world metaphor informs classical aesthetics that, more than anything else, emphasizes emotional involvement. On the contrary, as in much of modern art, self-reflexivity and metafictional attention to the rhetoric of the real, to the framework, to the conventions and to the processes of meaning production, all involve a disenchanted, detached and sceptic vision – in short, an aesthetics of the text as game. By analogy, any analytic style or model that aims to produce a transformative experience must satisfactorily resolve the conflict between immersion (the analyst’s emotional participation and sticking to the dreamlike or fictional climate of the session, dreaming knowing it’s a dream) and interactivity (for the most part, interpretation as an anti-immersive device that ‘wakes’ one from fiction and demystifies consciousness). In analytic field theory the setting can be defined – because of the weight given to performativity of language, to the sensory matrix of the transference and the transparency of the medium – the place where an ideal balance is sought between immersion and interaction.