M. Fognini's and S. Harel's Workshop

An Autobiography of Thought. "A Memoir of the Future" as a polyphonic writing of the adventures of one's psyche.

We intend to study the various inscriptions of "acts of writing" that are to be found in the autobiographical and autofictional projects of Bion in order to define the relations between psychoanalysis and narration. It is common to indicate how narrative lability is woven in analytical discourse when looking for its specific character. In this particular instance, autobiography--as a singular form of writing of the self--is a colossal existential delusion.

To believe that it is possible to authenticate a narrative of the self--and the very notion of a self at the heart of this narrative--posits identity as an object of the writing protocol. There is at the core of this project an imaginary weakness that touches on the very perception of the self as projected identity. We see the narrative here as the secondary reprisal of a narrative identity that was played out during the cure. Writing also contributes to inflect what lack in analysis has already been woven in the cure. We will draw examples from Didier Anzieu's Beckett et le psychanalyste and Bion's A Memoir of the Future. Both analysts inscribe a plurality of narrative "voices" that is the only means to circonscribe the polyphony of the unconscious.

We will attempt to determine the parameters that could allow us to situate the enunciator and the narrative of the self, with regard to this unconscious "truth," by delving into the retrospective writing of the analyst who thus qualifies his clinical activity. In all, we wish to question such a problematic of truth and falsehood by looking into the discursive mediations brought into analytical writing, whether fictional or theoretical. To this end, we will study segments of Bion's work, most specifically those pertaining to arrogance, falsehood, the attacks on thinking, as well as his preoccupation with matters mystical (language of enlightenment, becoming O). From there, we will endeavour to define what could be construed as the autofictional writing of the analyst and the countertransferential features of such a scriptural process.

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Mireille Fognini
13 Avenue de Saint-Exupéry
92160 Antony
France