ABSTRACT
Modernist writers were influenced by Freud in their vision of the inner psychological time-space continuum, sharing with psychoanalysts an understanding of the timelessness of the unconscious and a close attention to stream of consciousness. Psychoanalytic listening requires not only efforts to find words to convey the depths of an analysand's experience. The analyst's act of "going into character" may seem perilously close to gratifying symbiotic wishes through mind reading, should the imagination be used to reach inside and find words for the analysand's inarticulate experience. The psychoanalytic therapist becomes privy to dimensions of the patient's inner world, but some aspects of emotional experience are not—and should not be—accessed. Psychoanalytic writers have described true and false selves, private selves. The clinical use of imaginative literature to illuminate the psychoanalytic process does not reside in the manner in which one applies the specific story lines or language of such texts to work with patients.
