ABSTRACT
One of the fascinations of psychoanalysis, in the dual sense of that which makes it fascinating and that which is its own object of fascination, is its concern with mapping the ‘other’. This is, of course, a widely shared interest amongst intellectual disciplines, but where psychoanalysis differs from many other colonising endeavours is in its constant struggle with the realisation that this ‘other’ lies as much within as without—that it is the co-ordinates of inner space which are being mapped, even when the outside world is what is apparently under scrutiny. Put in the literary terms that offer the most compelling contemporary metaphor for the analytic process, this recognition of the other within the self becomes an instance of intertextuality—reading the other, we reconstruct ourselves. ‘The discovery of the unconscious was Freud’s discovery, within the discourse of the other, of what was actively reading within himself (Felman 1987:60). This ‘other reader within’—the unconscious, in its simplest interpretation—is a constantly disruptive force, skewing the maps we make of the outer world all the time. It applies to psychoanalysis as a discipline and to individual workers in the psychoanalytic tradition—beginning, as the quotation from Felman indicates, with Freud himself.
