ABSTRACT
Marie Cardinal, who died in 2001, was a distinguished French author. Born in Algeria in 1929, she was brought up by her Catholic mother after her parents had separated when she was still a child. The Words to Say It, originally published in 1975, is Cardinal’s testimony to the experience of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition. It provides a brilliantly described and constructed account of psychoanalytic experience from the point of view of an analysand. The spoken images in the analytic session provide access to a gap in her knowledge. Cardinal recounted her troubles and her difficulties to her analyst. She spoke of her life, disclosing and discovering much. Until that time in her analysis, Cardinal had always remembered the past in terms of her own construction of events. Cardinal’s paradoxical self-description will be shown to harbour a depth of experience—the experience of an analysis in the Freudian tradition.
