On “The Burning Beach”: Immersion, Errantry, and Caribbean Relation

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as relational psychoanalysis was gaining ground in the United States, French Caribbean poet and writer, Édouard Glissant, used the same term, Relation, to describe his creolized human experience of the flow of the world. Glissant’s relational subject is a beachwalker, parsing the shoreline with his footsteps, traversing the edge between land and water in a mixture of grounding and flow that he also termed errantry. In Stacey Novack’s discussion of Marion Milner’s psychoanalytic account of creativity and self-immersive states in her 1950 work, On Not Being Able to Paint, a sense of aliveness that comes from an experience of the relational flow of the world is likened to the plunge into a body of water. For Glissant, however, the sea is part of a landscape that is corrugated, punctuated, staggered and staged. Even the most inward state is lapped and tickled by the tendrils of the Other, and this interlapping interplay is generative and creative. Novack’s discussion offers an occasion for thinking about how both Caribbean and psychoanalytic relationality understand immersive inward states, as frightening, oceanic, and boundless or as a staged descent, a dipping one’s toes in-and-out of the waters on, as Glissant termed it, the burning beach of reality.

This article refers to:

Carried Away: Creativity, Immersive States, and the Abiding Relational World

View responses to this article:

Is A Dip Still A Plunge? A Consideration of Immersion by Degree: Response to Corbett and Stephens

Notes

¹ For Glissant, errantry involves a form of wandering in which one retains at every moment a sense of one’s place, of one’s ground and, “one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides” (Glissant, 1990/1997, p. 20)

² Not unlike Novack’s writer-patient Nico, describing his efforts to enter the waters of his internal creative process as if standing on a beach and walking into the waves inch by inch (this issue, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Stephens

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst, a professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick, and the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. She is the author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke 2014); three co-edited collections in archipelagic American and Caribbean studies; and recent essays on race and psychoanalysis in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis.