Flashes in a Moment of Danger: On the Autobiographical Essence of Psychoanalytic Writing in Adrienne Harris’s Essay “You Must Remember This”

ABSTRACT

The author emphasizes Adrienne Harris’s skillful use of autobiographical material in his writing, an aspect that contributes to making it a remarkable essay. He also argues that any psychoanalytic writing about is invariably autobiographical, and that this is also the way, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, to move from mere chronicle to history. Nothing in a psychoanalytic essay tastes true unless it has first been immersed in the subjectivity of the narrator.

This article is referred to by:

Après Coup of “You Must Remember This”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst (SPI, APsaA, IPA). He lives in Pavia, Italy. Among his books are: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field, London, 2010; The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis, London, 2012; The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, London, 2014; Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism, Lanham, MD 2015; The Analytic Field and its Transformations (with A. Ferro), London 2015; Truth and the Unconscious, London 2016; An Apocriphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, London 2019; Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis, London 2018; Vitality and Play in Psychoanalysis (with A. Ferro), Milan 2022; Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction, London 2022; The hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art, London 2023, in press; On Arrogance: A Psychoanalytic Essay, London 2023, in press; In 2022, he received the Sigourney Award.