Between wild thoughts and schoolboy essays: Psychoanalytic reverie and the dreamy, digressive subjects of writing in Robert Walser’s Fritz Kocher’s essays

Abstract

In this article, I engage the psychoanalytic writings of Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Wilfred Bion, who proffer maternal reverie – an intimate intersubjective communication between the mother and infant – as an early model for the psychosomatic drifts of form and thought experienced in the analytic encounter. As a way to frame these psychoanalytic dynamics, I turn to Robert Walser’s fictional collection of schoolboy writings Fritz Kocher’s essays, and read the titular character’s various detours and digressions as useful examples of how reverie experience – a space of indeterminate identification between the essay and writer – may be articulated in relation to the needs of writing practice. Since the dream is other to the time of school, Fritz’s contradictory meanings carry the trace of a disturbance that words can never clarify. I also adopt Bion’s conceptualization of the caesura of birth as a way of viewing the breach of meaning in writing as only one possible entrance of many into the infinite figures of signification. Looking at how Fritz’s writing encourages a productive decentering of that which is normally expected of writing students, I end this paper by celebrating the importance of the arbitrary nature of digression.

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David Lewkowich

David Lewkowich is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. His research interests include reading experience, comics and graphic novels, visual response, autobiographical inquiry, theories of memory and forgetting, teacher education, and psychoanalytic theories of teaching and learning.