Poetic Confluence: A Sociological Analysis of an Enigmatic Moment

Abstract

This paper examines a form of interpersonal relationality that takes the form of a speech event in which one participant produces a spoken turn that exhibits a poetic relationship to a co-participant’s unspoken thoughts or unarticulated mental imagery. This examined in relation to an earlier analysis of a speech error during therapy which appeared to reflect some form of telepathic communication between patient and analyst. Drawing from sociological studies of the organization of everyday social interaction, I sketch some ways in which a sociological approach can contribute to psychoanalytic reflections on telepathic experiences between patient and analysts.

Notes

¹ The paper by Hollós was translated by my research student, Dr. Germaine Stockbridge, a German national living in the UK since 2009.

² A curious feature of the phenomenon is that once people are aware of it, they are likely to notice it happening to them. Schegloff’s corpus contains many cases from colleagues and students with whom he discussed his initial observations; most of the examples in my corpus have come to me in the same way. It is possible, then, that having read this article, readers of this journal may experience something like poetic confluence. In which case – and forgive the blatant pitch for data – I would be enormously grateful if you could send me a description of what happened via email ([email protected]). All personal and identifying details will be anonymized in any subsequent academic or public dissemination.

³ Should readers think that I am making a rather unidirectional case for the value of sociology to psychoanalysis, it is important to stress that I think that many ideas from relational psychoanalysis could be enormously influential in sociology too, particularly with respect to recent explorations of the role of interiority in social life, research on subjectivity, the study of affect and embodiment, and attempts to move away from theoretical and empirical individualism found in discussions of field theories. However, space prevents that discussion here; besides, these are issues that really should be addressed to sociological audiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin Wooffitt

Robin Wooffitt, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at the University of York. His research interests include language and interaction, anomalous experiences and the relationship between interiority and social action. His publications include Conversation Analysis (Polity, 1998, with Ian Hutchby), The Language of Mediums and Psychics (2005, Ashgate) and Telling Tales of the Unexpected (Harvester Wheastsheaf, 1992).