The Analysand and the Analyst: The Impact of a Published Case Study

Some research has been done on connections between uses of oral ways and written means in helping relationships. In particular, becoming so involved in their writings, psychoanalysts publish clinical cases about ex-patients cures. Nevertheless, the effects of the reading of his case by the concerned ex-analysand are a topic on which very few data are available, except for Serge Doubrovsky’s example (1999).In this field, the question which is studied here is : what would be the effects on a former analysand, Jacques, of his readings of his case published in two documents (a book and an article) written by his ex-psychoanalyst. The situation is unusual because their comparison leads to assuming a sort of parapraxis by the author during the writing of that article because of the disappearance of an essential paragraph appearing in the book. This kind of lapse by the analyst would illustrate Dona Rudelic-Fernandez’s hypothesis (1994) according to which the study of a clinical may reveal inanalysed elements of the concerned cure.Thus, an unforeseen and unlikely device would have been set up, via some published writings or intended to be so. And the analysis of an analyst’s article by the former analysand would have contributed, besides other perlaborations, to his autonomisation with regard to his transfer on his former analyst.This hypothetical and provisional conclusion cannot be generalized. Like this, in Plato’s Pharmacy (1997), Jacques Derrida commenting on Plato’s Phaedra, notices that the writing may form either a narcotic or a medicine for the life of the memory.