Still I’m trying to write about Freud. But it seems to get harder each time I try. I still can’t shake the image of that urn swaying back and forth in the middle of the night last January. This was before I took that class on psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Before I started going to therapy myself. It was as if the fall of Freud’s urn unfolded a series of events for me. It triggered my renewed interest in him, an interest both intellectual and personal. In the end, is there really a difference?
I stay up late and write about myself as a I write about Freud. I read about H.D. and Freud, Derrida and Freud, Fliess and Freud. There is always more than one. There is no autoanalysis.
I type on my computer. I type on my typewriter. I think about grandiose essays about psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and death. I dream of interweaving my dreams, my autobiography, among these insightful and obscure commentaries. I think about how Freud’s ashes have both destroyed and preserved his body, how he and his wife are indistinguishable in that urn. I want to tell someone, anyone, that I know and understand the nuances of Derrida’s interpretation of psychoanalysis. I understand that the Freudian signature on psychoanalysis is both singular and abyssal. I think of the back and forth of the death knell as Derrida’s figure for fetishism and its contradictory assertions. I dream of saying this all in a way that is both simple and evocative.
I continue to write as the satisfaction with what I have written eludes me. Maybe it will take a lifetime to find that. It may take a lifetime, even after Derrida, to understand and explain the relationship between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and the history of metaphysics. Maybe it will take a lifetime just to write about this impossibility. Regardless, there was some truth in what H.D. said, about Freud being reborn. H.D. also said, as if continuing the thought: “The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory.” [9] This virtuality inscribed within psychoanalysis inhabits all who speak its name.