Psychoanalytic theory

FAT CAT'S DANCE

by Erin Elizabeth Kelly-Moen

With a wolfish look 

to his calicoed face, 

and eyes of amber true , 

Fat Cat lumbers 

and keeps his place 

as head of cat household, 

demanding his due. 

With Maine Coon's blood 

in largeness of form, 

and length of shaggy coat, 

Fat Cat will wait 

outside the door, 

first in line for mealtime food, 

which he loves the most. 

When a new kitten comes 

into our house, 

twice now the others have died, 

Fat Cat, though male, 

without a grouse, 

adopts the mite, 

the other two go and hide. 

With leaps and bounds, 

he starts to play, 

amazing young and old, 

Fat Cat, so huge, 

with legs asplay, 

proceeds to dance, 

acting limber and bold! 

Dedicated to Fluffy 

a lover of kittens 

and all things catty.

ANALYSIS

       I need to remind you that these exercises are meant to comple­ment, not replace, the usual analysis we carry out in our literature courses. As far as I'm concerned,  reading/appreciating  texts is still the primary occupation one expects of a literature class. The idea behind incorporating creative writing techniques and strategies in such a class rests on the assumption, let me repeat, that writing or "creating" is already, in itself, the clearest and highest expression of literary appreciation. In other words:  a good writer is necessarily already a good reader. Likewise, encouraging students to write imaginatively inevitably leads to their having a stronger grasp of ideas, which should prove helpful to them in their literary analyses, as well. In fact, I believe that as long as a student cannot use words to describe ordinary objects, she cannot be expected to use words to argue by or communicate complex ideas with.

The second activity I thought of telling you about today builds on the strengths that should've ideally been effectuated by these different exercises in description. It involves, this time around, the telling of a story—in particular, a story about a secret. It remains a poet's exercise, however, and in this case, the poet who suggested it to me is the Hawaiian American Garrett Hongo. I call it, simply, "Secrets," and what it does is to drive home the point that poetic writing involves imagining as vividly, as concretely, as meaningfully, as possible—a task admittedly difficult for beginning writers, who can only write about themselves, about experiences they themselves go through.

The activity goes this way: you ask your students to put down in writing, in a single, complete sentence on a small piece of paper they shouldn't write their names on, a secret about themselves. Because of the potentially scandalous nature of this exercise, I like to insert a proviso into this uneasy bit of instruction: the secret they write may not be completely accurate, even as it should, in essence, be "true." At this point the class becomes evidently excited.

The twist, however is this: after the class have finished writing their secrets down, you ask them to fold the pieces of paper once or twice and to put them  inside a box or a hat (I bring my baseball cap to class just for this purpose). Everyone then gets to pick out a secret from this common repository—the moment a student happens to pick out her own secret, she is asked to refold it and put it back in, and to pick out another one. In the end, everyone should have someone else's secret in her possession.

The final instruction is a simple one, although it never fails to elicit a collective moan of despair from the class: they are now to write, in a page or two, the story behind and around that secret—a story that should be told in the first person, by the person (more accurately, persona) whose secret it supposedly is. The story doesn't have to be complete. It can end in the present or in the past. The important thing is that the secret gets to be revealed—and revealed in a well-described and interesting way.

The danger implicit in Lacan's 'grafting of an ambitious philosophy of "the human" on to an argument purporting to be a technical contribution to the study of specific mental disorders' has always been that 'the speculative welter of his own theoretical speech can easily drown out the undistinguished locutions in which ordinary human suffering finds voice. In his later years, indeed, 'Lacan seemed more interested in psychoanalytic theory than in clinical practice', particularly through his association with 'a circle of philosophers and mathematicians around his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller. The result has been that a kind of 'militant intellectualism runs through the entire French psychoanalytic community...the problem of the philosopher manque.

At its most recondite - 'The One of meaning is not to be confused with what makes the One of the signifier...The Other is thus a dual entry matrix - Lacanianism could be considerd as 'in constant danger of degenerating into intellectual games. At its most succinct - Lacan's "mathemes" - as 'Serge Leclaire, who is one of the most respected and distinguished of all French analysts, remarked...they were basically no more than "graffiti.

At the least, however, as Lacan himself put it in the first of his Seminars to be published, 'through all the misadventures that my discourse encounters...one can say that this discourse provides an obstacle to the experience of analysis being served up to you in a completely cretinous way.