Abstract
Before pondering why I write, I should first explain why I don’t write. I don’t because it’s lonely, daunting, burdensome. It’s not like teaching, or leading a discussion, both of which I much prefer for their social immediacy, the sense quickly of whether I’m reaching others and they me. On my own, I don’t easily feel that what I’m delivering is worthwhile, to say nothing of original, or even illuminating. There is also a recurrent self-recognition of minor depression, which requires realization and transformation. It is not easy getting started. Nor is it easy to stay at it.
But I write because I’ve come to believe I have something to add—off the couch, as we say—about linkages between my two professional ranges of interest: imaginative literature and psychoanalysis, their enlivening commonalities and significant differences. If literature offers “imitation of life,” which the fascinations of shared language can communicate, psychoanalysis does also, though in different ways. Both enhance recognition of others and oneself. Both open to wonders, puzzlements, and pains of human experience. Both enable empathy for and reflection about the dilemmas, limits, and desires of persons, and of course of one’s own. Thus, though I have published quite a bit, if not as consistently as many in either of my professions, my particular pride is a book I published on James Joyce’s Ulysses, focusing especially on the central personalities—indeed, as its title indicates, “the cast of characters” (Schwaber 1999), and dealing with the brilliance and challenge of that great novel’s narrative techniques and major figures, informed by traditions of literary scholarship and psychoanalytic understanding—while allowing, as is only fitting, my own range of understanding, feeling, and appreciation.