A few considerations concerning the psychoanalytic function of personality in the analytic field

the narrative of the analyst and the writer.

Abstract

Based on accounts of the experience of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (2010) with one of his readers, the article proposes an analogy with the analytic field, in which analyst-patient intersubjectivity is present. The theoretical context of reverie will be presented, as well as the alpha function and the psychoanalytic function of personality, created by Bion and discussed by contemporary authors. Understood from the perspective of Post-Bionian authors as a dreaming field of the analyst and the analysand, the analytic situation is always a complex one, where the psychoanalytic function of personality may be realized. The article ends by considering that both the experience between author and reader and between analyst and analysand, especially, the relation of intimacy and proximity happening between these two distinct contexts favor transformations. Such transformations take place by means of the psychoanalytic function of personality: the human ability to transform emotional experiences, initially in a raw state, into narratives, both the analyst’s and the writer’s, in the human’s restless quest for the truth and the meaning of what is experienced.