A poetics of change

Abstract

The progress of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy depends upon our capacity to study, in a scientific manner, the process of therapy. Since a study of this kind involves charting the waxing and waning of something as elusive as the sense of personal existence, the task has, in the past, been seen as virtually impossible. However, words, or more particularly the way words are used, manifest such shifting states. Sophisticated linguistic analyses are available which give us the means to conduct these necessary studies.

In this article, I am suggesting that an ongoing sense of personal existence, which William James called self, is 'multilayered', in the manner of the poetic, and that indices of such 'layering' will reflect beneficial change. The description of this zone of experience, which might be called the synchronic, depends upon contributions from Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson, and Ferdinand de Saussure.