Between wild thoughts and schoolboy essays: Psychoanalytic reverie and the dreamy, digressive subjects of writing in Robert Walser’s Fritz Kocher’s essays

Abstract

In this article, I engage the psychoanalytic writings of Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Wilfred Bion, who proffer maternal reverie – an intimate intersubjective communication between the mother and infant – as an early model for the psychosomatic drifts of form and thought experienced in the analytic encounter. As a way to frame these psychoanalytic dynamics, I turn to Robert Walser’s fictional collection of schoolboy writings Fritz Kocher’s essays, and read the titular character’s various detours and digressions as useful examples of how reverie experience – a space of indeterminate identification between the essay and writer – may be articulated in relation to the needs of writing practice. Since the dream is other to the time of school, Fritz’s contradictory meanings carry the trace of a disturbance that words can never clarify. I also adopt Bion’s conceptualization of the caesura of birth as a way of viewing the breach of meaning in writing as only one possible entrance of many into the infinite figures of signification. Looking at how Fritz’s writing encourages a productive decentering of that which is normally expected of writing students, I end this paper by celebrating the importance of the arbitrary nature of digression.