Preface

Abstract

Preface Peter L. Rudnytsky The task of an editor can be likened to that of the dream-work, at least insofar as one of my aims is that of secondary revision—that is, forging a unity out of the often heterogeneous assemblage of materials that make up an issue. In this instance, I fear I have been less than fully successful. Although I toyed with the idea of giving this number the title "Traces and Echoes," it seemed in the end to be the better course simply to play my strongest card, namely music, except insofar as the elastic word "meaning" can be stretched to encompass the concerns of Anne Golomb Hoffman and Sharon Talley with the body and literature in their respective contributions. Fortunately, since both Hoffman and Talley are making their second appearances in American Imago under my editorship, I can incontrovertibly claim them as "my" authors, and I therefore hope they will forgive me for confining them metonymically to this Procrustean bed. (For those who want to go back and read or reread their earlier work, Anne Hoffman's "Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?" was featured in our Winter 2006 issue, while Sharon Talley's "Following Thoreau's 'Tracks in the Sand': Tactile Impressions in Cape Cod" led off our Spring 2005 issue.) No less fortunately, the quality of the papers by both Hoffman and Talley requires no apology. Indeed, to those who aspire to publish their work in our pages, I can give no better advice than to emulate these essays, which are exemplary in their intellectual rigor, lucidity of exposition, range of scholarly reference, and the profundity of their engagement with psychoanalysis. Hoffman takes us through nothing less than the history of concept of the body as an archive, from the rise of the "science" of physiognomy in the eighteenth century, through the iconography of hysteria in the photographs of patients at the Salpêtrière, to Freud's conception of hysterical symptoms as an archive of unconscious meanings. For her part, Talley sets her [End Page 1] sights on Ambrose Bierce, best remembered for his Civil War stories, and deploys the framework of generative death anxiety, as well as an informed understanding of attachment and object relations theory, to offer a comprehensive reassessment of Bierce's life and work. Her essay culminates in close readings of two sets of fascinating texts, the four tales that constitute The Parenticide Club and "Visions of the Night," comprised of three persistent nightmares. In convincing fashion, Talley shows how Bierce's writings have roots that extend beneath his adult experiences as a Union soldier into his childhood, and also how his insights into dreams and unconscious mental life anticipate the discoveries of psychoanalysis. The music portion of our program had its inception in the session of the Discussion Group on Music and Psychoanalysis, synergistically co-chaired by Julie Nagel and Alexander Stein, at the Winter 2008 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. There, Leo Rangell, past president of both the International and the American Psychoanalytic Associations, as well as a long-time patron of this journal, presented "Music in the Head: Living at the Brain-Mind Border," to which Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, responded in virtuoso fashion with his reflections, "What Good Is Music?" including an autobiographical narrative about how music helped him to cope, far though he found himself from New York City, with the events of September 11, 2001. Rangell's paper, too, is deeply personal—indeed, self-analytic. It invites the reader to join him in examining through "a neuro-otologic-psychoanalytic prism" how, in the aftermath of a bypass operation he underwent in 1995, he started involuntarily "hearing" all manner of songs and melodies, a veritable "sound track of his life," as the saying goes. I have no doubt that both these papers will themselves linger in the minds of those who read them, and I thank the distinguished authors for the privilege of publishing their work. The paper by Michele R. Kelly provides a fitting coda to the Rangell-Steinhardt duet. For Kelly, looking back on her love/hate relationship with the piano as an adolescent...