The Writer Within: The Artist as Celebrity Object

Abstract

Consciously and unconsciously, the reader/patient transforms the writer/analyst into someone familiar, though a distance always structures the intimate bond. At the same time, a bidirectional quality distinguishes the analytic from the fictive dyad, which is primarily a narcissistic one. The analytic dyad, while itself narcissistic in many ways and asymmetrical in fundamental form, is predicated on the possibility of movement from a one-person field into an intersubjective field that opens itself up to thirdness. To illustrate these points, the essay explores the Indian-British essayist Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head (2012). Part memoir, part biography of British writer Graham Greene, the book reads as an account of Iyer’s lifelong relationship with Greene’s writings and fantasied attachment to the author. Brief clinical vignettes illustrate the similarities and differences that one encounters within analytic and fictive dyads—specifically around the tension between oneness and thirdness.