Abstract
Charalambous explains the conceptual move from fantasy of identity to fantasy of writer identity to make apparent to the reader how the term writing fantasy can be applied to explore to one’s Creative Writing and one’s assumptions about Creative Writing practice. First, she discusses how Lacanian psychoanalytic theory has been linked with Creative Writing through the surrealistic approach as a practice of creativity and as a basis for delineating an ethical approach to writing pedagogy. Charalambous then offers a short context to Lacanian theory in the field of psychoanalysis, providing an exegesis of the formation of self/identity and related terms. This narrative is extended onto how writer identity may be structured by writing fantasy and traced onto one’s texts and ideas about one’s Creative Writing.
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Notes
- 1.
By Lacanian psychoanalytic session here, I mean the meeting between psychoanalyst and analysand (the person in analysis).
- 2.
In Lacanian texts, this way of writing the “mOther” is used to signify that the mother is the Other, who we see as “not me” at the start of our life.
- 3.
You could ask me here “Why can’t the child know its mother’s desire?” The Lacanian answer is that it is impossible to know any other person’s desire, let alone our own desire, for two main reasons. First, if you are not the person themselves, you cannot really know their desire and their way of being and living it. Secondly, even when we do communicate what our desire is, there is always a part that remains distorted because the others interpret it according to their own understanding of reality and a part that we cannot communicate anyhow, because language both reveals and conceals our desire. We may approximate the Other’s desire, but it will always be our own interpretation of it. Supposedly, at the start of one’s life, one has no experiences to “affect” one’s interpretation. This is where the murky, uncertain waters of whether we are born with different tendencies of being come into play. Ettinger (2006) has written about the ‘trans-subjectivity’ that is developed within the womb, providing a strange and fascinating narrative about what “is” in our mode of relation before we are literally separated from the mother. She claims that we are conceived and exist in the powerful potential of feeling safe in the unknowingness of the Other in the womb. Nonetheless, this does not eliminate the fact that it is impossible to know the Other’s desire truly as we cannot ever experience the world like them because we are not them. Secondly, the term “desire” here does not have the simple meaning of “wish.” “I wish to get some rest” for example. “Desire” here is deeper—“what does the mother really want in her life? Who does she want to be? What do I mean for her?”.
- 4.
The first mention of fantasy in Lacan’s work is in Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953–1954) (Fink 2014, pp. 39–41). Fink (2014, vol. 2, p. 39) suggests that it seems that Lacan has borrowed it from Klein. He suggests that Lacan develops his own formulation of the term four years later in Seminar V Les formations de l’inconscient (Unconscious Formations) (1957–1958) and that the fundamental fantasy is elaborated ‘extensively’ in Seminar VI, Le désir et son interpretation (“Desire and its Interpretation”) (1958–1959) and in later seminars (1958 “Direction of the Treatment” Fink, ibid.). There is also the seminar on “The Logic of Phantasy.” I have mostly used “Desire and Its Interpretation” and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” (Lacan 2006).
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Charalambous, Z. (2019). Writing Fantasy: The Story of Writer Identity. In: Writing Fantasy and the Identity of the Writer. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20263-7_3
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