“Talking in Fractals?”
Hello, Dan –
Greetings from your favorite Philadelphia analyst! I hope all is well with you; all is well here, except for Life (my version of “given the human condition”).
I confess my geezerette status by stating at the outset that this is only the second time that I have posted to a blog, public revelations being somewhat outside my professional habits. But I did want to congratulate you on this truly delightful book. I laughed and laughed, so hard over “purée of ibuprofen” that it took three attempts for me to read the passage aloud to my husband. My only criticism is that the book ended much too soon; I would have been happy to continue reading your wonderful sentences that made me nostalgic for my good talks with you.
I was fascinated by your analysis of the structure of conversations and wonder whether such structure exists intra- as well as inter-conversationally. In other words, might there be a fractal quality of conversation, that is to say self-similarity between brief segments of a conversation, longer segments, and the conversation as a whole? I’ve written about this in relation to psychoanalytic discourse in my second book, finally published last year (Loving Psychoanalysis – glad to have learned that you approve of gerundive titles). I was also interested in your various comments about how an individual’s character expresses itself in conversation; I would think of this as a personal aesthetic. Analysts and patients (and parents and children, friends, colleagues, spouses, partners, etc.), I believe, are well-matched or not depending on whether their personal aesthetic is within the same range on the continua of complexity, humor, irony, density, and so on. Your conversation with your attorney (putting aside the fact that there was a specific aim to this exchange) would be an example of the meeting of two different aesthetics. I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of this.
Again, my warmest congratulations and my thanks for a great read!
Susan
Well, hello, Susan, and I hope you et. fam. are well, and thank you for writing such a gratifying response to this strange little book.
Yes, I think conversations can be fractal–shapes within and mimicking larger shapes, especially in the latter stages of a conversation between two people who are in the process of getting to know each other–that is, I think people replicate and may vary their parts in the stages of role assumptions, where, essentially, first one person can be the Listener/Advisor and then the other takes that role. (In analysis, this tends to be, and should be, more nearly a one-way street.) I also think that after the sharing of confidences, the taking of risks, many people tend to withdraw to safer ground, with a “Well”–as at the beginning of this note– and then go back into candor and confidentiality again. Very wave-like, or musical in a way, with themes, variations, reprising of earlier themes, playful interludes to lighten the darker parts, and so on.
And yes, I think that any pairing of people is a pairing of aesthetics, with successful or unsuccessful results. The matching of therapist or analyst with patient must have deeply to do with this matching dynamic, though, as with ordinary conversations, compatability can and sometimes does result from “mismatches.” The example from the book that you cited–the laconic lawyer and I–was in retrospect a crucial or at least catalytic moment in my conversational life. This man and I were extremely different, and yet we made a really good connection–and I learned something, something well beyond the law.
Stay well, and congrats, however laggard, on the publication of your book. I hope our paths may cross again soon.
Dan Menaker
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