In the mind of the reader: On some aspects of relating to a psychoanalytic text

The aim of this paper is to explore certain aspects of reading as a psychic activity, focussing on editorial reading of psychoanalytic texts. The author puts stress on container–contained aspects of the reader–text–author relationship. The efficiency (or failure) of a text as container is more or less to be sought in its form and its “readability.” Concerning psychoanalytic texts, the editorial reader has to function as a container for the author's primitive and/or Oedipal anxieties, a process necessary for the evaluation and/or the potential transformation of a text; moreover, the psychoanalytic journal as a whole, through the linking processes it establishes between readers and authors, in the psychoanalytic community, can be regarded as the third object of a commensal container–contained relationship.