THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT IN THE DRAWER - OBSERVATIONS ON THE ANALYSIS OF A TYPE OF SYMPTOM

The interminable project, such as an unfinished manuscript in the draw er, is a familiar affliction in populations of writers, artists and in tellecutals. An unrelenting absorption in such a project consuming who le decades of one's life distinguishes this plight from more benign va rieties of work inhibition. The interminable project lends itself to a real dilemma of a double life. A case of a female writer and lecturer is presented, in which a longstanding unfinished manuscript figures a s a principal complaint. In addition to familiar developmental conflic ts, which psychoanalysis finds in psychopathologies of ambition and ac hievement, the analysis of this patient called for particular attentio n to various gains of the symptom itself; for example, its lending fea sibility to the patient's alternative career by making of it something less ideal and therefore less crucial than it otherwise would have be en. Moreover, the harrowing consumption of time that characteristics s uch symptoms was also maintaining a state of moral masochism that grat ified the patient's subdued ambivalence towards the analyst and the an alysis. A literary project that exists principally to serve such ends as these expires as something feasible when the analysis has subtracte d from it is extra-literary aims and devices.