“I jump into a book – we take a book into our hands, and I become everybody, everywhere in every era. I become Emma Bovary – it is a very famous expression by Flaubert saying, “I am Emma Bovary, Emma Bovary c’est moi.” I become someone else in a different place, in a different time, in a different body, sometimes in a different sex. I can even become an alien, a princess, a count. Then I let go of my defenses and I delve into my existential struggles but in this transitional space of literature which is so unique because the story of the characters is our story.“
Merav Roth, Ph.D.
Tel Aviv
Episode Description:
We begin our conversation about the reading experience with Merav sharing with us her story of growing up in a family of writers. We discuss the factors within us that lead us to read and how it shares certain similarities with the clinical encounter. She considers the use we make of literature to help us make the intolerable more playfully bearable. The work of Jorge Semprun is discussed with examples given from his memoir Literature or Life. Merav shares with us her sense that the depressive position informs and allows for a more ethical engagement with the literary experience. We close with her reading the poem Eating Poetry by Mark Strand.
Our Guest:
Merav Roth Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society; She is the head of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University; and a researcher of psychoanalysis and culture (mainly literature and trauma). She is the former chair of the interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in psychoanalysis and the former founder and chair of the post-graduate Klein studies, both at the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, Sackler School of Medicine. Together with Joshua Durban, Roth edited and wrote the Preface and introductions to the book Melanie Klein – Essential Papers II and also edited Klein’s Psychoanalysis of Children and Brenman Pick’s Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter. Her book Reading the Reader – a Psychoanalytic Perspective on Literature, was published by Routledge and is translated into Spanish.
Recommended Readings:
Jorge Semprun. Literature or life – Penguin, 1997.
Merav Roth. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature – Reading the Reader, Routledge, 2020.
Merav Roth. Mutual Witnessing between a Writer and her Readers in Etty Hillesum’s Diaries, 1941 -1943 Psychoanalytic Review, 107(6), December 2020
Merav Roth (2018) True Love as the Love of Truth, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 15:2, 186-198.
Merav Roth. Transference in the Days of Corona(IPA web) –
Etti Hillessum’s book: An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum [1941-43] (a tremendously inspiring diary of a young woman during the Holocaust)
Sharing this with my mother is pretty special. We have an unbreakable bond with how we cherish books and writing in the margins. Outside of that it’s nearly impossible to connect. This episode helps me believe more deeply in how deep (and not just intellectual) our connection is in the magical world of books. Thank you so very much!!!
Dear Nora,
What you shared is so touching, and what you wrote at the end touches upon the roots of this “magical world of books”: that it bypasses our intellectual habits and also our habitual defenses. This is what I meant by “The distancing paradox”. I also find it very interesting that you relate it to another very meaningful area – the bond between readers. And it is indeed especially strong between parents who once read to us the very first stories, and thus created for us and in us the first threads of magic that tied between us and the reading parent on the one hand and between us and the literary characters on the other hand. Thank you Nora, for sharing this with us.
Very good, thank you Harvey and Merav, I am still enjoying a lot. The theme, that I like, is beautifully developed.
Many thanks Adriana.