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 drawer, is a familiar affliction in populations of writers, artists and intellectuals. An unrelenting absorption in such a project consuming whole decades of one's life distinguishes this plight from more benign varieties 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 as a principal complaint. In addition to familiar developmental conflicts, which psychoanalysis finds in psychopathologies of ambition and achievement, the analysis of this patient called for particular attention to various gains of the symptom itself; for example, its lending feasibility to the patient's alternative career by making of it something less ideal and therefore less crucial than it otherwise would have been. Moreover, the harrowing consumption of time that characterises such symptoms was also maintaining a state of moral masochism that gratified the patient's subdued ambivalence towards the analyst and the analysis. A literary project that exists principally to serve such ends as these expires as something feasible when the analysis has subtracted from it its extra-literary aims and devices.