I always wanted to tell the story of my life. The entire beginning of my analysis was me telling a story. A linear, continuous story. I never lost the thread; I ‘strung things together’, always knowing ahead of time what I was going to say: never the slightest break, the slightest gap, never the slightest flaw where a slip of the tongue might have a chance to sneak in, where something might happen. And thus nothing happened. From the other side of the couch, nothing. ‘My life’ was met with indifference.

Everything ‘started’ when I had nothing more to say, when I no longer knew where to start or how to end. At that moment, what I had recounted before came back, but in a way that was entirely other, in a discontinuous way, in different forms (memories, dreams, slips, repetitions), or it never came back. I understood that I had tried, by telling the story of ‘my life’, not to recount it – it is too much for words – but to master it. I had been at once foolish and unfaithful.

My mouth then stopped being the place from which flowed a reassuring discourse and became a cave from which more or less articulate and intelligible words burst forth, cries whose extremely variable tone (booming, evanescent, barely audible, halting, melodious, etc.) surprised even me. I had never heard myself speak like this, and ‘I’ did not recognise ‘myself’. […]

from Sarah Kofman, ‘"My Life" and Psychoanalysis’, Selected Writings