Rhythms

Despite Nicolas Abraham's fame as a psychoanalyst and philosopher, few people are aware of the direct relevance of his work to issues of poetics and literary theory. The fourth volume of his posthumous publications, Rhythms explores the relationship between the interpretation of texts and psychoanalysis. It includes three long essays written between 1948 and 1962, which form a cohesive group: Outline of a Phenomenology of Poetic Expression, Rhythmizing Consciousness: An Essay on the Temporality of Rhythm, and Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: Time, Rhythm, and the Unconscious. As a postscript to the volume, Nicolas T. Rand and Maria Torok contribute a review essay that explains the unity of Rhythms and provides an extended commentary on A Glossary of Paradigmatics, an unpublished work by Abraham that deals with the theoretical innovations that flowered in Rhythms.