ABSTRACT
Marie Cardinal confronts us with a strangely disconcerting paradox. As she thinks back on her analysis, the course of which is described in her autobiographical novel The Words to Say It (1975), she has difficulty in finding herself, that is, the self she used to be. This self of the past, the mad one, lived within her body just as she lives within it now. “I am she” (p. 8). The mad one saw with her eyes, she had the same fingernails, the same ring. But where is the mad one now and who is Marie Cardinal? Can they be one and the same? Or, are they somehow disjunct?
