Abstract
I imagine that from an objective point of view the answer to “why I write” would be complicated and different for everyone, requiring an analytic biography to subsume the leading themes. But subjectively I have a clear and immediate response: I write in order to find out what I am thinking. Some psychoanalytic writers I know have a clear idea of what they want to communicate before they begin a paper, or even a set of mental or actual notes, perhaps even an outline. But for the most part I begin only with some feeling in mind, a clinical conundrum, an issue or clinical oddity that I have recently observed or one that has been rolling around in my head for some time, appearing and disappearing or even sometimes showing up in dreams. And so it is there but not quite there, waiting to be discovered or hatched, and the process of writing is, for me, simply my way of actualizing what has been going on by itself for some time.
This may sound like a disavowal of responsibility for one’s thoughts, something not unknown to creative writers and poets and even to psychoanalysts. I recall that Freud seemed almost eager to attribute the dream book to Fliess, as if in some way an intermediary or muse might be necessary to shield the flame of inspiration from the work itself, or as if someone else should be blamed for the disorder, even plague, that he was bringing into the world. In our language, I may be talking about the transformation of primary process into secondary process, of unconscious or preconscious to conscious, of unformulated experience to formulated experience and also a transformation of binary thinking to a more modulated way of viewing experience as endlessly linked on a continuum.
That’s a lot of jargon and theoretical lattice to describe the apparently simple act of turning a dream or fantasy into a story. Because I imagine that everyone’s writing starts from a fantasy or particular theoretical way of viewing the clinical world, a theory to which the world as it is must accommodate itself because we have no other way of approaching it except through our own vision. How can we describe this as a scientific report?
Freud was shocked when he found himself telling stories—he who had done so many dissections and wanted so desperately to be a scientist. But the scientific part of psychoanalysis turned out to be in the telling of a true or honest story, which began to seem more and more difficult to do, leading to the discovery of the transference/countertransference and projective distortions.
And so the particular amalgam of science and storytelling that we know as psychoanalysis, including everything from the most objective statistical research to the most subjective of intimate feelings and revelations, is the playing ground on which our writing originates in the continual effort to understand where we have come from and where we are going.
I write because we have been thrown into this world unasked and exit the same way and writing is the only response that comes naturally to me. I write as simply as I can in any way that might be useful to my readers, in an effort to help along the healing process of the scarred world we live in. This helps me too. But it can be useful only if it is true, and the truth keeps changing all the time. And that is why I continue to write.