Writing the Inward Eye

Ilove to write.

An article by Virginia Woolf about her early writing for the Times Literary Supplement describes her pleasure in a growing sense of herself from “a girl in a bedroom with pen in hand” to “a professional woman,” due to actually being paid for these reviews, and being sought out by the editor. ¹ She wrote chillingly, though, that the silent injunction to a Victorian female, “Never let anyone guess that you have a mind of your own,” nearly “plucked the heart out of my writing.” She called this inner voice “the Angel in the House,” urging her “not to criticize but to charm and flatter.” Conquering that inner voice was a prerequisite for writing, she believed. This necessary fierceness propelled the pen of this magnificent writer, my lifelong heroine.

Reading about her—forgetting for the moment her ultimate suicide—I wished I could have experienced such noble struggles as hers. In our own field, Glen Gabbard wrote in this column (JAPA 67/4) that his desire was “to exorcise . . . demons that haunt me.” For another moment I wished that I too could be so in touch with such violent aspirations. Surely in psychoanalysis we believe that the best in life is born of dark conflicts?

My terrible confession therefore is that I simply love to write. I have loved the mechanics, for one. Once upon a time my aunt plied me with beautiful crayons and, later, beautiful fountain pens. I salivated at the luscious colored inks, the new white empty paper, my velvet nib sweeping over the velum. I used to practice fancy scripts—Old English with embellishments, Celtic decorative alphabets copied from the Book of Kells, Latinate scripts of all sorts. When I was a teenager and we had three-hour high school exams, I kept secret from my pals (in case they’d fully discover how weird I was, or how much a teacher’s pet) that I looked forward to those silent, flowing, uninterrupted hours. I’d take the essay questions and joyfully bury myself within the questions, take out my fountain pen and draw on my every experience while answering them. “Assess the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the North of England with an eye to contemporary life.” Oh, bring it on! Like Graham Greene, I’d traveled extensively with the same maiden aunt, and, yes, we happened recently to visit a friend of hers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne—and we three had motored around. They’d smoke (hence my future devotion). I’d be party to their conversation and join in, as they chatted about the history, the geography, the social conditions, the politics, the language, the sights and sounds of the craggy region amid the smokestacks. So in the exam I’d just take my pen and re-create our experiences with all their details and a few of my own. I’d turn it into an organized response to the exam question. I often got rewarded with good marks. And of course that was encouraging. I could have gone to Oxbridge, tried to become a professional writer and have developed agonizing internal standards of comparison with Virginia. I didn’t. Instead I opted to stay in Ireland, closer to home, and indulge my romance with medicine and Louis Pasteur there. (That way, too, I could hang out with my beloved older brother who wrote poetry, shared living space with Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, and celebrated connection to our family’s real author, William Trevor [Cox]. ² )

But I cherished writing in order to relive moments, conversations, and thoughts at the time, that latter habit now resonating in my psychoanalytic writing as playing with theory. Writing is in fact a form of play for me. I still do this with ardor. A letter from Warren Poland is a grand experience (see his essay for this column in JAPA 67/3). Like Warren I belong to a line of letter-writers. My mother got a letter every week from her own mother, and I received and wrote many letters to my soulmate artist cousins and weekly letters to my own parents till they died. . . and thus, I suppose, clinical writing is a good fit for me. It appeals to me to savor the remembered moments with my patients and our interaction that excite and inform me and expand my awareness of them, of myself in time, and of myself in their worlds that are also mine in the sharing.

So why do I write? I don’t really know. I write because I talk, and I like to talk. And I love to think because I love to talk. I do come from a family of similar people with two parents (plus my maiden aunt school teacher, who like many women of her generation had had a betrothed who died in the Great War). The adults in my family never doubted for a moment that their past many lives were fascinating, both to themselves and to those around them, including their children. Their friends had no trouble talking either. Go into an Irish pub someday and just start up with anybody there, and you too can have that experience! These grownups, older than the average parent, were also really interested in other people and their quirks and peculiarities of mind. They expected the children to chime in too. I just remembered that their pet name for little kids that engaged with them was “the wee chats,” who, much to their delight had said this or that that would be “old-fashioned”—meaning, beyond their years.

I thus rarely think about whether I’m pleasing or offending anyone besides myself by talking—and therefore also writing. I confess I don’t even feel guilty about this egotistical, self-centered, and sensual word-pleasure in communicating! I think everyone else in my earlier environment might agree and puzzle, “Why would anyone feel guilty? Really?” I mean, if you want to change the drift of the conversation, or stop it, or start it over, or redo it, there are plenty of words for that protection of self and others. If I thought that my pleasure was harming anyone, I guess I’d feel bad. But whatever or whomever I write about—I believe they can take what I say or not, as the case may be. If they object, can we not talk about it? Can I not drop an idea or change course if persuaded? These unknown faces are at least my equal, and they have similar powers as a reader that I have as a writer—the power to disagree, or just ignore my text if they want to. It’s more important to me that I feel I’ve said on paper what I wanted to communicate. I am interested in what the reader thinks in response as a guide to whatever may follow. Of course, when I write clinically I heavily disguise my subjects. I think of that as a psychological art form. On occasion I do consult the subject. The two greatest compliments I have ever had for writing came from two patients. One long-terminated and very sophisticated person wrote, “I recognize myself here—but no one else except you would!” The other, a raw teenager, a misfit in a high-profile literate family wrote, “You are the least full of bullshit therapist I’ve ever talked to in New Haven!” That one brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had many adventures in writing, but I don’t have any noble struggle against a tide of inner people telling me how I should think or act.

In case you think that I think I have had nothing but success, I must disabuse you of that notion right away. For the compliments my writing has evoked, I’m thrilled—but it certainly also has been rejected. I have examples. Here’s one: I wrote a paper many moons ago on how—bizarrely—Freud and the others I was reading as a candidate never seemed to have appreciated that girls had just a very different body from boys to inhabit from birth. I was rather pleased with that very early text that included an extensive critique of the details of the interpretations in several major contemporary case accounts of female children, by well-known child analysts. I thought—well there’s a substantial piece of compelling evidence that should be hard to ignore! My paper was rejected roundly by the peer reviewers of a major international journal (in the 1980s). One of the critics had left his name at the top of the page—I guess, inadvertently. He was a famous, old white male German-American child analyst, and he turned out to be a clone of the very child analysts I was criticizing. He had written: “This author should be told not to be so critical of the literature.” Gosh. . .

That was a while ago. The characters are now all deceased, as they say in risqué journalism—but it would not be the last time that editors turned down papers that (to me) directly addressed rather psychoanalytically knee-jerk errors in understanding that (in my opinion) have been crafted into complicated, received “theoretical” notions that I criticized for their limitations. A counter-criticism from occasional peer reviewers has been that some of my ideas are “too controversial.” At times like that I think of my mother’s sayings. One of her favorites, handed down from her own early Victorian mother and offered to me with a laugh, was “You’re big enough and bold enough and ugly enough to do exactly as you want!” (I need to place an asterisk by the word “ugly” here, as not a reference to physical attributes as it would be in American English, but as an Anglo-Irish vote of confidence in her daughter: “By now you can handle your own anger, and others’ anger at you”). Virginia Woolf had internalized such a painful agony of constraining, serious, effective injunctions to be fought against in the battle for survival of her very sense of self that she overcame it through the salvation of writing. For me, in our field, in our era, and for our purposes, differing angles of response are the luxuries of free opinion. Telling me “anonymously” not to be “so critical”—perhaps to “charm” the audience?— turns out to be a matter of free-floating opinion within the plethora of good journals and editors to which we all have free access to work out our ideas with a psychoanalytic readership: ideas that can be both popular and unpopular, or ignored till later, or even permanently. I have been deeply delighted with the hearing and conversation that I have managed to acquire over time from sharing my ideas in writing and speaking in our field. I will keep seeking this pleasure, even in private.

Would I exchange my own simple pleasures to have been able to write To the Lighthouse, and to be far, far more interestingly troubled? I honestly don’t think I would. I am so glad I can read her work.