Abstract
To ask a writer why he writes is to ask a very personal question. If he actually knows something of why, the answer becomes an even more intimate one.
I write because I am afraid I will not be able to write.
I could say that I want the freedom I experience in writing. The solitude it provides. The way I have conversations with myself and with others I will never meet. The community of writers I feel recognized by and a part of. The opportunity to contribute to the literature of psychoanalysis. All of this is true. But it evades a fundamental truth: I have a dread of not being able to return to the unique state of consciousness I find when writing.
It has taken me a long time to know what I mean by these comments. Twenty-five years ago, during a painful period of my life created by a trauma, I was made all too well acquainted with feelings of helplessness and of a sense of alienation. For a time, I lost the capacity to view myself and others in my world as complex characters. I no longer saw in colors or felt a sense of the continuity of past, present, future. I saw in black and white, two-dimensionally. Fortunately, this was a temporary state of mind. But my memory remains of it as a sort of locked-in experience, one I did not have the capacity to work myself out of at the time.
I discovered during this period that reading works of literary fiction provided a kind of preserve: a protected space in which I felt less alone, less cut off from myself, more alive. I could again appreciate complexity, imagine my universe in colors. Here I felt less defined by a single moment in time. This benefit was temporary. So I kept reading. The more I read, the more I wanted to write. I began writing as a means to understand how this process had worked for me (Griffin 2005, 2016). Along the way, I wrote about my painful experience as a piece of autobiographical fiction (Griffin 2004). Here I could put into words what had happened to me—without getting so close to the experience that I was retraumatized. I found I was able to generate a creative space not so different from what happens in the consulting room.
But my search for words to bring coherence and meaning to my world began long before the difficult period of my adult life. Linked to this experience, I have learned, there was a time very early in my life when I felt the freedom I now associate with writing. I think of it as the time before. I was three years old. Then I experienced what I felt to be the loss of someone vital to me. Suddenly the playful freedom I had felt was gone and was replaced by caution, by a fear of being me, by a sense of dread that is difficult to articulate. At the time I had neither the capacity to put this into words nor anyone I could speak with about what I did have language for. This forever shaped who I am. Translated into adult terms, in the time after, I lost my fearless voice. A voice I eventually refound through the psychoanalytic process I discovered/created in writing.
Hans Loewald speaks of psychoanalytic process as the rediscovery of a sense of sensory aliveness that occurs when a two-way communication is achieved between preconscious and unconscious experience and with it, a sense of integration, coherence. In his vision, as in poetry, old words can be reanimated and lend themselves to new and unique uses. Even words, I would say, that were never thought or spoken. In this way, a kind of authenticity and originality is found.
John Berger (2001) speaks of this kind of synthesis in his description of the originality found in poetry: “Original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry . . . the two senses are united in such a way that they are no longer contradictory” (p. 452). The old word is not destroyed, but is transformed by its own development. In this way the newly created word preserves a connection with its progenitor. If I had to turn to ideas to articulate something that is for me purely experiential, what these authors say captures much of what I find at times when writing.
When I listen to what writers understand about the origins of their own writings, many will say they write to face loss and to transform their suffering into something more bearable (Griffin in press). For some writers, this process is largely unconscious. Others acknowledge its central role in motivating their need to write. The writer William Maxwell (1980), who lost his mother at age ten during the Spanish influenza pandemic, goes so far as to say that writing makes it possible for one to “go on and lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing” (p. 135; see Griffin 2022). In many of his novels, Maxwell at once relives the death of his mother and brings life to her as she becomes a permanent part of a text, much as she lives on within his mind: in perpetuity. For Maxwell and others I have studied, this act of writing requires ongoing creative activity. The writing must never stop.
My need to write (and read) has led me to new and unexpected places. It has deepened my sensibility and expanded my capacity to listen to my patients more creatively. I read psychoanalytic writers well known to me now in a new register and discover fresh meanings and uses of their language and ideas. I gratefully turn to works of fiction and personal essays by writers I respect to attune my mind so that that I am in a space to do my own writing. All of this has led to endless writing projects. And it provides me with a solvable problem when I awaken at 3:00
I have no formal training in creative writing or background in literary studies. I entered the reading world because there was a time in my life when I felt it was useful to me. This, in turn, led me to write. It is psychoanalysis—as a discipline, as an avenue for self-inquiry, as a way of life—that opened the door for me into the world of writing. I read texts the way I listen to patients and to myself when I am with them. The compass that guides my writing comes from my experience with the freedom/imprisonment, aliveness/deadness, and trueness/falseness I find within the analytic space. Every day I feel fortunate to have found psychoanalysis.
Perhaps one only knows what is essential when there is the threat of losing it. Recently, over the course of several months, I have experienced significant pain related to a medical problem, something that has made it difficult for me to write. I became filled with dread that this state would be permanent, that it would rob me of my capacity to write. There is only one way to find out.
My need to write has long taken on a life of its own. I cannot name a singular motivating force that keeps me writing. But there are times that, as I write, I get a glimpse of the time before. It is then that I feel what I imagine it was like for me to be near the person I lost. I find reassurance that something of the life of that time and place remains.
