On My Way

I love to play with words, their multiple meanings, their etymology, and their evocative power. I wonder about my sentences: Do they sound right? Is what they say true? Do they inspire the next sentence, the next paragraph, and eventually lead to the article, story, or novel I had in mind? I go over a text many times, cutting here, adding there, listening to the melody and rhythm, and changing words when they don’t fit the music. In each revision I notice something to improve that previously escaped me—as if what is meant to be expressed were still halfway in my mind and would only slowly make its way out on paper—the place where the errors occur.

What is this particular pleasure in writing that I share with almost all who have written in this column? Starting a new writing project always feels challenging, but mostly I anticipate enjoying what I will be doing. It’s like falling in love with the subject I’m approaching. I know, only if there is Eros and passion in what I do, only if I engage with love and care, will it be good. I usually start out with an idea that has sparked and now preoccupies my interest, at first gingerly feeling my way into it, then proceeding more vigorously and at times writing as if in a fever (only to later discard much of it), and eventually continuing more steadily, as if now moving in familiar territory. At this point I believe my psychoanalytic text will achieve what I was hoping for, and then writing is just enjoyable. By contrast, when I work in fiction such familiarity would be delusive, because if the writing proceeds too smoothly it might be flat and miss the vibrancy of an unconscious pulse that pushes imagination—mine, and the reader’s as well.

To bring something new into the world is both laborious and exciting (to “give birth” to a book is a well-known trope). Whether I write a scientific paper or a short story, a theoretical book or a novel, sublimated procreation provides pleasure after all! But there is something else: When I am writing I am on my way to something I aspire to, and this aspiration, the activity before reaching a goal, fills me with expectation, like something wonderful is about to happen. What will emerge, the thing itself, always goes beyond what I initially had in mind, be it only by revealing the details that confirm my intuition. But even more than the excitement over potential discoveries, it is this striving itself, this reaching for, which is mesmerizing: I will prompt a vague perpetual longing within, now endowed with a fresh sense of promise, and write by moving with hope toward a destination—that won’t be the end of it. There will always be more to go for.

A wonderful consequence of putting on paper (and then publishing) what I am elaborating while writing is that the fruit of this work can be revisited at any time. When I put together a volume of papers I had published over twenty-five years (Schmidt-Hellerau 2018), I was sometimes amazed by the range of sources I had consulted for my articles. While the propositions of my papers (and the themes of my fictional endeavors) were all part of my awareness, the detailed knowledge that informed (and the fine moves that created) them had sunk into oblivion. How nice to rediscover them! They are the interlocutors that inspired my thinking and became an integral part of my work.

At eight I published my first poem in the children’s section of a local newspaper; at eleven I wrote my first little novel. I wanted to become a writer. But when I tried seriously in my early twenties, I didn’t get very far. I had read the giants of literature, and for a while I had been under the influence of Samuel Beckett—nothing could compare! I’m not a fiction writer, I concluded. Anyway, I was training to become a psychoanalyst and happily turned to writing psychoanalytic articles. Here the purpose was clear, the subject to be explored right in front of me. My first book (Schmidt-Hellerau 1986) combined my two major interests: a psychoanalytic study of the literary work of Robert Walser—a quirky mind, subtle and amusing, a master of subversive style and poetry.

Then I dived into the work of Sigmund Freud. Being totally fascinated with his way of exploring and explaining the human mind in health, neurosis, and pathology, I was also transported by the beauty of his diction (in the German original). My first encounter with Freud made me a Freudian forever. I do not worship Freud as a person, even though I admire him as the great thinker he was. It’s reading his work that I find most thought-provoking, enlightening, and enjoyable. For twenty years I immersed myself deeply in Freud’s theory. I wanted to figure out why his conception of the death drive, presented as aggression, didn’t convince me. I thought I would address this problem in a small paper and ended up writing my second book, Life Drive and Death Drive, Libido and Lethe: A Formalized Consistent Model of Psychoanalytic Drive and Structure Theory. It was published first in German (1995) and then translated into French (2000), English (2001), and Russian (2002). Working with the translators (as far as I could) was another interesting experience: how is an idea, articulated in German, best communicated in a different language? Scientific writing leaves little room for poetry, yet it needs to be done well. Good editors may push me to further clarify and sharpen my ideas. Whatever I’m working on—often guided by my own questions, but at times also stimulated by Congress themes or invitations to certain topics—the process of writing enhances and deepens my understanding of the issue at stake.

I grew up and lived in Germany and Switzerland. My mother tongue is German, and I was writing only in German. In 2000, when I moved to the U.S., what concerned me most was my lack of ease with the English language. I remember sitting on the plane to Boston thinking that I was about to lose one of my greatest pleasures, my capacity to express myself and play with words in my own language. I thought I would never be able to enjoy writing as much as I did in my native language. Living and working in the U.S., seeing and analyzing patients in English, left me no other option than to start writing in English. Fortunately, my husband and colleague, Fred Busch, helped me with my first efforts. Tirelessly he went over my English texts, explaining not only the correct use of grammar and word choices but also, in general, how to say something in English. I struggled, wanting to say things in my Germanic way, and sometimes only reluctantly accepted my editor’s advice. Over time, listening, speaking, reading, and writing helped me to improve and become comfortable with expressing my thoughts in English. And to my great surprise, now I enjoy writing in English as much as writing in German.

Finally, something even more surprising happened. Having left Beckett’s ascetic prose behind and having concluded my scientific revision of Freud’s drive theory, I resumed writing fiction. And now, after two analyses, I am free to write with my entire mind in play. Fiction writing is simultaneously scary and fascinating. At whatever point I start or stop, I find myself confronted with events and realities of people I have created. The subject I choose (and clearly it must be a topic that engages me deeply) soon develops a life of its own, which I can steer only as much as its inner dynamics will allow. As a psychoanalytic fiction writer, I’m interested in what goes on in the mind of my protagonists; it’s their inner worlds that I try to explore. I wrote two novels in English and then translated them into German (Schmidt-Hellerau 2019, 2020). I cherished every moment of working on them in both languages. My English vocabulary is still lacking, and when I write I have a dictionary open beneath my MS-Word document. But often the English word that I lack intuitively comes to me—and when I check, it usually is just what I sought. The English language has grown deeply into my mind; it now enables me to be creative with whatever my unconscious imagery may reach for. This is the mysterious engine that drives my fictional journeys: the words that want to be written and surprise me when they appear, as if of their own volition.