Abstract
Language, and other people, are there to surprise us into new forms of life.
Drawing is a testing of ideas, a slow-motion version of thought. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.
I think of myself as an artist making drawings, even when the charcoal is replaced by an ink word. Being led by a line, in this case a line of ink or a pen.
Two of Paul Klee’s wry quotes often inspire me: “A line is a dot that went for a walk” and “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” I think of how I make a mark on the page, an indentation that then grows into a word, and the words then multiply into a sentence, a line of language. Making my mark on the page feels different from typing onto a screen; it feels more personal, more permanent, definite unlike the vanishing that comes with pressing the Delete button. Interestingly some film directors have commented on not being able to revise their movies once they are released. They are then a static form, not moving, in the sense of being crafted, anymore. Films once produced rarely get re-shot. I suppose an analytic session is like that too; it was as it was. It cannot be edited or re-shot. I might perceive different angles with each viewing of a film or re-imagining or re-membering of a session in an après-coup.
Uglow (2022) sees the popular British illustrator Quentin Blake’s recent ballpoint pen drawings as demonstrating “a democratic medium, in reach of us all” and showing us that “the unvarying line” of this kind of held pen can “be adapted to all styles and moods: smooth, romantic, craggy or wild” (p. 225).
I am someone who thinks in pictures. Much as I love the pleasurable sounds and rhythms of words, I often feel that I am struggling and searching to express myself in a second language that fits the images and sounds in my mind. As well as what I smell and taste. I have to work hard to make the transition to finding the right words, to travel across the space between seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and written language. I experience a pleasure and a strange sense of loss when I move from sensing and being sensed, from being embodied and embodying to expressing myself in words on paper or screen. The pleasure lies in the discovery and crafting of my experiences, and the loss has something to do with the giving birth and the loss of the privacy in order for something of me to be shared with others. Perhaps there is an anxiety about revealing a very private part of me, an aspect of my True Self, to others who might not respect or understand? For me reading, writing, and drawing are related. They all generate ideas in me. I play with ideas as I read and write and draw.
Such playing does not always come easily. I can avoid or put off beginning: moving my pen on the page or my fingers on the keyboard. Writing seems to come through my hand and into my fingers onto the page or screen: a kind of brain-body connection. The white page or blank screen can feel frightening rather like a mirror; what will it reveal of me that I do not know, indeed what I may not want to see? Sometimes I feel blocked, blank and frustrated; other times I can allow myself to just get the words on the page without jumping into editing, into worrying what others will think. Some gestations are long and even painful; some deliveries smoother and easier requiring less effort.
Why do I write? A question Orwell (1946) tried to answer for himself.
I think I write to express my feelings, to discover my thinking, and to communicate with others, the imagined readers. Once I get going, it’s like a kind of dialogue with myself, but also with others in the field. When I am in flow, I feel very alive and in a pleasant state of solitude, not lonely or painfully alone. I am alone in the presence of the other. I am with the patient, or family that I am writing about, rather like being with the emerging characters in a novel or poem. In some ways I feel I am written, that I am a kind of scribe of the voices within me. I recall my ex-husband, also an author, saying that the characters in his stories told him what to write. In clinical writing of course this is complex as the analyst is one of the characters of the narrative. And of course, through the changing transferences and countertransferences, the analyst is given and experiences various roles. In my writing I think I need a similar receptivity to what I hopefully can achieve in an analytic session.
In writing, I am allowing myself to play, with my thoughts, my feelings, my senses, my memories, with different angles on the clinical encounter. The pleasure comes in seeing connections that I might not have seen before, but have somewhere known. It is like I am writing up, up from the preconscious, raising my awareness. I am reading myself and the other, broadening and deepening my perspective. Writing can afford perspective.
Some (e.g., Holmes 2019) have compared the blank page or screen to the psychoanalytic session. A space, an opportunity. As in the session, in writing I am open to and surprised by surprising myself. The unexpected and the strange turn up. I think this is one of the most profound reasons why I keep writing. As well as the wish to communicate with and to others. To play on Winnicott’s phrase, one might say that there is no such thing as a writer in that the environment consists of previous authors, the imagined and real readers, editors, colleagues and, of course, the patient and their family. Such an environment or village, to draw on an African adage, may be facilitating or not-so-facilitating. Pointed criticism of writing, especially in the very early stages, can feel like a sharp assault on my precious fetus. Questioning established views, pointing out gaps, and breaking new ground by setting out new views and ways may be met with hostility or even indifference, arguably the worst response.
More recently I have come to realize that my psychoanalytic writing (and indeed my poetry) is a way of thinking. What I have called writing through (Davids 2022a, 2022b) is a form of working through the clinical experiences and thinking conceptually about the clinical happenings. Subsequently I read that Clingman (2022) considers the South African artist William Kentridge as subscribing to a similar view; namely, “drawing is a kind of thinking, thinking a kind of drawing” (p. 16). As do other artists and writers, for example, Hanif Kureishi and Joan Didion. This thinking is deeply engaging and makes me feel alive, absorbed fully in the present.
My gestational anxieties—Do I have something to say? Can I produce something worthwhile? Can I stay with it until full-term?—that seem to accompany writing, may then followed by publication anxiety (Britton 1994) and what I have called “consent anxiety.” Nitsun’s (2019) description of the uncomfortable dynamics of the clinician writer’s position as a rebel resembles some of what I found myself experiencing when I wrote my paper on sexual transference and countertransference with male midadolescents. I had to work on allowing myself to stand out from behind my psychoanalytic ancestors and not mute my own voice.
Consent anxiety is a form of publication anxiety: informed consent is a complex subject which I have discussed in a recent paper. What is it about this particular patient that I am wanting to write through? In seeking consent and discussion with the patient am I wanting to address something that has been left out or gone missing? I argue that a certain amount of guilt accompanies asking for consent; this may link to its being an act of intrusion, an eroding of the privacy and confidentiality of the clinical encounter. We are beginning to discover what collaborative writing can reveal to us about the analytic experience, particularly its intersubjectivity. It seems that the freedom of writing a case study is gone in this digital era of publishing; we have to mourn the loss of those rich stories and find other ways of keeping writing and publishing.
And then there are postpublication blues, often for a few days after the paper or book is published. Often online, for all to see. Some writers deal with the anticlimax by diving into the next paper or continuing ongoing projects. Weegman (2019) argues that writing may be a way of righting errors: a kind of reparation which affords healing. Sometimes through writing I right myself, discovering that I have somehow been pushed off balance and then I find my feet and bearing again.
Finally, I write as a way of making my dot, my line, my mark, leaving something of me behind. I want to live on in my words, in my legacy, in the body of psychoanalytic literature and in story, drama and poetry. I belong to that intriguing minority: writers.