Writing About the Psychoanalytic Process

Abstract

The written description of psychoanalytic process is basic to our professional communication. It underlies our study, teaching, research, and the way we evaluate aspects of our training. We have been hampered by a lack of an accepted method for translating our clinical work into written form. Each analyst has needed to devise, sometimes with great difficulty, an individual method for describing analytic process, but often the resulting description has hidden the analyst or the process. Recent efforts to teach about clinical writing show that this skill can be readily learned and can add to the analyst's growth. This article presents a method for writing about the clinical interchange. A repeating three-part structure provides an experiencing section of several paragraphs, in which the writer describes the experience-near analytic interaction over a relatively circumscribed time period; a reflecting section, in which the writer draws back for an overview of this material; and a transitional narrative section, in which the writer creates a bridge to a time later in the analysis. A clinical illustration of this method is presented and discussed. A variety of stylistic problems are examined. Ways that the writing task can be introduced during analytic training, as well as the effects of the writing task on the analyst, are mentioned.

Notes

The author thanks Daniel Jacobs, Judy Kantrowitz, Malkah Notman, and Judith Yanof for their careful readings and helpful suggestions over several drafts of this article, and Judith Bernstein for her significant contributions and guidance.

¹An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, December 16–20, 1998, New York, and an abbreviated version of the methodology was included in a “Commentary on Robert Michels' paper ‘The Case History’,” Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association, 48(2): 381–391.