The Art and Urgency of Psychoanalytic Writing and Writing Psychoanalytically

Abstract

This introductory essay to a special issue of

Psychoanalytic Perspectives considers the difference between psychoanalytic writing and writing psychoanalytically. Both, it is argued, are deep and complex productions, the former being a concretization of what we do ephemerally every day in the clinical trenches, that is, endeavor to formulate and speak the experience of our patients, the latter being a potential platform with rich arteries into vital, nonanalytic spaces. The inevitability of a writer’s evolutionary change is also considered in this introduction, and book reviews are discussed as a particular form of analytic writing too easily relegated to back-of-the-book status.

Keywords:

• book review
• Ogden
• psychoanalytic writing
• weird
• writing

Psychoanalytic Perspectives is a journal that invites original thinking, certainly from its contributors, but also from ourselves. Senior Editors who shepherd and steer our individual issues have traditionally been granted an open latitude to imagine single themes that sing to them in resounding and personal ways. When we land on one, we are granted a vast leeway to really think and dream. It is a practice that requires faith in an all-volunteer army of staff and a willingness to kindle and encourage ideas that present themselves initially in ember-like states, glowing with potential.

Like it was yesterday, I can remember being a junior editor, freshly fledged into the field and feeling remarkably impressed sitting around a rectangular conference table at my home institute (where only a few months before I had been a candidate-in-training). At times there would be an open call for ideas for themes from the head of the table. Confidently, democratically, someone would ask “who wants to take this one?” Our outgoing editor-in-chief (and intrepid re-imaginer) Steven Kuchuck began this practice years ago. It’s continuing under the fresh helmsmanship of Rachel Sopher.

I’m now taking this one: the theme for this issue is Psychoanalytic Writing and Writing Psychoanalytically. There is a meaningful cleavage between these phrases. “Psychoanalytic writing” is one thing. It’s what we do, importantly and indispensably, for each other in the field. We publish papers in hardcopy journals, we write discussions reflecting on the major papers of our colleagues, and we read our writing aloud to one another at conferences. In its nascent, analytic iteration, psychoanalytic writing is what we do when we jot down notes during or after sessions, or record process for formal presentation in class or in supervision. Process notes, after all, are our first analytic writings (Bradshaw, 2011; Robinson, 2017). And especially as of late, we write in digital ink in on-line forums, participate in comment-driven webinar discussions, and of course many of us live much of our reading lives engaged in the analytic writing trove on Pep-Web.

Deep down, psychoanalytic writing in all of its forms is more art than craft, even as it is axiomatic to say that there is a utility to it. It can do things that analytically informed journalism cannot. It can collapse time, it can stop time, it can draw time out (Loewald, 1972). It can channel enactment (Pizer, 2000), and can coax out dimensions of a treatment that are crucial but dormant and awaiting discovery through the vehicle of writing (Altstein, 2016). Psychoanalytic writing requires us to shush the voices of our powerful influencers (Bloom, 1973) so that we can enter into a soaring, illusory state where we can create the texts we aspire to create (Slochower, 1998). It invites questions of transparency (Coen, 2000), and, critically, requires an ethical consideration of the matters of disclosure, consent and disguise (Aron, 2000; Lipton, 1991). It approaches trauma in unexpectedly generative ways (Altstein, 2017a; Boulanger (2007). It grazes fiction (Harris, 1998; Miller, 2009). It is inimically tautological; when we write, we reach for words to capture a process in which two people strive to find words together to narrate a life. Most of all, psychoanalytic writing is always accompanied by feeling, from thrill to intimidation to drudgery to love. If we listen hard enough as we soldier through the emotional unfoldings of our writing, we can draw deeply from these feeling-states and learn from them, just as we learn from our countertransferential reveries in session.

“Writing psychoanalytically” is another thing. It’s what we do when we write about nonanalytic topics in a manner that is infused with fine attunement to unconscious processes, motivations that are out of awareness, and internal fantasy life. It’s what we do when we chronicle the contemporary world with a focus both on what we understand and a letting go of what we understand, invoking the evenly-hovering observatory stance that is the signature of deep psychoanalytic listening. With this ear, we can write psychoanalytically regardless of whether we are fully minted analysts or people who are psychoanalytically-minded. Topics outside the traditional clinical or theoretical ambit can touch on any number of disciplines, including literature (Groves, 2018), sports (McPhee, 1965), politics (McAdams, 2016), and Bowie (James, 2016). Some even reach the tables that greet you inside the fortress doors of big chain book stores (Grosz, 2013; Malcolm, 2012; Phillips, 2000).

In a more urgent vein, writing psychoanalytically has the potential to stretch our thinking powerfully into nooks of the world that need it the most. The world is a beautifully complicated, terribly complicated place, changing at a full-speed velocity. It is full of thinking people with thinking and feeling conscious and unconscious minds, ripe for deep understanding. We swim daily in issues of passion, dishonesty, war and uncharted creativity. We confront radical transformations of daily life as technology booms and pandemics disorganize ourselves and our societies. Sometimes it feels like the sky is falling. Whereas psychoanalytic writing harnesses the ephemeral task of trying to put words to experiences that do not begin in words, writing psychoanalytically holds the promise of impacting society in wider and wider ripples, perhaps even resulting in being able to hold up the sky just this much, as we summon and spread the word about what we know about why people are the way they are and why they do what they do.

This issue of Perspectives is full of both varieties, the assembly of which I’ll describe briefly here, with an emphasis on the short essay by Thomas Ogden and the imaginings it has stirred.

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Alexander Stein’s paper, Psychoanalysis in the Public Sphere: A Call for Taking Analytic Thinking, Writing and Action into the Broader World, crowns the suite of papers devoted to “writing psychoanalytically.” His is a major paper making a vehement case for widening the net of our analytic thinking through the instrument of writing. It is half battle-cry for and half love-letter to psychoanalysis. Starting from the assertion that “what and how analysts write about psychoanalysis [i]s inseparable from the state of affairs of the field,” he methodically presents his vision for what, from his perspective, that state of affairs is, including a lament for what he considers to be our too-narrow range of reach. Stein is a psychoanalyst who transitioned from clinical work into consulting for corporate organizations, maintaining his analytically honed way of understanding the world and human behavior all the while. His has been an experience of taking analytic writing to a business readership where, he believes, there is much to be gained by fostering a psychoanalytic understanding of power, misfeasance, responsibility and influence. A person could potentially think about writing for any number of extra-analytic readerships beyond a business one; I expect and hope many of you will do just that. Stein’s writing is both scholarly and alive with vivid examples from the traditional canon and the pop world alike (from Freud to Steve Jobs to Kodak to Netflix. You’ll see).

Stein is introduced by Kerry Sulkowicz, an analyst and the founder of his own psychodynamic management consultancy. As the newly elected president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a human rights and anti-poverty activist, he is well situated to orient the reader to the paper to come. And, Stein’s paper has inspired two discussions. Jill Gentile, no stranger herself to the action of extending the psychoanalytic imagination and intellect to the broader spheres of democracy and feminism (Gentile, 2016), thoughtfully considers what Stein sees and what she sees differently about the current state of affairs in the field. Gentile is less worried than Stein is about the field’s staying small and circumscribed, arguing that “[t]he task of decolonizing psychoanalysis has [already] been broadly taken up” and that a “migratory, diasporic psychoanalysis is [already] paradoxically taking root, infusing a traditionally incrementalist field with an improbable amalgam of the transgressive, subversive and radically inclusive imaginaries.” Her discussion fleshes out an important debate about psychoanalysis’s ostensibly self-abnegating relationship with the outside world.

Todd Essig, like Gentile, considers deeply the points of Stein’s paper that resonate with him, namely, the need to widen the platform for analytic thought and prose. Then, he travels into his differences with Stein, notably his idea that focusing on utility should not displace a focus on experience. It’s a warning not to take an analytic approach focused on problem solving too far. In a very personal way, Essig describes his evolution as a writer by means of an early, post-training dream that invoked a need to look both inside and outside of himself. His discussion ends with “A brief how-to” guide for newly graduated analysts with an interest in and/or trepidation about entering the writing world.

The issue then swings to the other side of the gamut: Poetry. Thomas Ogden contributes Experiencing the Poetry of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, a brief essay from his forthcoming (2020) book The Feeling of Real: Psychoanalytic Explorations. Right up front, he makes clear that he is going to do something other than he’s done in the past. He is not going to talk about how reading poetry informs analytic listening in the consultation room, and he is not going to do it the other way around, layering psychoanalytic listening onto the reading of poetry. He doesn’t want there to be any doubt about this, it’s the first thing he says. Reading this, I was reminded of the feeling I had when I heard that Jhumpa Lahiri (1999) decided to stop writing in English and switch exclusively to writing in her newfound language, Italian: intrigued, a little disappointed, ultimately admiring. I treasure her short stories and felt rather sad that I’d never get to read another one again written in the voice I had come to love. Still, I thought, people grow, and just because I had an investment in who she was at the time she wrote my favorite collection didn’t mean that she was obliged to stay that way for her readership. Like the rest of us, she gets to keep unfolding.

Ogden, too. Here he leaves psychoanalysis proper and dunks himself into the language and feeling of poetry; we go with him. Ogden is after something pure. But that doesn’t mean simple, and it certainly doesn’t mean light. With Frost he speaks of epitaph, being drawn into a darkness (a darkness packaged in the innocent quaint), and inevitability: “a forced march toward the unstoppable.” With Dickinson, he talks of feeling haunted, disjointed. He talks of distance and despair, and, again, he talks of an inevitability. The poems are unsettling and Ogden is occupied with endings, perhaps not only because of the content and feeling of the poems but for other reasons that lay outside the poems: the planet, a noxious presidency, or something closer to home, perhaps an end (death) to one phase of his theorizing, and a readiness and intention to turn to other territory. Perhaps an anticipation of the inevitability of a new relationship with his readers. Do I know this for sure? Of course not. But I’m a good student of Ogden’s. I know that as a reader of his writing I must allow myself to think his thoughts, just as he had to think my thoughts (as his unknown reader) when he wrote his essay (Ogden, 1994). I draw also from his thinking on “adding on” to the writing we take in, reshaping texts by our very reading, a process he is not exempt from, see Ogden (2012, p. 4) (“The same is true for you, the reader, in reading … what I write … ”).

Today, Lahiri (2016) writes exclusively in Italian, and has a translator rewrite her work back into English, even though English was one of her first spoken languages (Bengali was the other). When I read her current work, it has a different texture—hard to describe, a little more exacting, a little cooler—but I can still feel something familiar leaking out here and there. No matter if this is real or not; it is what I feel. So too with the Ogden essay. Even though his essay is the briefest in this issue and declaratively not about psychoanalysis, his close attention to language’s stirrings, sound and movement still reach me right where I live as a clinical listener. Indeed, I need only look to the first noun of the very title of the piece—Experience—to feel a psychoanalytic spirit. This is a word among words in our canon. It captures a way of saying how we feel as we exist, though saying what it feels like to exist is ineffable and inherently indescribable—until we try (see, e.g., Gedo, 1985 (On the Dawn of Experience); Loewald (1972) (The Experience of Time); Ogden (1989) (The Primitive Edge of Experience); Slochower (1999) (Interior Experience Within the Analytic Process); Stern (2003) (Unformulated Experience)).

In the next piece, Alice Jones, a poet, psychoanalyst and teacher of analytic writing, describes the simple, elegant exercise of listening to poetry aloud with her psychoanalytic writing students. She grounds these classroom experiences in the original idea of the couch, which “lessens the visual field and heightens the auditory one.” She is interested in developing the “ear/mind” and describes doing so by reading poetry aloud, encouraging her students to surrender to a total listening, absorbing the cadence, tones, hesitations and, most of all, feelings of what they’re hearing. More than a few times, I was reminded of Stern’s (2002a, 2002b) description of letting a patient’s words “wash over” us with a suspension of effort to understand. Jones is interested in cultivating an openness to “the bodily and imagistic uncertainties” that the clinical hour brings as a way of “attuning mind and ear to both self and other.” It’s a salve of a paper.

Our third section includes two reflections on the writing process. In Summoning Spirits, Bridging Worlds: Writing, Dreaming, Working Through, Karen Starr takes on the task of putting into words the complicated dynamics of a hot case. Starr and her patient both descend from war trauma: same war, different sides, she from the victim’s, he from the persecutor’s. He recounts the Nazi past of his grandfather in an offhanded tone one might expect invoked when talking about a subway delay on the way to session. This sends Starr reeling—into distress, into disbelief, into her own memory of growing up in the shadow of her parents’ survivor-trauma, and ultimately into creativity, as she decides to write about her unfolding feelings. Surprisingly, touchingly, these feelings include closeness, even love. Her language is dotted with Holocaust-tinged descriptors, evidencing her own unconscious process leaking out in word-choice (watch for a description of floating anxiety needing a place to “hang itself” (invoking the gallows); “a final decision” to make (echoing “final solution”); “the wrong selection” (echoing the selection process); her patient’s hair a “tangled barbed-wire morass.” The entire paper is infused with feeling, some of it unconscious, and reaching for meaning.

Kim Bernstein’s essay reflecting on psychoanalytic writing caps the issue; I want it to stay ringing in your ears. It’s about weirdness—a word I don’t think we use enough in our field. Entitled, in part, When the Weird Turn Pro (a reference to Hunter S. Thompson), her paper considers the oddness of our writing. Her thinking is grounded in Laurence Friedman and Lewis Aron’s scholarship on the monsterousness of psychoanalysis and its inherent uncategorizability. Going further, Bernstein argues that the very part of analysis that makes it so difficult to pin down is the very thing that is part of its great vitality, and extends this idea to psychoanalytic writing. This, too, is weird for good reason, and this precious weirdness is an honest reflection of the field. She folds this iteration of analytic writing’s oddity into the broader, external peculiarity brought in by the postmodern turn in western thinking and the relational turn in psychoanalysis, which dismantled many of our old ways of thinking, especially about forms of structure and authority. Bernstein considers the irony that writing is a means of legitimizing—of asserting authority and upholding structure—which makes the action of writing even stranger, and harder to do. Ultimately, the essay makes the point that analytic writing becomes more important (and for different reasons than in the past) because of all this.

A word about our book reviews. Reviewing our colleagues’ work generates a very particular kind of psychoanalytic writing. Writing about the writing of another—for publication—is an incredibly powerful position that carries with it an enormous responsibility. Writing reviews can arouse competition and result in ax grinding, agenda promoting, political maneuvering, or even ad hominem attacks. The other side of the coin—idealization of the author, fantasies of allegiances—is to be guarded against, too. For all these reasons, book reviews should be undertaken seriously and with heart, with as close an attention to one’s own internal processes as one interacts with the texts that one might summon in an analytic hour. But responsibility should not foreclose criticism and creative, original thinking, and balancing these dynamics can be a bit of tightrope walk. Indeed, my own (Altstein, 2017b) experience of writing a book review of a publication I deeply admired became an opportunity not only to encourage readers to read it, but to unexpectedly figure something out for myself. The book tackled the subject of how to write psychoanalytical clinical prose, which is a different matter from what it is that we do when we write psychoanalytically. The review not only pushed me to consider the necessary tension between the idea of needing to practice your writing (inescapable) and the idea that you don’t know what you’re doing until you do it (also inescapable). It also began my thinking about the delicacy of writing book reviews, and the importance of balancing one’s criticism with one’s own creativity.

In the end, at their best, book reviews both encapsulate the publication fairly and add something new. Although they are typically down at the bottom of our journals’ table of contents, reviews should be written and read with a gravitas proportionate to the powerful impact they inherently hold; they are often the first (and sometimes the only) exposure a reader has to a publication. Our two book reviews in this issue include Chaim Bromberg on Alan Slomowitz’s Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism and Chana Ullman on Rina Lazar’s Talking about Evil: Psychoanalytic, Social and Cultural Perspectives.

Capping our issue is the Private Lives section, one of the most unique features of Perspectives. Started by Clem Loew when the journal was originally conceived, it invites memoir and creative nonfiction from analysts in the field who want to stretch their writing muscles in ways other than writing about theory and practice in traditional academic form. This issue include’s Nina Cerfolio’s The Bicycle Shrink.

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It has felt very important to me to have the idea of writing examined closely in this journal’s inaugural year under new leadership (see Sopher, 2020 looking to where the journal has been and where it is going) and in keeping with the priorities of the Institute that houses Psychoanalytic Perspectives. NIP (the National Institute for the Psychotherapies) has long required analytic papers as a requirement of graduation, and has recently added a course devoted to psychoanalytic writing to our Adult Training Curriculum, understanding the value of devoting time in one’s training to learning about writing as a vehicle for analytic communication and understanding, a different goal from “learning how to be a good writer” (see Glick & Stern, 2008).

Ocean Vuong (2019) writes of an envy of words “for doing what we can never do.” I include the words in psychoanalytic writing and in writing psychoanalytically in this sentiment. They indeed have the potential to do things we cannot do in the spoken lives of our talking-cure practices, and not only in their ability to reify. Everyday, we try to say something about our patients’ experiences or about our experiences with them while also staying open to the spontaneous unexpected. This—the attempt to put into words what begins as inchoate—has long been the heart and hallmark of the psychoanalytic endeavor. Sometimes we say these words aloud. Other times we think them to ourselves. When we are ready to do something else with them, we write them down.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Altstein

Rachel Altstein, LP, JD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lower Manhattan. She teaches psychoanalytic writing at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), is a senior editor at Psychoanalytic Perspectives, is a member of Beatrice Beebe’s Infant Research Board, and chairs the Educator’s Award for Unpublished Scholarship at NIP. Before entering the psychoanalytic field, she worked as an attorney specializing in prisoners’ rights, criminal defense, and anti-death penalty litigation. She publishes and presents on themes occurring in writing, and in the psychoanalytic writing process in particular.