When the Weird Turn Pro: Some Thoughts on Writing in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Writing is one of the biggest means of legitimization—a field’s literature serves to assert its authority and substantiate its validity. Given that contemporary psychoanalysts can no longer draw on the epistemological certainty of the past in the work we do in the room with our patients or what we make of it in the literature, psychoanalytic writing can be daunting as well as kind of weird. This paper traces that weirdness to two sources: (1) the weirdness of psychoanalysis itself, and (2) the cross-disciplinary shift from twentieth-century modernism to postmodernism, which manifested most prominently within psychoanalysis in the form of the relational movement.

Keywords:

• authority
• legitimacy
• literature
• monstrous
• multidisciplinary
• postmodernism
• psychoanalytic writing
• relational
• structure
• twentieth-century modernism
• weird

Notes

¹ Friedman says that this traditional medical model is evident very early in the development of psychoanalysis, specifically in Studies in Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893–95), where “the protoanalyst … first examined his patient, then diagnosed her illness, and then treated her. You know what I mean: The patient was interrogated, a traumatic memory was discovered, and a treatment manipulation was carried out that might consist of inserting the memory into the patient’s awareness …. the physician was a physician and looked like one” (Friedman, p. 691).

² Just for starters, consider just how daunting it is to write about our patients: attempting to capture the complexity of one’s work with a particular person or people while honoring—and legally protecting—their privacy, as well as rendering them respectfully, in their full particularity and not simply as “cases.” I once wrote a paper about a patient whose story and racial and cultural identity configuration was too specific to publish; I could not blur her identity by altering traits, experiences, and locations without collapsing the point of the project, that the analyst’s and the patient’s unique and respective racial, cultural, and religious affiliations were deeply implicated in the transference work of the dyad and the therapeutic action of the treatment.

³ “Postmodern,” then, could also be understood as “monstrous” in the way Lew Aron meant it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kim Bernstein

Kim Bernstein, PhD, LP, NCPsyA is a psychoanalyst in private practice in downtown Manhattan. She is faculty and supervisor at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she also heads the writing component of the National Training Program. She holds a PhD in English literature and an MA in creative writing, and has taught writing to undergraduates, to psychoanalytic candidates, and as part of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, she worked for as a professional editor for over 15 years in academic and commercial publishing. She is former senior editor for the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives and continues to edit privately, primarily for those writing within the field of psychoanalysis.