Empty Minds and Blank Pages: The Scholarly Writer at Work

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Notes

¹ For more on these paradoxical mandates, see David Tuckett’s “Editorial Afterthoughts: The Conceptualisation and Communication of Clinical Facts in Psychoanalysis.” Though he focuses his argument on psychoanalytic publishing, I believe his insights apply to all scholarly writing.

² This paper is part of a larger, long-term research project informed by composition theory and pedagogy as well as psychanalytic scholarship that seeks to better understand more than we currently do about both the material conditions and the inner lives of authors at work, paying special attention to the stages or moments writers find most anxiety-producing. (Composition Theory and Pedagogy has for several decades researched the procedures and strategies of writers, especially students. Influenced by cognitive psychology, its debt to psychoanalysis has in many ways have been effaced.)

³ Anton Kris distinguishes between “resistance” to the process of free association during treatment and “reluctance,” the former unconscious, and the latter representing a “conscious attitude of disinclination to participate” (31).

⁴ See Murray Schwartz’s” Where is Literature?” for a discussion of how psychoanalytic inquiries provide a language for imagining the “union of person and profession, private and public identities” (758), thus, avoiding the trap of disinterested medical psychology by making space for the scholar as a “whole person” whose uniquely individual “analytic and synthetic activities” (762) are exposed. According to Schwartz, psychoanalytic inquiry identifies as a proper subject of scholarship the “actively synthesizing personalities of individual” theorists (760), whose thinking and interpretations come from “actively mixing” (763) themselves with their subject matter.

⁵ Ausubel, who also compares the writing process to being pregnant, observes that “being a woman in the world, we’re asked to keep a lot of our lives under the surface. You have to be nice, you have to take care of everybody and do all this surface work, and everything else happens in the dark corners.”

⁶ Lottery tickets were placed in two containers, one with participant names and the other with the prizes, with some of the tickets blank. To draw a blank was to enter a contest with high hopes that might be dashed, an interesting etymological heritage when it comes to how writers experience creativity and inspiration. Later, drawing a blank came to signify forgetting something once known, a meaning that gets us closer to the sorts of disconnections from an earlier states of knowing psychoanalysis addresses.

⁷ See psychoanalyst Howard Levine on taking notes, which he recommends to analysts struggling to contain clinical processes and the mental contents that get aroused. By taking notes on what the patient is saying during the treatment hour, analysts can keep track of their own minds and insights. The very process of annotating, “the act of writing and gazing at the words” serves as a “centering and self-regulating device,” helping the analyst recover the “composure and competence” lost when clinical material provokes a “ profound, general disabling” of the analyst’s mind (985, 984). Levine’s advice applies to writing as well, especially scholarly writing that legitimately involves extensive reading, research and notetaking, note taking that can easily turn into free writing that can soon become drafting.

⁸ In an interview about her writing habits, Maya Angelou reveals she has “kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in,” a place where she writes, leaving her home by 6 am and arriving at her temporary study by 6:30, and returning home for lunch (179). Arranging her writing life in this way might be a way for her to transition in and out of this enfolded position.

⁹ Briefly, Gentile is evoking the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and Margaret Mahler. As Ogden explains their ideas in Subjects of Analysis, “the infant at birth is already a psychological entity engaged in a complex set of interpersonal interactions with the mother” (171), which can include “temporary disconnections from the mother” and “cocoon-like” (11) interludes of sensory isolation. Applying these theories, I speculate that chronically blocked writers, whose impasses threaten ambitions and careers, have become merged with their writing. Without some distance between writer and written, thinker and thought, the writing process cannot proceed. Often a supportive reader, teacher or editor can disrupt this merger, introducing sufficient detachment so that movement or process can proceed.

¹⁰ To name just a few examples, see: The Poetics of Gender (1986, edited by Nancy K, Miller); Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (1986, edited by Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (1986); Writing and Sexual Difference (1980, edited by Elizabeth Abel).

¹¹ Cathy Caruth calls “trauma’s ‘contagion,’ the traumatization of the ones who listen” (4). And for examples of what Caruth is addressing, see Sylvia Flescher’s “Googling for Ghosts: A Meditation on Writer’s Block, Mourning, and the Holocaust” (Psychoanalytic Review 2012) or my “Mourning and Melancholy: Literary Criticism by African American Women (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2016). See also Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory (2002, edited by Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic or Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997, edited by; Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen).