In un certo senso,
Credo che sempre scriviamo
Di qualcosa che non sappiamo:
scriviamo per rendere possibile
al mondo non scritto
di esprimersi attraverso noi
Italo Calvino, 1983
In a way, I believe we always write
About something we don't know:
we write to make it possible for the unwritten world
to express itself through us
Italo Calvino, 1983
1. The psychoanalyst who writes
We would like to deal with a particular declination of the ‘unconscious-language binomial’, proposing a reflection on the theme of writing in psychoanalysis, and not only its links with the universe of the symbolic and logic, but also with the unconscious aspects of the psychoanalyst ‘who writes’.
The written word, in many ways so very far and also functionally different from the spoken language, takes on a particular significance in the work of the psychoanalyst.
Writing becomes a part of psychoanalytic work more than is commonly recognized. Writing about the clinical case is certainly the most evident use, but there are many other variations: its value in training, the daily note to capture a thought after the session, the urge to write about one’s own analysis, and on a wider scale, the translation of the texts and the importance that this has in the psychoanalytic thought of different geographical-cultural areas.
Why does the psychoanalyst, who is not a writer by profession, feel the need to write? Is there a thread that links writing with transference, when we turn our clinical experience into writing? And vice versa, what are the obstacles that can make it difficult for a psychoanalyst to write?
2. From thinking to writing
The path from thinking to writing involves many steps, which are for the most part unconscious.
Thought, being in itself devoid of any rhythm and euphony, is then articulated through writing in search of balance and phonetic cadence, seeking better and more accurate lexical matches, articulating subordinates, inserting the breath of the comma and the full stop as a pause of the period, all as if the final outcome must become a reading test. Above all, there is a self-reflexive effort in which the analyst tries to step away enough to imagine another, a potential reader, with whom to retrace and make understandable a story as complex as a clinical history.
All these transformations, even the apparently formal ones, alter the very thought from which they originate and generate new inputs.
Let us retrace, as individual analysts, how writing has traversed psychoanalysis as a discipline from multiple angles.
Is writing such an essential element, not only for the analyst as an individual, but also as an important function of the very fundamentals and development of psychoanalysis?
Writing has walked across psychoanalysis from its composition to its expansion and continues through time and in real life as it passes from one generation to another. Is it possible to think psychoanalysis without writing? The need to write reveals a motive: why do analysts feel the need to push themselves into a territory that is not their
ab origine?
3. Why the need to write
Is it the same impulse that drives the writer to construct his novel, and, more generally, the artist to create? Many psychoanalysts (Carotenuto, 1995; Ferrari, 1994; Chianese, 1999) place the reparative function of writing at the center of their reflection. In 'The Poet and the Fantasy' (1907), Freud argues that the unsatisfied desire is the driving force of fantasy and creativity.
Do we write starting from a wound, from a mourning, in any case in the wake of the unfinished and the loss? This is an element that stands out clearly in the autobiographical literature of those who have gone through devastating historical or life moments or in other literary genres with subtle hidden motives.
We believe however that there is a difference that defines the specific quality of psychoanalytic writing versus common literary products.
The psychoanalyst, when he writes, when he tells about the patient, about himself, about the theory, navigates in the awareness of the process’ limits and accepts them. He cannot, like the writer, reshape reality and its outcomes, use creativity and imagination without constraints, bending them to his own needs. For the ‘writing psychoanalyst’ the words said remain the same, the interpretative choices are those that had been proposed, the outcome of the story is exposed for what it was. Writing is anchored to that same internal setting that has oriented the therapy and the position of abstinence.
Aware of the strong anchor and invariability of these factors we move in the only area that can always be remodeled, which is the area of sense and elaboration of facts. This uninterrupted flow of new inputs and meanings transit through the preconscious, always within the limits of the invariable, into après coup, in an ever new rewriting of the representations of meaning.
The unfinished cannot therefore be corrected by the analyst who writes. It is however an intrinsic part of the movements of psychoanalytic writing: we write capturing elements of what has remained unfinished in the analytic story, on the taut thread of the main difficulty, of the unresolved countertransference or of our own transference to the patient. These affective motions derive from the liminal condition of clinical histories, the exposure of which oscillates between the communication of objective aspects and their representation, modeled by the subjectivity of the analyst who has experienced them.
4. Unconscious, preconscious and writing
So let's look at psychoanalytic writing as being informed by this unconscious resource of the analyst who writes. This process is driven by the urgent desire to write: to communicate about the analysis that has been carried out, evidencing the reference points to each theoretical reflection, making it all understandable to the reader, weaving a network of conscious meaning for all elements of the missing without ever losing the focus on reality and the existing limits.
In our opinion, it seems reductive to consider solving the missing as the main motive for writing in psychoanalysis since it would never account for the unexpected elements of surprise that it can provide. In fact, we should recall the aphorism of Joseph Joubert: '
Looking for words, you find thoughts’
There is indeed no analyst who, while writing, doesn’t feel the unfolding of further understandings about an impasse, or about the nature of a transference, or about the reasons for one's own orientation in an interpretative choice, sometimes even about the motive for that specific patient’s chosen pseudonym and so on.
It seems to us that it is precisely the appearance of these unconscious elements in the mind that determines the sense of pleasure in writing: enjoyment is given by witnessing the development of a creation, the aggregation of ideas that unfold and combine to the final thread that stretches and connects the clinical aspect to the theory, the narration to the speculation.
We must therefore reason in terms of the vast potential for elaboration and creativity whenever we consider writing in psychoanalysis; Ogden (2005), in fact, defines
state of writing as a particular psychic condition: at the same time a state of meditation and a clinched challenge with language.
This state or condition resides always at a boundary: subjective but reaching out towards a recipient, right on the border between pure expressiveness and communication. It recalls the area of the transitional space (Winnicott, 1974), specifically the third area: the bridge between the internal and the external space, the playground, the cultural and creative experience.
Resuming the effective Freudian metaphor (1915-17), it could be said that writing allows us to stay in the
‘middle realm’, understood as the place where the transference unfolds on the writing. It is the necessary intermediate area where often conflicting positions of the mind oscillate. Staying in this realm, comparing contradictory ideas, finding their own order and organization in writing, allow the analyst to define his own style and identity. This includes formulating the internal reference models more precisely and comparing and dealing with the encountered theoretical constructs in the course of training and profession. Writing is basically the final act of a wandering state of mind, in the same way an interpretation takes form also thanks to the less structured, free-floating attention condition that precedes it.
The erratic state, by etymology contiguous to error, is the prerequisite for every creative act. We proceed by trial and error, accepting to stay in a more indistinct state of mind contiguous to the laws of the unconscious, before a creative act can take shape.
In meta-psychological terms, the analytical writing process calls for the preconscious’ functions; it draws directly from the magma of the unconscious and reaches out to the conscious without yet yielding to its laws. It is in the preconscious that the undisturbed coexistence of contradictory ideas is made possible and it is thanks to this tolerance that those unprecedented bonds, that feed creativity, are born.
Writing therefore feeds on the unconscious, lingers in the preconscious to reach the conscious.
A part of the contradicting term’s potential will be sacrificed in a cycle but this does not conclude the elaboration: new elements of the unconscious feed the preconscious, new links are created and work can resume. We could interpret this writing process as a dialectical one, where the elements, sometimes opposite, sometimes similar, generate new, unprecedented integrations. This elaboration collects the myriad of particular elements, which are germinated by the analytic practice, conveying them into a more coherent structured discourse, attempting a shaping of the shapeless, binding the excess presence of the spoken words to the essence of those written and therefore giving rise to an elaborate and communicable product.
5. Writing and transference
The analyst's impulse to write, which is fundamentally the need to give further meaning and representability, has its roots in some peculiarities of the analyst's condition. For the analyst, writing is also a way out of the condition of specific solitude of the consulting room. This solitude consists not so much of
being concretely alone, but of
feeling alone because inhabited by the ghosts of the many patient’s transference faces, all different from his own.
We cannot dwell in this paper how much and in which way writing can be considered a continuation of the transfer-countertransference interweaving; we have approached this topic in other publications (Lucantoni-Catarci, 2016).
Writing is then also perhaps the re-appropriation of something from which we have been partially expropriated. It is, in fact, the reacquisition of our own identity in the lexical and stylistic aspects, precisely thanks to the relationship with the other-reader in which we recognize ourselves.
Writing therefore can be seen as a paradoxical liberation and continuation of transference.
6. To conclude
Writing is therefore an extraordinary tool that allows us to establish the processes of the analytical story, to help us feel them less ephemeral, less exposed to the emotional turmoil that life itself brings with it. We could perhaps think that one of the powerful motivations for writing in psychoanalysis is connected to the primitive anguish that assiduous, loving, tiring acquaintance with the unconscious presents to us. This anguish emerges from the ineffability of the indistinct, from what is buried and elusive and contradictory, in a word, with the typical
uncanny quality of the unconscious.
Analytical writing therefore seems to live in the paradox of a state in which we are being creatively nourished and at the same time, by outlining shapes and structures, flee away from the perturbing disturbing dimension of the unconscious.
References
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Lezioni Americane. Milan: Mondadori.
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Scrittura come riparazione. Bari: Laterza.
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Image: Watercolour by Claudio Castiglioni