Deborah Coulthard

Dear Mr Whelan,

Thank you for the dinner party invitation.  So far the guests seem to have brought hearty appetites for meaty issues and energy for fine conversation.  In thinking about the writing/reading cure, I am reminded of the numbers of people who have credited the written word for their very survival. Primo Levi is one, even though it was not enough to save him in the end.  Of his work, the Australian writer Clive James says "cumulatively, it suggests that one of the best reasons to continue living, after one has seen the world at its worst, is to get things written, to establish a place for the introspective self even in a context of overwhelming destructive historic forces."

Victor Frankl was another concentration camp survivor who said "Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it."  Was this what finally allowed Virginia Woolf to quell the voice of her mother? (see Kay Souter's contribution) Her unconscious was able to put it into a form of words that made it part of her own story instead of something that just kept happening to her - truly finding her own voice, as Elisabeth Hanscombe would say.

The Pulitzer prize-winner, Richard Rhodes quotes a journalist named G Kopperud who had suffered a breakdown whilst in a refugee camp.  When asked how he survived, Kopperud said "I began taking notes.  If these others had no future, well, I did.  I wrote, and I used the words like a life rope."  Rhodes then quotes Nietzsche "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."  Another who used writing as a "life rope" is New Zealand author Janet Frame, most famous for the film adaptation of "An Angel At My Table."  She wrote her way out of a psychiatric hospital.

As intrinsically social beings, sending our own version of events out into the world, like a message in a bottle or connecting with another's inner world through reading (as did Levi during his time at Auschwitz, we perhaps alleviate our alone-ness.  Pain is lessened if we feel that our side of the story is heard.  A potency is felt.  A power is behind the voice.  A power that is missing in the trauma kept in silent memory. 

Thank you again for your hospitality.

Deborah Coulthard (psychoanalytic psychotherapist)