Elisabeth Hanscombe
I read Maurice Whelan’s thoughts with great interest and pleasure and ask the question: what is it in creative writing that allows for healing? Is it the fact of being published and finding an audience, or of finding a voice? Or does healing come through pruning the writing, which might start as an autobiographical response but in the process becomes something else, something like fiction, which when published, is made public property, from which the writer must distance herself to reflect? Reflection can of itself help to heal. At what point does writing shift from being purely about self-expression into a communication with others and what purpose does this self-expression serve?
Focussing on the work of the neurologist, Antonio Damasio on ‘the body’s story’, Paul John Eakin suggests that the purpose of self-narrative is ‘the maintenance of stability in the human individual through the creation of a sense of identity’, both in the body and mind, a type of homeostasis. Eakin argues that the function of self-narrative is to push us towards future stability. ‘We are steadily moving away from the past into the future, and we want to bridge the gap.’ Therefore, we cannot talk so easily about the present in self-narrative terms, rather we tend to hark back to the past ‘because the present isn’t a story yet.’
Barbara Turner-Vesselago, teacher of a style of creative writing, Freefall without a Parachute, urges beginning writers to adopt the ‘ten year rule’. The writer follows images in the writing that have energy but pursues only those images that exist in the mind and memory from at least ten years earlier. Our experiences, she argues, need time to compost. The writer attends to all the sensuous details and writes only, without reading back. The writer in the process of writing changes nothing. Writing and reading, Turner-Vesselago argues, are different activities. The conscious mind is active as critic and editor in reading, whereas in writing freefall, the writer is more able to switch off self-consciousness. Thereby, she can prevent her conscious mind from interfering with the process of allowing what’s unknown to surface.
The cardinal rule of psychoanalysis, the rule of free association, differs somewhat from one of the central rules in ‘creative’ writing, the rule ‘to show not tell’. The reader needs to be able to see the scene, imagine the ideas unfold, hear the dialogue as the writer constructs it. The reader does not want to be told. The effort to write with a reader in mind requires, as Turner- Vesselago suggests, an emphasis on the sensuous detail and an attempt to avoid telling the reader what the writer would like the reader to think. It requires a distance and objectivity. Turner-Vesselago’s emphasis on sensuous detail is like the analyst, Marion Milner’s belief that an exploration of the external world in writing can act as a window or door to what lies inside.
The task of any writer is first to find a voice. The task in any therapeutic endeavour is to assist the person in treatment to find a voice. Finding a voice, whether in psychoanalysis, autobiography or in fiction, relates to the task of finding an integrated sense of self in all its multiplicity. This involves trusting the unconscious and the need to strangle the demonic voices within; voices that constantly seek to criticise and devalue the very effort to write or to speak. A sort of ‘resistance’ to self-expression that psychoanalysis also seeks to tackle.
Elisabeth Hanscombe
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist
