Fred L. Griffin, MD - The New Orleans Psychoanalytic Center

Dear Mr. Whelan,
   
   Thank you for your interesting history lesson about Freud, his conversations with Schnitlzer, and his "gift" of an approach to free association from Borne.  And congratulations on your Society's Experiment in Dialogue.
 
   At the end of your comments, you pose the following question for discussion:
"Psychoanalysis may allow a writer a greater freedom to express him or herself but the removal of an external constraint is one thing. What about internal constraint? How does the writer remove them?"
 
     I have given much thought to this subject and have written about it in two articles.  To my mind, this problem of "internal constraint" is the same one we encounter in all forms of self-analysis.  Although I am a great advocate of self-analysis and of creative writing as one medium through which to achieve a self-analytic space, self-analysis does have its limitations.  In a paper, titled "One Form of Self-Analysis" (Griffin, F. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIV, July 2004), I experimented with "the writing cure" by becoming a creative writer myself.  In the paper, I demonstrate and discuss how I wrote a piece of autobiographical fiction and used it for self-analytic purposes.  Although this medium was highly generative in terms of increasing self-knowledge, I did run into the question of how did I know—amongst its many revelations-to what degree was I concealing still truer truths from myself: the question of "resistance" as posed by classical analysis.
 
      I will provide from my paper only a "note on listening" in which I describe the manner in which I "sounded out" the associations that were generated by my experiment with autobiographical fictional writing (which I reconceptualized as a matter of listening for what is "true" and "not true," rather than for what is "true" or "false" [defensive]):
 
"I have cultivated a particular form of listening to the words/voices that I create, one that I have demonstrated in this paper but have not articulated.  There are certain words, such as "no music" and "quickening of his*voice," that have a particular ring of truth to me.  I have learned to trust the authenticity of the associative pathways along which they lead me when*as I sound them out*I encounter a kind of rhythm, a unifying music that connects the elements and generates still more "verse" that deepens my self-understanding.  This form of listening for what sounds emotionally true in my self-analytic experience has become a reliable guide for me.  For there are some words or phrases I have written that produce no such resonance; they are dull or flat and create no new life.  While still others are discordant due to the anxiety that is evoked, and I must lean into the anxious words to give them another sounding in order to find what may be contained within.  One aspect of this self-analytic work may be characterized as listening for what is false (defensive) rather than true.  The most compelling component of this self-analytic activity, however, involves sounding out the words/voices I have created to discern what sounds/feels true and what sounds/feels not-true to my emotional experience.  This form of listening is a highly visceral experience*of rhythms, shapes, textures*akin to what we may sense when reading/listening to a poem that speaks to us or standing before a painting that reaches us.  This is a form of knowing what is emotionally true to us without knowing (at least initially) how we came to know what we know."
 
   Lastly, in a paper entitled "Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature" (Griffin, F. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIV, April 2005), I describe a clinical experience in which there was a collapse of the analytic (imaginative) space.  I then discussed how I made use of a "conversation" I created with a short story and my own analytic experience to restore his imaginative capacities and to resume psychological work with the patient.  My thesis is that a literary form created by an imaginative writer captures something of the way the author shapes emotional experience and psychologically engages with it.  The manner in which experience is created and contained in an imaginative literary text has much in common with the way experience is generated and worked with in the psychoanalytic situation.  I made use of a story by William Carlos William and ideas of Bion to assist me (as would a consultant) in resolving an experience of (transference-)countertrasference that had led to clinical impasse.
 
     Thank you for the privilege of entering into a dialogue with you about this most interesting subject.
 
Fred L. Griffin, MD
The New Orleans Psychoanalytic Center
flgriffin@uabmc.edu