Helen Epstein
Hello from Massachusetts!
As an analysand as well as a biographer and memoirist, I'm delighted to stumble upon this intercontinental dinner party. I went online to read about psychoanalysis and writing because I was interested in the relationship between the two forms of introspection. I first entered analysis twenty-five years ago, after writing and then reading a very personal book: Children of the Holocaust. The sequence seemed logical. My writing provided an analytic agenda: setting forth the themes and organizing them into a narrative came first; working them through with an analyst came after.
More recently, in the midst of writing another memoir, I found myself so overwhelmed by the material that I went back to analysis for help. Becoming overwhelmed by or lost in the traumatic parts of one's personal history is a hazard for many memoirists. Some writers I know simply stop writing because they are afraid of where and how fast the process is taking them. My friend, Parisian psychoanalyst Rachel Rosenblum, has written about the problem of "mourir de dire" in regard to the French philosopher Sarah Kofman and I think what she writes is pertinent to many Holocaust survivor suicides as well as to Virginia Woolf.
The novelist John Gardner wrote that all art begins with a wound and I agree. Many writers are ignorant of the dimensions of that wound when they begin writing and only begin to discover them as their narratives unfold. Psychoanalysis can be an enormous help but many writers are worried about it interfering with their creative process or shutting it down altogether. In fact, an insensitive therapist represents a significant occupational hazard.
I've been writing and talking concurrently for four years now. Recently, I decided that before rewriting, I wanted to stop the work on the book for a few months and continue to analyze. It feels like flying without a seatbelt or using a trapeze without a safety net, a great risk in the hope of great gain. The issue, I guess, is trust.
All the best,
Helen Epstein
