Philip Hewitt

I would also like to thank you for making this discussion possible and accessible.
 As I read your most interesting piece and Dr Griffin’s contribution my thoughts turned to Christopher Bollas’s recent novellas, “Dark at the end of the tunnel”, “I heard a mermaid singing” and “Mayhem”. In these three books Christopher Bollas’s main character is the psychoanalyst and the lens through which we look into his world.  He uses various other characters as devices through which he engages in a discussion both with himself and with the reader.  Thus in the true sense of an analysis there are always two patients and two analysts in the room, often at the same time which makes sessions challenging.
It occurred to me that writing is not always healing but can be an experience of externalising anxieties.  In many places the books are engagingly humorous because Bollas shares experience which we may all share.  When made to laugh I am not thinking but feeling and for these moments judgement is suspended.  This does feel like some relief. In the books the comedy is of outrageous events which the psychoanalyst has to confront some event in his life and practice.  There is something of the absurd touched on and I feel at one point shrunk to a speck but then as I analyse the ideas, enlarged once more.  Again another sense of relief pervades.  I believe that underlying Bollas’s writing in these books is a serious concern about the state of the world, the institution of psychoanalysis and the lack of engagement with the erosion of personal autonomy.   I wondered whether Maurice Whelan’s thoughts about the process of writing were also suggesting the importance of creativity as does Dr. Griffin in his creative expansion model of self-analysis and free association.
 From “the talking cure” we now seem to be talking about “the writing cure” clearly something which Freud himself could not resist. Whilst this is an extension to be desired something else is going on in the thoughts being articulated.  Could it be that we are expressing a need to be heard and to make contact with a world about which we are all worried?  I am grateful to those who do write creatively as I may receive their gifts in a way which scientific writing with its own associations, in every sense of the word, often are just not there.
 
Philip Hewitt
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
London UK