“The Write Stuff”

In 1930, Freud received the Goethe Prize for literature. In the years after Freud, the ability to write about clinical material has been taken for granted. For most analysts, psychoanalytic writing has been regarded as incidental to their professional activity, a skill acquired by trial and error, put to use in process notes and summaries during training; later, by some, in case write-ups for certification; by even fewer, in case studies prepared for presentation or publication; or, by a very few, for research.

Many analysts actively avoid writing. Yet the time-consuming nature of analytic work, and in consequence the small number of patients any analyst can treat, has always mandated that analysts learn from each other's work. Effective writing about clinical process is currently being recognized as a matter of high importance for progress in theory and research in psychoanalysis, as well as for technical advances in psychoanalytic practice. Several papers in this issue of JAPA examine why clinical writing is important, what constitutes effective writing, and why analysts often do not write. The papers address the complications and complexities that emerge as these issues are confronted.

Writing about the analytic process might sound straightforward—but it is not a simple matter. To those who have never tried it, psychoanalysis itself might seem a simple task, for both patient and analyst. Although the patient has merely to say “whatever comes to mind,” it quickly becomes evident that this is not possible. The patient is perceptually informed by input from within and without the body. Mental content is nonverbal as well as verbal, often vague and fleeting, not organized in a coherent way even if it is verbal, and if coherent still idiosyncratic and largely incomprehensible to a listener ignorant of the referents.

The novice analysand discovers that even the “simple” task of recounting a dream is not simple. The remembered dream is likely to feel vague in comparison to