Exorcising the Demons

About a decade ago, the late Ethel Person and I sat down for a cup of coffee and discussed why we wrote. Ethel noted that she wrote to figure out what she thought. To me, this perspective rang true, but incomplete. I think we also write to find out what others think. Writing a publishable psychoanalytic paper requires one to read and study before writing. After perusing the literature, one hopes to arrive at some form of mastery over a particular aspect of human experience. While this approach certainly makes sense, I have come to the disappointing conclusion that the mastery one seeks is partial at best. Much of analytic data arrives in fragments from a session here and a session there. Writing brings some degree of coherence to the fragments. However, some of the most penetrating insights lead to further uncertainty. Hence the quest for mastery may be one reason I write, but it is an aspiration for mastery that often lies just beyond my reach.

Another motivation for my long interest in writing is related to the wish to be known and heard. Analysts spend much of their day in a state of reserve, biting their tongues, eschewing chattiness, and avoiding premature conclusions. Such restraint is mitigated to some extent through the act of writing, where one can elaborate on the complexities of psychoanalytic thinking and can express one's views more fully. Like many of my colleagues, I have a need to draw conclusions about human experience, and to share them with others in an effort to understand the staggering complexity of unconscious motivation and the painful truths connected to the self-defeating trends within all of us.

Warren Poland (one of my favorite psychoanalytic writers) launched this new feature on the motivations for writing—Why I Write—in the last issue of JAPA. In his wonderful contribution (Poland 2019), he emphasized the pleasure one derives from writing. I can relate to this pleasure of creation, but my emphasis here is on the darker forces at work when