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I love psychoanalysis. But my devotion to our literature and my desire to contribute to it, as much as they shape me, are not, at bottom, why I write. But don't misunderstand: without the love of a subject matter, neither I nor anyone else would have any reason to write. To write, you must love to think about something. But I think I would write even if it weren't psychoanalysis I loved.
Many years ago, in the New York Times Book Review, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates (1982) wrote, “If I say that I write with the enormous hope of altering the world—and why write without that hope?—I should first say that I write to discover what it is I will have written” (p. 1). Writing is just this kind of emergent process for me. I can't make it happen, and I have the very clear sense that it would be a shame if I could. I have no choice but simply to observe the unfolding of my own thoughts and feelings on the page. I am an onlooker at processes that, paradoxically, could not be more my own.
When I write, I hope to get out of the way and let something grow and change and come into focus, only to verge back into the unformulated and then begin to emerge again. I want to go through this cycle of experience, which never grows old, again and again. It gives me a feeling like no other, a feeling of becoming, of participating in the life of something bigger than myself, of contact with mystery.
As writers, we hope to bring ourselves so thoroughly to bear on the problem at hand, with so little reservation, holding back so little, that something comes into being at least a little bit differently than it has ever done before. We aim to access something we have always lived with but sensed only hazily, or never perceived at all. Writers, when successful, are mid-wives of being. We go deep inside ourselves and find … the world!