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I love to write.
An article by Virginia Woolf about her early writing for the Times Literary Supplement describes her pleasure in a growing sense of herself from “a girl in a bedroom with pen in hand” to “a professional woman,” due to actually being paid for these reviews, and being sought out by the editor.1 She wrote chillingly, though, that the silent injunction to a Victorian female, “Never let anyone guess that you have a mind of your own,” nearly “plucked the heart out of my writing.” She called this inner voice “the Angel in the House,” urging her “not to criticize but to charm and flatter.” Conquering that inner voice was a prerequisite for writing, she believed. This necessary fierceness propelled the pen of this magnificent writer, my lifelong heroine.
Reading about her—forgetting for the moment her ultimate suicide— I wished I could have experienced such noble struggles as hers. In our own field, Glen Gabbard wrote in this column (JAPA 67/4) that his desire was “to exorcise … demons that haunt me.” For another moment I wished that I too could be so in touch with such violent aspirations. Surely in psychoanalysis we believe that the best in life is born of dark conflicts?
My terrible confession therefore is that I simply love to write. I have loved the mechanics, for one. Once upon a time my aunt plied me with beautiful crayons and, later, beautiful fountain pens. I salivated at the luscious colored inks, the new white empty paper, my velvet nib sweeping over the velum. I used to practice fancy scripts—Old English with embellishments, Celtic decorative alphabets copied from the Book of Kells,