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Why I write is for me a question that has evolved and continues to evolve. In a recent edition of The New Yorker (October 14), John Seabrook writes a column about the impact of Google's recent introduction of “Smart Compose,” a predictive text feature. While you are typing, Smart Compose suggests endings to the sentence you are writing. It guesses your thoughts and saves you keystrokes. Artificial Intelligence certainly can save time for people writing frequent, business-oriented emails; however, as Seabrook reflects, for those of us who write to develop our own thoughts, “Smart Compose is a nuisance at best, and an interference at worst.” Currently I am teaching a candidate course that includes close consideration of the symbolizing and nonsymbolizing mind. I strongly believe that at its best, writing is the chance to engage in a symbolizing process—one that organizes and gives meaning to our affective lives.
Recently I write in a much more personal way due to the shock of life events that shook my world. I write to attempt to integrate the unexpected threat to who I was before, who I am now, and who I continue to be. Writing affords me a process of bringing coherence to chaotic experience. For this issue of JAPA, I have written a book review where for the first time I have spoken about becoming ill. I had believed I would never want to write about it, never want to reenter that space of disease, the threat of dying, and treatment. Yet as I wrote the review, I could see so clearly the symbolizing function of writing, and the metabolizing of personal emotional experiences.
Historically my writing had been not quite as personal or solitary. Early on, ensconced in my work with patients, my writing was an effort to digest a process I felt immersed in, a form of symbolization. I wrote to bring together psychoanalytic concepts with the analytic processes I was experiencing, to bring better clarity to my clinical work.
In the fall 2019 issue of The American Psychoanalyst, Na