You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Writing, like dreaming, is a medium in which I think and talk to myself in ways I cannot do in any other form. Also, like dreaming, it keeps me alive in my work as a psychoanalyst, for I find that I have to be creating something of my own as I am immersed in trying to help someone else create something of his or her own.
Writing an analytic essay is a very difficult thing to do and requires a great deal of time and effort and anguish. Part of the difficulty is that writing of any sort is autobiographical—after all, where do our feelings, thoughts, and responses originate other than in ourselves? Consequently, analytic writers must put their private world on the page. The better the analytic paper, the more this is the case. I am referring not to information about one's life, but to the life of the writing. An analytic writer, in the very act of writing, is not simply creating a work of art in a particular literary genre; he or she is engaged in a process of being and becoming more fully him- or herself.
Opening oneself up in the act of writing is not enough. One must do something original with one's writing. We must find a way of looking at a situation in our own way, a way that bears our own mark. This is where engagement with language comes in: one creates one's “own mark” solely through the use of language. But the problem facing writers of all sorts is that experience does not present itself in words. Nor do ideas present themselves in organized sentences and paragraphs, much less in the form of an article with an internal structure. One must create something new in order to convey experiences and develop ideas in words and sentences and paragraphs.