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I write to figure out what I think. Both Warren Poland and Glen Gabbard have said the same. But, surely, if someone asked any of us to say what we think about a topic, we'd come up with something relevant. Yet writing is different. How so? For starters, writing allows a slower, more considered reflection on whatever one is contemplating. But as I write this now, I see that, while what I just wrote is true, there's more to it.
When I was an adolescent, I thought I wanted to be a short story writer. As I reflect on this ambition, I wonder why. I was then, and remain, an addictive reader of novels, often long, complex novels where characters develop, evolve, change—not something containable in a short story. Nor did I love reading short stories the way I did novels, because the form didn't allow for such character development. I have a close friend, Edith Perlman, who is a gifted short story writer. Edith transforms her anxieties into transporting tales. Although I did write a few short stories stimulated by adolescent angst, by mid-college I was aware I didn't have the imaginative gift to create compelling narratives. I ask myself, what was it in literature that I really loved? The answer is pretty clear: character—its complexity, development, how people became who they were, how they engaged, changed, how these changes affected them and others.
Well, there's a pretty straight line from that recognition to becoming a psychoanalyst. But for me, as a psychologist, the route at the time was a bit more circuitous. I had to write, but a doctoral dissertation and the first research projects that enabled me to have full analytic training were not writing that deeply engaged me. I wrote to get past hurdles. And then I found I was writing again.