Eros, Thanatos, Agon

When I dig into the many and varied motivations that make me write, three Greek words come to mind: Eros, Thanatos, Agon. Freud's courageous introduction of Greek mythology into psychoanalytic theory has made us familiar with the first two. The Greek word agon (άγών) has the meanings of “contest, struggle, conflict, fight.” It is the etymological root of the English word agony.

My writing evolves from a gamut of emotions and motivations, with love and hate leading the way. For me, love of writing includes generosity, sharing, gratitude, and a deep desire for responsive engagement with others. Hate (Thanatos) joins hands with envy, greed, anxiety, and narcissistic exhibitionism.

Writing is a sexual act. It is driven from inside. It pressures from inside—a force and an urge demanding expression. What we write must also have sexual qualities to survive and to be alive. It must reek with desire for intercourse with receptive readers. What we write must be sexually fertile enough to generate offspring—offspring in the form of new feelings, new ideas, and new responses in our readers. What we write should also seek to engage in acts of “textual intercourse” with the texts of others, acts in which fertile texts tumble together and interpenetrate, entering into and joyfully receiving one another.

Hatred enters into my writing. I hate the task of attempting to communicate in words the swirl of complicated emotional responses and reveries that swamp my mind during a session. As T. S. Eliot (1944) reminds us, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden.” I especially hate the professionally imposed burden of cranking out a “process note” after every session. That this task is not internally driven but externally imposed creates anger and resentment. It offends my narcissistic wish to “get it right” and to capture in words the emotional core

of the session. It is as if the attempt to put the raw feelings of t