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WHEN ANALYSTS USED TO WRITE about writers, they were often buoyed by a conviction that they were talking about another species. Those who recall the heyday of Edmund Bergler (1949) in midcentury may also recall his extensive analysis of writers.
The writer acts both roles—that of the giving mother and the recipient child—on his own person. He gives to himself, out of himself, beautiful words and ideas, thus establishing an autarchy. . . . Whereas the typical neurotic needs two people (himself and an object) for unconscious reenactment of an infantile fantasy, the writer combines both roles into one. (pp. 81-82)
The insight is shrewd, but the innocence Bergler displays in not applying it to himself, an analyst said to have produced four books a year and more than three hundred papers, would be difficult to preserve today.
The old idea of the analyst as objective observer of psychic phenomena has been dethroned; we postmoderns have guillotined the neutral medium. To be consistent, we must scrutinize how ideas in psychological discourse are affected by the medium in which they appear, including writing. (Was not one of Spence’s accusations against Freud that he was too good a writer?) More typical now, a half-century after Bergler, would be this comment by Stanley Olinick (1997) in a discussion of writer’s block: “During many years, I was at times peripherally aware of writing for a vaguely defined, taciturn, critical colleague in some distant city” (p. 184). Here the analyst-writer puts himself on the line, albeit a bit gingerly. Writing is an essential means of shaping the discussion of psychoanalysis, but it is not a neutral medium. Writing in Psychoanalysis, the first volume of a monograph series called Psychoanalytic Issues published by the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, recognizes this implicitly. Its contributors try to come to terms with the fact that we have lost our innocence.
But what is writing? Antonio Alberto Semi’s chapter, “Writing in Psychoanalysis,” h