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Sometimes a piece of writing so takes my breath away that, feeling awed, I have to shut the book and ask of the writer: “How did you just do that?” How in the world did you figure out how to choose those words and put them in that order in such a way that made me taste cinnamon, smell pine, or do whatever it was that this writing so magically did? With psychoanalytic writing, I might ask, how was a patient conjured with so much palpable texture that whatever defines this person—her sulk, her gaze, her impatience—is made so vivid and alive? I bet this is a familiar experience for Suzi Naiburg, who has written an almost empirical book about the experience of admiring and trying to understand the writing of others. Didactic, deeply researched, and written with a determination to understand clinical writing by systematically unpacking it, Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose is a culminating volume of ideas for Naiburg, who has spent a career immersed in the teaching of clinical writing. The book will be of interest to both beginning and seasoned clinical writers.
Writing exercises—drills set off from the page in boxes outlined in black—are interspersed throughout the book. They have a distinct “here's one way to do it; now you try” feel. The exercises are not only teacherly tools, they provoke implicit and challenging questions about the utility and limitations of such drills. Among them, in the broadest sense, is the question of how and whether art can be taught, and, more narrowly, what happens when it is not just any writing that is the focus of scrutiny, but psychoanalytic writing that is under consideration, since psychoanalysis itself rests on learning from the inside–out rather than the outside–in. If an analysis proper—its trajectory and end-product—cannot be forecasted or scripted, how, one is left to ask, is psychoanalytic writing any more conducive to being architected from the outset? I will comment briefly on these questions at the end of this review