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I, like many of us, feel chronically behind in my reading not just with my New Yorkers, which I mercifully don't see in stacks any longer thanks to my iPad e-subscriptions, but even with the New York Times. As someone who entered the clinical world after a long career in research and public policy, the pressure to “master the professional literature” is especially acute. So when my eye caught a small New York Times article about the seemingly effete topic of who gets to write novels about whom, I was surprised that I did not simply leave it to the literati. But I was intrigued that it had reached the top 20 on the Times Most Popular List, so I checked out this dispatch from this year's celebrated Brisbane conference.
The article, it turns out, concerned the keynote speech by novelist Lionel Shriver about what she and others have referred to as identity politics gone mad, or to be more specific, the increasingly popular idea that writing about people who do not share one's “identity” is an act of cultural appropriation akin to identity theft. In her speech, Shriver complained that the increasingly shrill critiques about writers with one identity writing about characters with another would ultimately produce characters “so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we'd indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.” (Shriver, 2016) Not long into the speech several of Shriver's colleagues stood up and walked out, setting in motion a literary conflagration that spread to the pages of newspapers around the world and prompted the hasty organization of “counter-programming” to express the literary world's consternation over her remarks.
Why should we, as psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapists, be concerned about this dust-up among writers at a literary enclave in a far corner of the world? Because if differences of identity proscribe us from gaining an intimate understanding of the experiences of others, we are stripped of what psychoanalysts fro