The Inheritance of the Unwritten

“You cannot begin a sentence with because!” my 7th grade Language Arts teacher exhorted, sweeping the room with the fire of paranoid eyes. The class sat transfixed or rather paralyzed in small wooden seats. Abruptly turning his large back to us, Mr. P proceeded to fill the chalkboard with what I dare to call a catastrophe of grammatical particles. From within the violent dust cloud of chalk, a landscape of scrawling rune-like-confusion slowly spread across the horizon of the space. We stared—or tried not to. What choice did our young psyches have; another language trauma forming. Mr. P was a tight man with a round pale face and a greasy top of curls. Traumatized himself, of course. Does it matter that he was a traumatized traumatizer? A man who lacked faith that one can begin with a connection to incompleteness. It is for him and the long broken chain of grammatically traumatized-traumatizing others, that I begin with a swiveling middle point.

Relevant Manifestations of the Ongoing Issue

Because I am a writer by nurtured nature, and my formative psychoanalytic mentor (therapist and supervisor in one) to be called Dr. X did not write, I am tasked to write the un-writable; that is to formulate the conceptual words how his unique style of practice functioned and what story he told himself about his work. It may be that he told himself very little in the self-narrated theoretical kind of way found in analytic papers. Since he had no need to write, he may also have had no need to tell himself a creatively involved story about his work. Perhaps he muttered a baseline myth of self, here and there, and had bullet points of who he is in relation to the theories and interventions he referenced. Importantly, he kept no ongoing diary of mind that he tended to as a garden of theoretical aesthetics in which to grow his clinical discoveries. Most likely, it is only I who have the wish or need for a story about him, for I am a writer by relational spe