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We know that the growth of our field depends on clinical writing that is creative, experience near, conceptually clear, and theoretically sound. But what is less frequently noted is how the act of writing grows us. Both clinical writing and personal writing can deepen our understanding and allow us to bring something valuable from our work on the page back to our work with our patients.
When we write, we uncover what we know but did not know we knew and discover something new. Writing makes the implicit explicit and has the potential to catalyze the unspoken or unspeakable in the analyst and the field. Whether we write about our clinical work, our personal lives, or a combination of the two, writing has the potential to become “a transformational process” that alters “self experience” (Bollas, 1987, p. 14). We have both experienced writing this way as have the contributors to this issue, who were specifically asked to discuss how writing functions for them as catalyst and transformational process. How is the operative word, and you will find a rich and varied tapestry of responses woven through these pages as eleven writers respond to our call and our question.
This issue—entitled “How Clinical and Personal Writing Catalyze the Implicit, Unspoken, and Unspeakable in the Analyst and the Field”—begins, in Part I, with six brief papers that started out as short responses to exercises presented in Suzi Naiburg’s writing groups. Asked to expand their responses to a handful of pages and reflect on the influence of their writing on themselves and their clinical work, these writers demonstrate that you do not have to write at length to experience the catalytic and transformational processes they describe.
The writers of the five longer papers, presented in Part II, were invited to write about their clinical work and also tell us how the creative process of writing (or other artmaking) influences them and their work, that is, how the creative process serves as a transformationa