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Writers have long regarded writing as a means of transforming trauma and healing themselves and others (DeSalvo, 1999). When Freud, unquestionably a writer, discovered the “talking cure” and found that keeping traumatic experiences out of consciousness had very adverse somatic effects that could be reversed through free association (Breuer & Freud, 1895), he also discovered that written disclosure of his feelings to himself and others helped boost himself out of a somewhat depressed mood and provided some respite from the pain of his cancer (Farber 2005). The “writing cure” was an intrinsic part of Freud's self-analysis and made it possible for him to write “The Interpretation of Dreams”. (Freud, 1900).
People have kept journals of their thoughts and feelings for centuries, and “journaling”, popularized by psychologist Ira Progoff (1975) has made its way into the therapeutic community. It is used by gestalt therapists to help patients use their immediate experience in the service of self-healing, and may be used in various therapies to promote affect regulation. In family and systemic therapy, in which the narrative approach (Pennebaker & Seagall, 1999; White & Epston, 1990) is used to help individuals rewrite their own life stories, patient and therapist co-construct a narrative as a metaphor for understanding how the patient can construct, make sense of, and transform his life. Almost twenty years after social psychologist James Pennebaker introduced the writing paradigm, the surge of interest in therapeutic writing has risen dramatically among clinicians, the public, and researchers, who have conducted hundreds of writing studies. The Writing Cure elaborates the various means by which thoughtful and exciting scientific inquiry can be inspired by a therapeutic method that works, but through mechanisms that are not fully or even partially understood.
In several empirical studies, Pennebaker and colleagues (Pennebaker, 1989; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Kieco