Revisiting, Rewriting, Reexperiencing: Clinical Writing Today

Psychoanalytic writing exerts a unique allure over me.

Realistically, the analyst who publishes in 2024 should expect that his patient and others will read what he has written and recognize the patient whose analysis is described.

From the inception of psychoanalysis, with Freud’s first cases, clinical case presentations have been central to analytic writing and theorizing. Ricardo Bernardi and Monica Eidlin describe such cases as “critical for understanding the complexity of real situations, for guiding toward new discoveries and hypotheses about causal mechanisms, and for being the basis for case-based learning” (p. 35). And yet, as Giuseppe Civitarese puts it: “To raise the problem of writing in psychoanalysis is not to talk about writing, but to talk through or in writing” (p. 113). The flux between epistemological and ontological aspects of analysis, as described in Thomas H. Ogden’s contribution, is one way to understand the Möbius strip aspects of clinical writing, a metaphor invoked by both Civitarese and Gurmeet Kanwal.

The problem of writing is at the core of psychoanalysis, and each of these papers addresses the problem of clinical writing in different ways. One aspect is its changing nature: over the years, our notion of good

clinical writing has evolved. Extensive, biographical renderings of the patient’s life have fallen out of fashion, replaced by detailed descriptions of key moments in the analytic process; and the patient’s own biographical details have receded, in part out of concern for confidentiality given online searchable databases and in part due to the shift in analysis to a two person model. But while there is broad agreement that the analyst’s depiction of