The Writing Cure: Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education by Mark Bracher Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1999,  230 pp.

Psychoanalysts and creative writers have long been intrigued by each other. They have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, each looking to the other for inspiration and support. Freud paid tribute to the poets and philosophers who, he acknowledged, had long ago discovered the unconscious, while creative writers have not only transmuted psychoanalytic themes into art but also sought help to overcome writer's block. The term “talking cure” is now over a century old, but the equivalent “writing cure” is less well known despite the fact that novelists, poets, and playwrights have often affirmed the therapeutic benefits of writing.

The publication of Mark Bracher's The Writing Cure should help to bring needed attention to the ways in which psychoanalysis can aid composition teachers in their efforts to help writing students. Bracher is one of the leading American psychoanalytic literary critics. Professor of English and the Director of the Center for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society at Kent State University, he is the author or coeditor of several psychoanalytic literary texts as well as the founder and editor of the influential journal JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. He is thus ideally suited to formulate the first systematic study of a psychoanalytic writing pedagogy.

Bracher's thesis, boldly articulated at the beginning of his book,