Teaching Writing: Psychoanalysis and Writing Instruction: Beyond “Classroom as Therapy”?

It was in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student, that I first met a teacher who was accused of running his classes “like therapy sessions.” S.'s classes always seemed to be at night; he would turn off the institutional florescent lights, illuminating the classroom instead with soft, yellow lamps from home. Students would help move all the chairs and desks out of the room, S. would lay down a rug, and everyone would sit cross-legged on the floor, in a circle. People would freewrite, and read their writing aloud. Sometimes they would cry. I remember sitting in, curious, having taught my own freshman composition classses nothing but formal argumentation, florescent lights blaring. No one ever cried in my class, and S.'s class seemed both dangerous and deeply appealing. His students were very much engaged by their own writing; it seemed a part of their lives, and not, as my students' writing usually seemed to be, simply a task they had to get through to pass a course.

In spite of the fact that I was deeply intrigued by S.'s teaching philosophy, however, I was uncomfortable with the idea of it. Was delving into emotions appropriate in a required class at a large, anonymous university? Did S. force