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At George Washington University, as at many other institutions across the country, creative writing is one option among many other courses in performing arts that students must take to satisfy a general curriculum requirement. These courses are intended, as our catalogue states, to “gain an understanding of the role of the imagination in human life,” and “insight into the interactions between materials, talent, and the imagination (12).” Although students are able to choose courses in music, art, communication, and philosophy, the most popular course chosen, by far, is the creative writing course.
Part of the appeal of the creative writing course may be that it offers students opportunities to explore their identities through writing. In the poetry course I teach, writing definitely becomes an absorbing process of self-examination with ethical as well as psychological dimensions. In my class as in most other classes, student are trained in a wide variety of literary genres from the sonnet to the elegy. Whatever particular poetic form they may imitate in both poetry and fiction, however, students write about themselves. In fact, workshop leaders' exploratory approaches to writing are often similar to and to some extent derived from psychoanalytic techniques—techniques that have become progressively integrated into our culture and into our culture of teaching.
Behn and Twichell's The Practice of Poetry is representative of many currently popular textbooks which argue that the unconscious can be and should be used by aspiring writers. The text offers writing formulas for evoking the unconscious and making use of its contents for the writing of poetry. Students are exhorted by the text to “mine the unconscious.” Sections are headed by titles such as “Ladders to the Dark: The Unconscious as Gold Mine,” “The Self and its Subjects,” and “Accidents, Chance, and the Nonrational.” The book's concern for the unconscious is not mere metaphor and word play. The text attempts to ex