You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Writing Cure poses interesting and ambitious questions while at the same time presenting a view of the field of composition that both challenges and defends some of the major assumptions currently published and taught by professionals
in the field. Perhaps the most ambitious, and most appealing for those inclined toward a psychoanalytic approach to writing instruction, is Bracher's grappling with the social constructionist hegemony in composition instruction and theory. Bracher does not use the term “hegemony,” but he spends the first section of the book building up a strong argument against the powerful claim to exclusive theoretical and political correctness in the composition classroom that social constructionism has had in the past few years. At the same time, he explains and defends a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to teaching writing while, if not exactly defending expressionist teachers, at least commending the expressionist approach for coming closer to the therapeutic and meliorative aims of psychoanalytic pedagogy than social constructionists could possibly achieve.
Bracher's argument proceeds thus: He notes first that writing and psychoanalysis belong together because “a psychoanalytic perspective can offer unique and valuable insights into (a) central but often hidden forces operating in the writing process, (b) the sources of writing problems, and (c) the dynamics of writing instruction” (1). He then explains away possible objections that teachers are not analysts and should not be doing what they are not trained to do. His response to this objection is that they already are working in the realm of psychoanalysis, whether they use expressivist techniques or social constructionist approaches. He confronts the desirability of social constructionism in the teaching of writing by arguing that social constructionist classrooms can investigate areas such as date rape or even more sensitive social issues that