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In her two-person drama “The Unexpected Man,” Yasmina Reza’s (1998) protagonist, a renowned author, says, “Did I write what I wanted to write? No, never. I wrote what I was capable of writing, not what I wanted to.”
Initially, I thought, “That’s exactly my experience!” How wonderful it felt to see those words written by an acclaimed playwright! Then I realized that phrase may resonate with many, if not all, of us who have attempted writing, and certainly clinical writing.
Rachel Altstein’s paper, for which she received NIP’s Educators’ Award in 2013, speaks to those of us who have written about our patients and to potential and frustrated authors for whom expressive words are so hard to find and assemble on the page. The Unexpected Man’s experience of writing is not so different from our own—in working with patients or writing about them; for how different are the vagaries of the writing process from those of analysis itself? To be sure, there are many differences, but there are profound similarities as well to be found between writing and our “impossible” profession (Malcolm, 1980). A patient of mine, a fiction writer who has published many novels, once characterized therapy as “novelistic.”
Wilma Bucci’s (1997) multicode theory, grounded in analysis, cognitive science, and neuroscience, helps to explain some of our plight. Our inner knowing is very much a subsymbolic, right-hemispheric, intuitive affair, as is so much of how we live and what we learn—including with and from our patients in therapy. The symbolizing left brain, the hemisphere that dominates in creating writing is well suited to mastering the challenges of the external world; however, it is sadly inept at translating inner experience—our inner knowing. And so can we ever write exactly what we really “wanted” to? Can our words, even of self-description, ever be more than approximations? Or must we always, as I have entitled an article of mine, remain in part “strangers to ourselves” (Frank, 2012), especi