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.
Psychoanalysis is synonymous with the “talking cure,” the term coined by Josef Breuer's (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895/1955) celebrated patient “Fräulein Anna O.” in Studies on Hysteria to describe the magical power of language to relieve mental suffering. Anna, whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, the first patient in psychoanalysis, referred to verbal therapy as “chimney-sweeping” (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895/1955, p. 30), and the talking cure has given relief to countless men and women for over a century. Until recently, little has been known about the “writing cure.” To be sure, poets, novelists, and playwrights have acknowledged for centuries the therapeutic nature of writing, but only in the last few years have clinicians and social scientists started to investigate systematically the ways in which writing promotes health and well-being. The publication of The Writing Cure is thus a noteworthy event, and the fact that the book is published by the American Psychological Association makes it likely that it will reach the wide audience it deserves.
The Writing Cure consists of 14 chapters exploring the therapeutic implications of expressive writing. The two editors, Stephen J. Lepore and Joshua M. Smyth, are both psychology professors, as are nearly all of the 30 contributors to the volume. All but one of the essays pay tribute to the groundbreaking research of James Pennebaker, whose dozens of articles and book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (1997) initiated the scientific effort to evaluate the health benefits of self-disclosing writing. His message in Opening Up is simple: “If you can get people to talk or write about their problems, their health improves” (Pennebaker, 1997, p. 25). Pennebaker developed a protocol in which college students were asked to write about stressful personal experiences for 20 to 30 minutes each day for several days. A control group wrote for the same length of time about emotionally neutral events. In study after stu