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This relatively short study, which takes as its point of departure the familiar notion of writer's block, is timely, thorough, and could not have been written by anyone else. In other words, as a teacher of writing, as an analytically trained therapist, and as an accomplished poet, Susan Kolodny is admirably suited to the task. In fact, she is additionally qualified in having suffered through the condition her multifaceted study explores:
I wrote this book as a way of grappling with questions which had long plagued me. Why is creative work so difficult? Why, when we've made time to write, do we struggle with a sudden temptation to do laundry? Why are there poems or stories, or for that matter, dissertations and professional papers, that seem tenaciously to resist us, or present themselves as if the oracle were speaking, then stubbornly defy our attempts at revision? Why is there writer's block? (p. xiv)
And why, she continues, do artists in other media encounter similar difficulties?
Although in later sections she explores a host of quasi-external factors that impact, often deleteriously, on writers' lives, such as the ambivalence with which they are treated, her central focus is on “difficulties from within” (p. xiv). To a degree, such obstacles go with the territory:
That which confronts us with charged emotional material and so mobilizes our anxiety in response is inevitably difficult. Tension must build
Page 900within the artist if creative work is to be done, and a need to face that tension or anxiety, to take on that difficulty, can help to motivate creative work, while the anxiety, transmuted, is often one source of the work's power, (p. xiv)
Problems arise when the inherent difficulties are “compounded by internal conflicts or inhibitions” (p. xiv). Quoting T. S. Eliot, she notes that both analytic and creative work are “raid(s) on the inarticulate” (p. xiv). Bodi are affected by anxiety as danger signal as well as by various defenses or resistances geared to ward off