Why I Write

Both the art of being an analyst and the art of being a father are, for me, inseparable from the art of writing. To put this the other way around, learning how to write is an integral part of how I go about trying to become a better father than my father was for me, and a better analyst than my analysts were for me. I take the three—becoming a better writer, a better father and a better analyst—as interwoven responsibilities. My father's having been a better father to me than his father was to him, and my becoming a better father than he was, seems to me to be an essential part of the way human progress is made.

I write analytic essays, literary essays, and fiction because writing in of these genres teaches me what I think and gives me a sense of who I am. I do not know what I am going to write when I sit down to write; I find out what I think in the process of writing it. Thinking in the process of writing is a principal medium in which I become more the person, the father, the analyst I would like to be: a person who aspires to (and inspires) imaginative thinking, artistic expression, critical judgment, and truthfulness and tact.

For me, the art of being an analyst involves the art of writing—the two are inseparable, each opens the door to the other. Writing is like dreaming in that it is a medium in which I think and talk to myself in ways that I cannot do in any other form. Also, like dreaming, it keeps me alive in my work as a psychoanalyst, for I find that I have to be creating something of my own (to come more fully into being myself) as I am immersed in trying to help a patient engage in creating something unique of his or her own (in coming more fully into being).

Part of the difficulty in writing well lies in the fact that writing of any sort—analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction—is autobiographical. After all, where do feelings, thoughts, and responses originate other than from oneself, one's past experiences, including one'