“Remember, Billie, you write your own story.” I heard my dying grandmother telling me that I could be the master of my own destiny. I marveled at her wisdom. How could her shtetl upbringing have produced someone so modern? With her injunction nudging me forward, I decided that I, then a dance therapist, could become a doctor (of philosophy in clinical psychology). Only many years later did I realize that her words could be taken more literally. So taken had I been with her metaphor that I completely missed the obvious: I could write my own story.
There was a problem. I had always expressed myself through choral song and modern dance. These modes of expression required harmonizing with other voices, playing off others' energy, or moving in and out of the currents of group movement in choreographed fashion. I saw professional writing as something “other.” I imagined that in using a singular voice to opine on controversial topics to an audience of relatively unknown people, I would feel too exposed to criticism. However, I had always kept a journal and I knew how to write a competent academic paper, so I accepted the challenge.
Once I completed my training, started my own family, and began my private practice, I prepared to write by taking careful clinical process notes, but was certain anything I wrote would be so imperfect it would be rejected out of hand. I began cautiously by participating in online psychoanalytic colloquia. Those short encounters were extremely useful for learning to listen to the chorus of other voices and gauging the controversies in the field. I came away from those meetings with a desire to be as conversant with the written word as I once was with more embodied expression.
If I were to write a truly psychoanalytic paper, I would need to acquire greater skill. My dissertation had won an award from the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) for its contribution to psychoanalysis, but writing it was more about twisting statistics into plodding prose than about creating images that pranced off the page. The project I hoped to describe was my consultation to Thinc, the lead exhibition designer for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. The firm wanted my help with memorializing and organizing in space and time the various narratives required to tell the story to a diverse audience of visitors, many of whom might still carry trauma from their experience of that day.
Billie A. Pivnick, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program and New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Writing, and consulting psychologist to Thinc Design, the National September 11 Memorial Museum.
Although in the past I had started many papers, I usually tucked away what I created, fearing they were unreadable. Not incidentally, my crabby internal audience sounded a lot like a certain older female figure who greeted my first foray into serious professional authorship, a paper that appeared in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, with the words, “If it were written in English, it would be a real seller.” When I could take that critique with mere bemusement, I was ready to ask for assistance. I chose the New Directions Program for Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.
The first assignment of my first year was a two-page paper on play. As a Columbia professor of child therapy, I wrote the least playful paper on the topic probably ever written, complete with thesis statement, topic sentences, and three footnotes. I thought I was brilliant for having included so much so efficiently in so little space. Looking back, I can laugh at the preposterousness of what I had turned in, but, at the time, I was shocked to discover that my writing instructors wanted me to rewrite it from scratch—overnight.
By joining the interdisciplinary community of writer-analysts provided by New Directions, writing came to feel more like group play than solitary pastime.
Despite my unhappiness, I trusted their advice. This program was unique: Each writing group was co-led by a professional writer and a psychoanalyst. I discovered the students were all experienced analysts, therapists, writers, or academics. From all over the country we converged on Washington D.C. three weekends a year to read, listen, think, and write about a specific topic. After reading and listening to analyst-writers who were themselves experts on themes including “Trauma,” “Writing a Life,” “Queering the Couch,” “Home,” and “Revenge and Forgiveness,” we also had to pen short papers on those subjects. These and personally chosen longer papers were critiqued in writing craft classes, yearlong project groups, and three yearlong project groups each weekend. We stayed together at the same little hotel; we often ate our meals together; those so inclined also enjoyed drinks together. In the winters and summers we could participate in weeklong writing retreats, devoted just to craft and completing projects for publication, while being advised by the professional writing staff.
Grace Paley, the short story writer, once confided that she learned to write in the company of others. When I read that, I imagined she had experienced the sort of joy I felt in the New Directions community, the opposite of the pinched and hopeless emotion I faced at my solitary desk, writing something that would be read by an audience I imagined as uncomprehending or contemptuous. I discovered over the course of the three years that in place of my scowling inner audience, a secret sea of smiling faces greeted me.
By then, I had written a dozen clinical or personal essays, many of them of publishable quality. Before New Directions I had written one paper per decade. New Directions helped me in three years to write not only the 12 required papers but also 13 new published or presented papers. The American Psychological Association, the New York Psychological Association, the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and several analytic book editors all accepted my offerings. One chosen was “What the Living Did: September 11th and its Aftermath,” my chapter in Anne Adelman's and Kerry Malawista's The Therapist in Mourning: From the Faraway Nearby.
Given my own experience, it came as no surprise when I read in a March 2012 New York Times Magazine article (Steve Almond's “Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise”) that many now seek solutions to their psychological distress in writing programs rather than psychoanalysis. Although I initially doubted such experience could be as useful as a unique relationship in the special conditions of an analytic consulting room, I had learned that in writing programs of our own, we psychoanalysts and psychotherapists could participate in thriving groups characterized by a special kind of written engagement that is a form of applied psychoanalysis. Furthermore, these groups could enhance an individual analysis much as a chorus amplifies or provides contrast to a soloist.
Thomas Ogden, in a 2005 International Journal of Psychoanalysis article on the subject, has claimed that psychoanalytic writing is its own literary form, involving “the conjunction of an interpretation and a work of art.” Although analytic experience is not apprehended in words, it must be translated into imaginative verbal form to convey the “music” as well as the description of the clinical encounter to readers: We must become fiction writers if we are to tell the truth. Furthermore, the psychoanalytic writer, like a vocalist chanting a canon, has to enter a conversation marked by shifting, repeating, and sometimes discordant lines of thinking. If writing is re-envisioned as a group activity through which an individual contributes to something larger than him- or herself, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in counterpoint, improving it may call for group intervention.
In her 2012 ethnographic study of the psychoanalytic writing students in New Directions (“Writing with an Other: The Essay as Interpersonalized Fantasy,” which can be found in Other/Wise: Online Journal of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education), Sandie Friedman reported that a writer's experience of reshaping his or her internal “other” through interpersonal fantasy was crucial to his/her ability to translate emotionally based memories into the sensate building blocks of lively narrative. Just as an analytic pair created what Ogden calls an “Analytic Third,” so too did this New Directions graduate internalize what Friedman terms an “Essayist Third,” consisting of an evolving self partnered with this more receptive audience, and expressed in a transformed voice. The community's empathic appreciation of my writing efforts also created a sense of safety that diminished the risk of trying something new or not yet well formulated.
My diffidence about writing professionally stemmed neither from lack of support nor a dearth of ideas. To become an effective writer, I needed a conversational context, a culture of intersubjective psychoanalytic discourse that enabled what linguists call thinking to speak and, reciprocally, writing with receptive others in mind in order to think. By joining the interdisciplinary community of writer-analysts provided by New Directions, writing came to feel more like group play than solitary pastime.
At my graduation one of us began to intone “Pomp and Circumstance” while we tromped up for our certificates. The audience of other students joined in, too, while we matched our footsteps to their downbeats. I am sure you can hear the music now if you listen hard enough. We laughed and cried at the poignancy of the graduation speeches, one written from the point of view of an analyst's tissue box. As I listened to our hummed graduation march, I realized that I had finally learned to write as naturally as I once sang and danced.