On Analytic Writing: An Introduction

What is the value of words? Words can be concrete, and they can be symbolic. They can be pulled from the unconscious, and pull back to the unconscious. Words resonate; they set up blockades. They can be direct – and often are not. How do words mean?

So, what is the value of analytic writing? And what kind of analytic writing is to be valued?

Each of the five authors of brief essays on analytic writing published here grapples with the uses and process of writing as a means of exploring their work with patients. Despite vibrant differences in tone and approach, I am drawn to some common themes: Form. Time. Attention.

To extrapolate first from Anne Adelman's essay, writing well is not “business as usual.” Moving on to Harry Polkinhorn's contribution, to write, and to do it well, is to be terrified by one's “angel.” Mary Landy tells of the “light-bulb moment” in which she found her analytic voice, while Mark Moore speaks of writing that plunges us to depths, then guides us back to safety. And Ellen Pinsky, reflecting on her experience as a middle school English teacher, shows the fireworks set off in the minds of her young students as they explore and discover story and form.

I suggest that the form of each is unique – a synergy between the particular analyst and the particular patient – each of whom is unique. The form is found through attention. Simone Weil comes to mind. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says,

Attention [for Weil]… suggests that knowing the reality of the world is less an individual achievement or attainment of mastery and more a gift of grace—openness to what cannot be predicted and to what often takes us by surprise.

“Attention” for Weil is intimately connected to her definition of love: “belief in the existence of other human beings as such.” In her words in Waiting for God:

Attention is creative. But at the moment it is engaged it is a renunciation… The man accepts to be diminished by concentration on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him.

And so, for each of these writers there is a tension between finding one's voice and finding the patient.

That fruitful tension occurs when, as Landy states, “I am ready.” For Polkinhorn, it occurs “between memory and desire,” past and future, in a form of “waiting” in Weil's terms. Moore speaks of it occurring when “what slips past the grip on our pen…[when] we are closest to experiencing the unconscious, and not simply ‘writing about it.’” Adelman finds “rejuvenation and restoration.” Pinsky suggests, in the discovery of the form each piece of writing takes, one “remembers and says good-bye.”

There are many riches layered into our authors' essays. My tangential take, when my slip of mind brought in Sim-one Weil, at best indicates how many paths there are as we explore the uses and meanings of analytic writing.

One thing we do know: Writing well is certainly not business as usual.