One by one, students appeared, their Zoom squares popping open like tiny jack-in-the-boxes. I scanned their faces, wondering if they sensed my trepidation.
“So, this is your first analytic writing course. Welcome. We know it's strange to have classes via Zoom—hard enough in general, but especially for writing.” I paused, trying vainly to make eye contact with each of them. “But first,” I said, “how are you doing? What's it been like during this time?”
There was momentary silence, and I wondered if that had been a mistake. Too much? Too soon? Intrusive?
One of the students spoke.
“Sorry we're silent,” she said. “We didn't expect to be asked—we thought class would be just business as usual.”
Business as usual? This course began a week after the shutdown, just after the world had abruptly shifted to life lived entirely online. I'd used Zoom before with patients away for college or travel, but I had never worked the way I was now—from morning until night, my entire practice reduced to the small screen on my laptop. It was exhausting.
I was co-teaching with an analyst I knew and liked enormously, but I had half a mind to back out of teaching and debated canceling the class altogether. Could we even teach writing via Zoom? Overwhelmed, frenetic, I feared facing the candidates in the virtual classroom—candidates I'd never met in person.
But talking with my co-teacher the day before, I was buoyed by her optimism and level-headedness.
So, on Tuesday, just before 4:00, I signed in and waited for Zoom to sound the now-familiar chime. I glanced at my co-teacher but couldn't catch her eye because, well, Zoom. Even so, I felt grounded as she smiled at the group. I did the same.
Bit by bit, students shared their experiences since the stay-at-home orders. Like me, they were weary, beleaguered, and adrift in uncharted waters. Listening, I began to rethink how to craft this writing course, offer something different: a place to exhale. We told them we were interested in exploring what we refer to as “alive clinical writing.” We encouraged them to set aside analytic jargon and diagnostic formulations. “Write to discover what you know about your patients, rather than what you think we want you to know,” we invited. Then we added, “Write in your own voices. Bring us into the consulting room with you, show us your work.”
Immediately we were beset with worried questions: “What about our end-of-year reports?” “Our supervisors want a formulation. Will we learn that?”
For their first assignment, we asked them to simply write about a patient, whether a favorite, their most difficult, one they'd known for a while, or one with whom they'd recently terminated. Alternately, they could write about someone they knew, had observed, or even invented. “Bring that person to life on the page. Share details with us —what makes this person interesting? Unique? Why are you curious about them?”
They looked dubious as they signed off. Rather than a rubric for case reporting, I was hoping they'd learn to use writing as a new pathway to clinical knowledge.
My worries subsided as they began to submit their writing, rich with imagery, sophisticated, gripping and deeply alive, simmering with warmth and compassion. They sought meaning in what was happening, for their patients and themselves, during this strange, uncertain time. They grappled with understanding the pandemic and its effects on the world beyond their analytic training. They resonated with their patients' plights; they were bound together by a pervasive sense of urgency.
The meetings felt like an island of safety in my otherwise stormy week where I dealt with patients in shock, their lives disrupted. The candidates offered support, encouragement, and gracious appreciation for one another's writing. They told each other, “What I love about your writing are the details.” Or “You have such a unique style, such an engaging tone.” Or “I love the humor in this piece.” They shared all kinds of writing: personal reflections, dreams, and memories. As their writing developed, so did their sense of interconnectedness; instead of remaining in isolated boxes on the screen, the group began to feel intimate. Writing became a healing balm, a haven where they used rich language and metaphor to transform their confusion, exhaustion, and fear into uniquely moving, finely honed narrative.
We accomplished something we hadn't expected: Our Zoom writing course became a place for rejuvenation, restoration, and the growth of analytic minds.
Anne Adelman, PhD, psychoanalyst, Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Freudian Society. Co-editor, JAPA Review of Books; co-chair, New Directions in Writing. Private practice, Chevy Chase, Maryland.