Writing as Forgetting

In writing, we forget. It is seldom our intent, yet the act of writing both frees us to forget and tricks us into believing we have captured the past in unalterable form. Plato in recounting the myth of Theuth, God of Writing, in the Phaedrus notes that writing: “will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” I first read of this idea in Jonathan Lear's Freud and it has left me unsettled ever since, in the way that all worthy ideas do.

Yet this emphasis on writing as forgetting paradoxically supports the argument that writing about psychoanalytic case material is an essential part of thinking psychoanalytically. The key features of habitual thinking are, of course, present in all forms of writing and many an ego function is necessarily drawn upon to organize material, to give name to experience, to sound a tone of voice and to choose the form of the tale.

However, psychoanalytic treatment requires more than reconstructing the past and boxing it into a comprehensible form as a static story. Analytic work at its fullest opens out our internal world and brings an unconscious vitality to our lived experience. In what slips past the grip on our pen—the unvoiced, the rethought, the misconstrued and the forgotten – there as writers we are closest to experiencing the unconscious, and not simply “writing about it.”

And like an analytic hour, the process of writing is contained within a frame: one of pages and structured words. This frame provides a shared space for exploration via reading with others, which in turn offers up the promise of further vitalizing unconscious experience; an experience that can be had anew and not merely recalled, one that can be savored and explored. I teach a class on writing in our institute for first year students, and most years I share the opening paragraphs from one of my own case reports. Every year, without fail, I am delighted to hear students react in ways I had not considered and yet evoke something familiar about the treatment, an impression that had until then only lingered on the fringes of awareness.

An example is how the students might respond to a specific phrase I use to describe my patient walking into the office: “the careful way he thread his path to my office,” due in part to his impaired vision. In reading it closely, some students might wonder about the inclusion of “careful” – does his physical movement reflect aspects of his defended, obsessive manner of engagement? Or his concern to pass unnoticed, disturbing nothing in his wake? Or a fear of falling, with or without hope that I might catch his fall? Or as an embodied constriction of the anger he fears he will unloose upon the world around him?

As I sit here writing now, creating possibilities of how I might be read, the last question unfurls a fresh fantasy within me (even alone I have an audience who are forever reading with me). My thoughts loop around the word “thread” and I see a rising Minotaur, a darkened path through the labyrinth; primary process now transmuting verbs to nouns with the action of “threading carefully” bound up with Ariadne's gift of thread guiding us back to safety.

These are not specific phrases or allusions I remember coming up in the treatment; my aim in writing and teaching writing is not to engage in a replicative process but rather a creative one. In true analytic fashion, if I were to use this example in class, the content would not be the focus but rather the process, or experience, of being caught up together; held safe by Ariadne's thread so as to allow us as reader-writers to wander, become lost and then found again. An analytic moment, not remembered as the re-membering or reconstruction of the past, but as experience re-encountered. In writing, we forget. In reading and being read, we discover and are discovered.