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’s fantasies? Consequently, when I write, I put my private world on the page. The more I am able to do so, the more I am able to bring a situation to life in the writing. But “opening myself up” in the act of writing is not enough. I must do something original with my writing. I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark, which I create in the way I use language. And that mark is a living thing that is alive only when I am writing. When I’m not writing, I am someone preparing to write again.

The analysand and I undergo different sorts of experiencing as we are engaged in the art of psychoanalysis: our roles are different and the sorts of artfulness entailed in those roles differ. Writing, as a part of the art of psychoanalysis, does not explain why anyone does anything or feels anything; it describes, and does so in a very particular way. Experience does not come in words; it is utterly inarticulate, so one cannot write the experience one has had in an analytic session. Writing must create something of its own that reflects what happens in a session. (A transcript of an analytic session utterly fails to convey what it was like to be there in the session.)  So, as an analytic writer, I face the task and the opportunity to engage in the art of writing to create (for myself and the reader) an experience in reading that brings to life something like the experience that occurred in the session. It is extremely difficult to do this well and has required decades for me to learn how to do it better.

Analytic writing—writing that creates something of its own in the medium of language—is not simply like fiction; it is a form of fiction. The patient who is created in an analytic paper is not the patient who lies down on the analytic writer’s couch; the experience with that patient can never be transcribed. The patient in the analytic paper is a character invented by the analytic writer, just as characters are invented by a novelist. Both the characters created by the analytic writer and those created by the novelist are “based on” real people, for it is impossible for writers to create a character that is not derived, at least in part, from their experiences with themselves or with other people. Even the theories developed in analytic writing are fictions. There is no id or ego or superego; there are no beta elements or alpha elements or alpha function; there are no such things as internalization or internal objects; there is no true or false self. Analytic theory is a collection of metaphors—none of which actually exist. And these metaphors will grow old and tired, and will be replaced by other metaphors.

My principal teachers of writing have not been analytic writers, though I greatly admire Donald Winnicott’s writing and consider him to be the finest analytic writer writing in English. My principal teachers have been my university professors of writing composition and the poets, novelists, short story writers, and playwrights who have stunned me with what they are  able to do with words. I read as a writer. I notice how writers use language: how they create a narrative voice or the voice of a character that I could not have imagined, and to which I could listen forever in rapt attention; how a combination of first-person and third-person narration is made to work when it shouldn’t; the turns of phrase and neologisms that are at once natural and staggering. I am humbled by these writers, but I have no wish to imitate them. To try to write the way they do would not only be impossible, it would not be any fun. Writing, though difficult and often trying, is ultimately a pleasurable experience. It is endlessly surprising, puzzling, confounding, and fulfilling. 

I cannot imagine life without writing. One of the great losses that death will bring is no more writing. And at the same time, two of the things that make the prospect of death bearable are the joy I take in seeing my son being a better father to his children than I was to him, and my hope that both my sons’ experience with me while I found my art as a writer will help them find such a passion for themselves, which they may pass on to their children and students.

This essay is included in the collection Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of their Craft.