Writing in Psychoanalysis

Emma Piccioli, Pier L Rossi, Antonio A Semi, Emma Piccioli, Pier L Rossi, Antonio A Semi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134894819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A beautiful and thoughtful collection of essays on reading, writing and learning, Writing and Psychoanalysis grows out of a colloquium. The results are wondrous and impact on the reader at many different levels. In the act of writing, we all discover something about what we know previously unknown to us, and we learn more about our inner world that we knew before we set pen to paper (or hand to computer). Patrick Mahony goes so far as to argue that Freud's self-analysis was essentially a "writing cure."

Writing in Psychoanalysis is the first volume in the projected Monograph Series, Psychoanalytic Issues, the Rivista di Psicoanalisi (the Journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society ) is undertaking in conjunction with Karnac Books. This series constitutes a major effort to bring about a dialogue among psychoanalysts who while ultimately bound together by a common psychoanalytic heritage nonetheless are separated in their thinking by different idioms, whether linguistic or theoretical. While featuring writers of very different idioms, this series will also present a venue to make some important Italian voices known to English speaking analysts.

CHAPTER ONE

The reveries
of a solitary scribbler

John E. Gedo

Isuspect it is the sheer volume of my psychoanalytic publications that elicited the invitation to contribute an essay to this symposium. I was fortunate enough to earn my psychoanalytic qualifications at a relatively early age, so that I have had almost four full decades of opportunity to practise the craft of writing in psychoanalysis. My career could well be characterized by the mocking bon mot once used to deprecate Edward Gibbon, “still scribbling….” How many pages have I published? (How many trees have I caused to be destroyed?) I have not kept count, but I suspect that, among living colleagues, none is guilty of greater volubility. It is not for me to claim that my output has been weighty, but it certainly occupies more than my fair share of shelf-space. Consequently, I feel justified to approach our topic from a very personal vantage point.

Nothing angers me more than overhearing detractors who dismiss my contributions because, according to them, I “know how to write”. (The implication is that this skill is an illegitimate trick through which hollow ideas are made to seem solid.) Not that I am alone in suffering such attacks: the American analyst whose work I most respect, Robert Gardner (see Gardner, 1983, 1984, 1995), is frequently put in his place by his writings being called “poetry”. I read them as cogent essays in epistemology, stated with the clarity and economy sadly lacking in most psychoanalytic texts. W. B. Yeats has reminded us that one cannot separate the dancer from the dance—neither can the writer's concepts be separated from the form in which they are communicated. Over 90 years ago, Freud rightly asserted that good writing is the consequence of clear thinking about one's subject matter (Freud, 1901b, p. 101). Nobody is born with a talent for scientific discourse.

On apprenticeship

By now, almost everyone knows the New York story about the lost Ausländer who asks an old peddler how to get to Carnegie Hall. “Son”, the wise man replies, “practice! practice! practice!” Writing is no different from playing the violin (or basketball)— the skill must be acquired by practice. The youthful Balzac threw away the manuscripts of more than half a dozen novels before he broke into print—some two thousand pages of mere rehearsal; the psychoanalytic writer can scarcely hope to master his craft with greater ease.

In this regard, the education of most psychoanalysts—by no means only those who enter the field from medicine or psychiatry—tends to be deficient, for it seldom involves much serious challenge to produce written work that is to undergo stringent criticism by qualified Judges. I have also been extremely fortunate in receiving opportunities of this challenging kind: in secondary school, by successively having to master communicating in three different languages (as my family moved in stages from Central Europe to North America); in my undergraduate years, by being offered rigorous courses in English composition, British and French literature, and more history than hard science; and even in medical school, where I was permitted to spend much of my last year writing for a students' yearbook and creating a play satirizing the faculty. It was Freud's panache as an expositor that attracted me to psychoanalysis, and I never doubted that joining the profession would permit me to continue writing.

When young people interested in becoming littérateurs ask for advice about how best to achieve this ambition, they are usually told that they should read as much good literature as they can. (Of course, it is not sufficient to read for content alone: Macbeth is not a murder mystery, nor is any of Freud's case histories merely a narration intended to highlight an individual's personal drama.) I have the impression that would-be psychoanalytic authors all too often neglect to follow worthy literary models. (Is this neglect of attentive reading particularly prevalent in North America, where television threatens to push the printed word into obsolescence? Perhaps so—but, Heute Los Angeles, Morgen die ganze Welt¹….) At any rate, my future as a prolific writer of psychoanalysis was prefigured when I matriculated at the Chicago Institute and found that I was inclined to read more psychoanalysis than anyone I encountered. For decades, I read most of the principal journals (in English) from cover to cover, as soon as they appeared. I did not find most of this material particularly valuable qua contributions to psychoanalysis, but thinking through why this was so, particularly in terms of the way the papers were organized, was enormously instructive.

The value of these exercises was soon validated by my experience as a reader of manuscripts submitted for publication to various journals, particularly the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and The Annual of Psychoanalysis. These publications use at least three readers to evaluate every manuscript and ask them to submit detailed reports that specify the reasons for their recommendations. These reports and the Editor's letter to the author about the disposition of the submission are then shared with each reader. I believe this is an excellent method for checking the reliability of the referees. I have now participated in well over a hundred evaluations performed in this manner and was gratified to discover that in the vast majority of instances the readers were in unanimous agreement. (I tend to reject more papers than my fellow referees, mostly because I value originality, in addition to the essential virtues expected by everyone. I can remember only one paper I endorsed because of its conceptual novelty that was ultimately turned down; others thought it was overly speculative.) At any rate, with practice I have gradually learned to evaluate psychoanalytic writings more and more expedltlously: nowadays, I find it possible to write reviews of most analytic books after a single reading, without bothering to take notes.

I mention this gain in efficiency because I believe it shows that with sufficient study of the writings of others, one may master the proper organization of psychoanalytic publications. Needless to say, writing a book is a more complex enterprise than is the production of an essay, so that a would-be author of monographs had best prepare by writing careful book reviews. Before I became a regular contributor to the analytic literature, I managed to get myself appointed as Book Review Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; for about five years, I regularly wrote brief reviews of some 10 volumes annually for this journal. Needless to say, to keep up this pace it was imperative to grasp the author's intention and methods quickly and to assess the adequacy of the book's structure as well as the validity of its argument. I have also learned a great deal from writing formal surveys of the entire analytic literature about certain topics (see Gedo, 1970, 1972) and from systematic reviews of the life work of certain analytic authors (see Gedo, 1968; 1973; 1981, ch. 11; 1986, ch. 3–8). I cannot claim that I have succeeded in avoiding all the pitfalls I thought my predecessors had fallen into, but I have certainly tried to do so. In summary, there are no short-cuts to writing psychoanalysis covrane il faut: it requires hard work and adequate preparation.

On quality

Of course, one may train oneself to write adequately and still produce only trivia: in this regard, writing in psychoanalysis does not differ from writing in general. Many are called, but few are chosen. In my Judgement, at least half of the published analytic literature is devoid of merit. On the basis of my editorial work for a number of Journals, I am also convinced that our publications do not overlook worthy manuscripts—on the contrary, they tend to compromise their declared standards in order to fill their allotment of space. All over the world, psychoanalytic Journals and publishing houses proliferate faster than do the scholarly/scientific capabilities of our discipline. The inevitable result is the printing of blather.

Among the numerous causes for the publication of well-written trivia, the one I would pinpoint as most prevalent is the failure of many authors to familiarize themselves with previous contributions on their subject. Of course, with the geometric expansion of our written production, the task of adequately surveying the literature has become ever harder. We have probably reached the point of needing a computerized data base to accomplish this important job thoroughly. A few psychoanalytic libraries (again, fortunately for me, including the one at the Chicago Institute) have computerized their own holdings, but none of them owns a complete set of the whole corpus of psychoanalysis, particularly of the materials published in languages other than its own. If psychoanalysis aspires to reach a literary standard comparable to that of other scholarly fields—from accounting to zoology—we must urgently establish a world-wide computer network linking all of our libraries.

It should also be stated explicitly that the failure to take into account significant prior work often results not from the difficulty of finding these references, but from a cavalier dismissal of the value of contributions by adherents of schools of thought different from the author's. The tendency to cite only those publications that stem from one's own intellectual circle has been one of the most important intermediate steps leading to the fragmentation of psychoanalysis into factions that do not communicate with each other. In recent years, I have even noted a trend to ignore ideological opponents deliberately, as a political manoeuvre to smother their potential influence. If my impression is valid, this development is an alarming departure from the psychoanalytic (and scientific) ideal to search for Truth and humbly to submit one's efforts to reach It for reasoned comparison with those of others. Of course, it has always been difficult to live up to these ideals; perhaps because of the current fashion to cast doubt on the very concept of Truth, they seem no longer to be shared by all of us. If every conviction were really determined by narcissistic considerations, as deconstructionists imply, how would psychoanalytic discourse differ from a political campaign?

At the same time, it must be admitted that various traditions within psychoanalysis have had such a long history of autochthonous development that it is scarcely feasible to correlate their respective positions on any particular issue with each other. Even if this lamentable state of affairs has not quite supervened as yet, the effort to compare one's thesis to those of contributors from an alien tradition may be more trouble than it is worth. As one example among many one could mention, let me recall a Franco-American psychoanalytic Rencontre in Paris, about a dozen years ago: the French audience was utterly bewildered by a paper by an adherent of ego psychology; the American participants were scandalized by the cavalier manner in which most French presenters attempted to support their contentions. My own presentation (Gedo, 1981, ch. 10), a clinical thesis based on developmental considerations, was perceived by an intelligent French discussant as a tyrannical effort to put a theoretical strait-jacket on the analyst's free exercise of some function I did not understand. Mamma mia!

At any rate, it is always a difficult balancing act to give proper consideration to the relevant literature without going too far afield. Cogent writings in psychoanalysis must show an awareness of the current conceptual structure of our entire intellectual domain—a standard ever more difficult to meet as a result of the centrifugal forces fracturing the field. Even if we lower our expectations and demand only thorough mastery of the author's specific psychoanalytic tradition, most of our publications fall short of seeing the sub-field in question whole. As a result, much of our literature is busy reinventing the wheel, claiming originality for pouring old wine into new bottles, and oversimplifying human behaviour by espousing some fashionable pars pro toto² fallacy. Of course, we should let every flower bloom, despite the sad fact that most plants in our garden are weeds.

On necessity and solitude

Most psychoanalysts never publish at all or, at best, write only an occasional paper; the list of writers in our ranks is surprisingly limited. (Of course, in this regard, psychoanalysis is no different from any of the other “health professions”: battling disease is not conducive to the vita contemplativa.) Our failure, thus far, to find a secure place as an academic discipline within the established university system has deprived all but a handful of exceptions among us of the opportunity to devote our professional life to scholarship. As private practitioners, we are obliged to subsidize our own scholarly activities, and most of us lack the resources to do this without impairing our standard of living. (Needless to say, the potential market for serious psychoanalytic writings is too restricted to make such scholarly work profitable.) I cannot say that I have been impoverished because I devoted fewer hours to remunerative work than my colleagues, but I have been chagrined by the stigmata of their greater prosperity, and I attempted to redress the balance by demanding higher fees than most. These are unavoidable complications, and they doubtless deflect many potential contributors from the path of writing psychoanalysis.

Even more discouraging is the solitude necessary for the task of the writer—a lack of actual human contact that psychoanalysts (whose choice of profession betrays a strong preference for dyadic relationships) may find particularly opprobrious. (For more detailed discussion of my view on the psychological vicissitudes that affect creativity, see Gedo, 1983, 1996.) To put this another way, to write psychoanalysis, one must obtain the cooperation of one's entire family. (As Anna Freud once told me, both she and her mother “devoted their lives” to make it possible for her father to produce his oeuvre.) I know several gifted colleagues who have been unwilling to extract such sacrifices from reluctant family members. To echo Yeats once again, they opted for perfection in life over perfection in work. I have never been confronted with such a painful choice, for my wife has been immersed in scholarly activities for almost as long as myself (see M. Gedo, 1980, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1994).

All in all, to write psychoanalysis requires vaulting over so many hurdles that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that this track will only be followed with perseverance by that small group of colleagues who by writing respond to an inner necessity. (In this regard, it is well to remember that there has long existed a great tradition of medical authorship, from Galen through Maimonldes and Rabelais, to Anton Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Freud, Jung, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Thomas, Oliver Sacks, and countless others. And it is possible to emulate these great predecessors simply by writing psychoanalysis….) I have the impression that the most productive authors in the psychoanalytic domain have been “writers first”—individuals who stumbled into the clinical arena more or less against the grain. Take a figure such as James Strachey, whose magnum opus was the Standard Edition in English of the entire Freudian oeuvre: this analyst was a member in good standing of the Bloomsbury group, related to such eminent littérateurs as Lytton Strachey, who, in turn, revolutionized the art of biography by infusing it with psychological insight. Or take Ernest Jones, whose massive Life of Freud and sparkling autobiography have outlasted his other works (Jones, 1953, 1957, 1959).

On genre and method

At various stages of my psychoanalytic development, I have been drawn to writing projects of very different kinds, in large part because I knew that they called upon those skills, abilities, and experiences that I had at my disposal at the time. Today, I would be utterly unable (and decidedly unwilling) to engage in the painstaking preliminary research required to produce the work on the intellectual history of psychoanalysis that was my stock-in-trade as a psychoanalytic author during the early years of my writing career. (I collected most of these papers in a volume co-edited by Pollock—Gedo & Pollock, 1976, ch. 1, 3–5, 7–8, 11–12, 15.) Those labours are best performed by persons with more energy and ambition than I am now able to command—not to speak of the physical demands of long hours of attentive reading, note-taking, ...