Ellen Pinsky, PhD, recently asked me to comment on the value of writing and the role of literature in psychoanalytic education.
Here is my response posted on the APsA election discussion listserv.
I see writing as central to psychoanalytic education and our professional development as lifelong learners. I regard writing as an ongoing capacity-building exercise that hones our clinical skills. Writing helps us clarify our thinking; wrestle with difficult countertransference moments; deepen our appreciation of complex transference manifestations; and enhance our understanding of the patient/couple/family/community. Writing helps us to more effectively understand our own unconscious resonance with the patient's inner world.
I love the way that Thomas Ogden reminds us that analytic writing is not separate from analytic listening. A set of phrases that has informed my own thinking about analytic writing comes from Ogden's 2005 book, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, where he describes writing as a psychologically intense, reverie-linked act of waking dreaming. He writes:
- "Analytic writing is, for me, comprised of equal parts meditation and the experience of wrestling a beast to the ground ... When in a 'state of writing,' I am in a heightened state of receptivity to unconscious experience ... Like the analytic reverie state, the state of writing is a form of waking dreaming, an experience of living at the frontier of dreaming. When a writer is in such a psychological state, language itself feels infused with the color and intensity of the unconscious."
Ogden, 2005, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, New Library of Psychoanalysis, London/New York: Routledge; General Editor: Dana Birksted-Breed
These evocative phrases highlight how analytic writing is another form of disciplined curiosity about the patient and our selves in resonance with the patient.
At the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT), where I completed my analytic training, candidates write ungraded, two-page reflections on any analytic topic of their choosing, read them aloud within their cohort, and then engage in open faculty-candidate discussions where we examine themes that emerge from the papers. This two-page paper exercise (twice yearly) was introduced into the curriculum in 2004 by Jill Savege Scharff, MD, FABP, Co-founder of IPI and inaugural Chair of IIPT. Over many years, this structure has reduced writing anxiety, strengthened cohesion, and supported the development of each candidate's analytic voice and identity. For me, this experience was transformative to my development as an author. I was fortunate to co-author the article with Dr. Scharff, which describes this exercise and its developmental role in analytic training: Savege Scharff, J. & Sehon, C.M. (2020). The use of a simple writing task to enhance psychoanalytic education, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 29(4), 215–223.
We know that psychoanalysis has always drawn nourishment from myth, poetry, fiction, and cultural texts. I see reading the humanities as a way to enrich our capacity to imagine, to symbolize, to develop greater sensitivity for ambiguity, and to keep language alive as a carrier of unconscious resonance. In these various ways, literature ultimately serves patients and the field.
Returning to Ogden, he speaks directly to the value of literature in sustaining the analytic mind.
- "The pleasure to be had in reading good writing and discussing how the piece works as writing is an end in itself. At the same time, reading poetry and fiction in an analytic seminar is an experience in 'ear training' i.e., the refinement of one's capacity to be aware of and alive to the effects created by the way language is being used."
Ogden, T.H. (2006). On teaching psychoanalysis. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87(4), 1069-1085.
Psychoanalysis has always drawn from myth, poetry, fiction, and the humanities to deepen how we listen and how we think. Writing is not separate from analytic work — it is one of the ways we refine our clinical mind, our professional voice, and our sensitivity to language as a carrier of unconscious experience.
These reflections began in dialogue with colleagues, and I share them here in the same spirit: with gratitude for the conversation, and an invitation to keep thinking together about how analysts grow — in training, in practice, and in service to patients and the field.
