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Chapter 10 Using the Psychoanalytic Process in Creative Writing Classes
- State University of New York Press
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10 Using the Psychoanalytic Process IN Creative writing classes 177 Part of the appeal of the creative writing course may be that it offers students opportunities to explore their identities through writing. In the poetry course I teach, writing definitely becomes an absorbing process of selfexamination with ethical as well as psychological dimensions. In my class as in most other classes, students are trained in a wide variety of literary genres from the sonnet to the elegy. Whatever particular poetic form they may imitate in both poetry and fiction, however, students write about themselves. In fact, workshop leaders’ exploratory approaches to writing are often similar to and to some extent derived from psychoanalytic techniques —techniques that have become progressively integrated into our culture and into our culture of teaching. Behn and Twitchell’s The Practice of Poetry is one of many currently popular textbooks that argue that the unconscious can be and should be used by aspiring writers. The text offers writing formulas for evoking the unconscious and making use of its contents for the writing of poetry. Students are exhorted by the text to “mine the unconscious.”1 Sections are headed by titles such as, “Ladders to the Dark: The Unconscious as Gold Mine,” “The Self and Its Subjects,” and “Accidents, Chance, and the Nonrational.” The book’s concern for the unconscious is not mere metaphor and word play. The text attempts to examine seriously psychic processes, and each chapter of the book is thematically tied to the discovery of some layer or dimension of the unconscious. In an opening exercise titled “Translations of Word to Image,” students are directed to associate an abstract concept with a concrete image through free association. For example, the student writes the concept the “self” and then, by a process of association, links the word “freedom” to an image of a brussels sprout.2 After some delay and reflection, the student is then asked to reconstruct the unconscious process that might have brought the terms together. The more recondite the association, the wider the gap between the concept and self-representation , and the more unique to the writer’s imagination. In this man- 178 ner, the contents of the unconscious are retrieved as essential artifacts for constructing poems. The Practice of Poetry seeks to teach students to write poems, but the use of the unconscious in poetry workshops often has therapeutic effects as well. In my experience as a teacher of creative writing, students find the process of writing poetry analogous to the process of therapy. Both going to therapy and writing poetry are forms of confession . Both psychoanalysis and confessional poetry provide a place in which subjects can vent conflictual feelings and ideas in the presence of a reflective and quizzical other. (Whether it be analyst or reader, this other also comes to embody an observing aspect of the self.) Both psychoanalysis and confessional poetry are “talking cures”—as the private content of the dramatic monologue reveals—texts of self-division and self-disclosure. In both processes, the subject, through talking, undergoes revision. Both poet and patient use language as a mode of revising the self, of vocalizing a new self into being. What does this mean? In writing poetry , the writer, through conscious intention, creates a message. Slowly, however , through a process of revision, the writer discovers in her own message another message and another previously unknown self, one perhaps trapped in the past, one speaking with striking emphasis, but not in the writer’s own familiar self-consciousness. Poets, like patients, learn to accept and at times sacrifice their fantasies to mold or configure better a personal or social message in an aesthetic form. In writing poetry, critical distance from an expressed message allows the writer to become a witness and therefore to confront her own increasingly emotional self-dramatization. Although Freud considered the creative writer to be susceptible to neurotic syndromes, artistic control, as Jeffrey Berman quotes Lionel Trilling as saying, “is antithetical to neurosis.”3 Art allows the artist to recreate distressing experiences to gain control over them. This process inevitably begins as students start to write. When writing a poem, students do not just tell the story of their lives, they typically confess to a story they do not want to tell. In following an unconscious logic of expression, students become aware of their own matrices of fantasy and recollection, and they expose secrets they had long concealed or repressed. Often they have the courage to “say...