Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing

Notes

259 Preface 1. Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, 214. 2. Anderson and MacCurdy, eds., Writing and Healing toward an Informed Practice, 2. 3. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 73–73. In his chapter “The Eye and the Gaze,” Lacan follows Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the gaze is presented to us in the form of a strange contingency, but adds that what we find on the horizon of our experience is namely the lack that constitutes castration anxiety. 4. Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle, 100–112. 5. Ibid., 111. Introduction 1. Hoffman, “Sustained by Fiction.” 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 111. 6. C. Frost, “Self-Pity,” 162–175. 7. C. Frost, “Self-Pity,” 173. 8. Bracher, Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change, 172. 9. C. Frost, “Self-Pity,” 173. 10. Ibid., as quoted by Frost, 167–169. 11. C. Frost, 174. 12. Keats, “Letters, in Gittings, 37.
notes 260 13. Ibid., “Ode to a Nightingale,” Perkins, 1184. 14. Hoffman, “Sustained by Fiction.” 15. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 1184. 16. Cited in Mayer, “Scribbling My Way,” 29. 17. As quoted by Orr, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” 34. 18. Ibid., 36. 19. Alcorn, Changing the Subject. Alcorn’s groundbreaking work on psychoanalysis , discourse, and literary and cultural criticism has had far-reaching influence on contemporary commentary about pedagogy and its social ramifications and potential for change. See bibliographical information on Alcorn’s other works, such as Narcissism and the Literary Libido and “Changing the Subject of Postmodern Theory” in Rhetoric Review. 20. The Letters of John Keats, 61. 21. DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing, 5. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Anderson and MacCurdy, eds. Writing and Healing, 7. 24. Des Pres, The Survivor, 41. Des Pres explores the individual and universal consequences of political terror in which victims who survive are compelled to give testimony to what they witnessed. Des Pres, like Wiesel, is concerned with the moral question of what we can learn from a history of atrocity and what can be done to make certain that collective crimes of such magnitude in a civilized world will not happen again. 25. Ibid. Chapter 1. The Healing Effects of Writing about Pain 1. Jamison, Touched with Fire, 121. Precise reference: Leon Edel, “The Madness of Art,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 132 (1975):1005–1012, quote on p.1008. 2. Bracher, The Writing Cure, 213–214. 3. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p.1. Herman’s book is the groundbreaking study, a classic in the field of psychology, bridging the traumatic effects suffered by war veterans and victims of sexual abuse. Herman’s book is meticulously documented in clinical experience, but also shows rare and luminous insights into the parallel worlds of politics and the domicile, maintaining a feminist perspective on what should be done in the aftermath of trauma for victims who have undergone severe harm brought on by terror and what can be done to help them to recover. Herman’s use of narrative as a therapeutic strategy for coping with patient’s self-blame and self-recrimination is essential to my bringing together writing as a “curative” form of retrieving and reconciling the past. Signifying Pain 261 4. Kenyon, Otherwise, 188. Although I do not go in depth into the subject, Kenyon’s courageous struggle with manic depressive illness is the focus of many of her most celebrated poems. It forms the trajectory of her life of self-examination, and her scrutiny of the suffering that so many have identified with, for whom her writing has made it, in that camaraderie, easier to bear. 5. Bogan, Journey around My Room, 70. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Berman, introduction to Marshall Alcorn’s Narcissism and the Literary Libido, ii. 9. Berman’s The Talking Cure is crucial to this study not only for its contribution to literary representations but its careful analysis of how psychoanalysis can help students in the writing classroom: to improve their writing while gaining valuable insights into their experience, past and present. He has pioneered the therapeutic use of “diary” writing in composition classrooms and, to much acclaim, has furthered our understanding of how suicide has been so romanticized in literature and culture that it poses a danger to impressionable students, and therefore must be demythologized as a grandiose act to prevent idealizations of suicides that may prove both catastrophic and irreversible. 10. Clarke, In the Ward, 37. 11. Ibid. 12. Lowell, Life Studies...