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1  the healing effects of writing about pain Literature and Psychoanalysis 19 Recalling periods of inner turbulence, plummeting into black moods can be a disquieting, if not distressing, experience. The mind, as Milton observed, “is its own place.” But, if biographer Leon Edel is right, pain can also be a powerful catalyst for art: “Within the harmony and beauty of most transcendent art works, I see a particular sadness . . . but it is a sadness that becomes a generating motor, a link in the chain of power that makes the artist persist, even when he has lived an experience, to transform it within his medium.”1 Writing can perhaps help to transform intense psychological pain into a discursive art form that has significance for others and serves to aid or abet their own emotional trials. In recent years, psychoanalytic pedagogy in writing institutions has furthered the effort to use writing as a means of confronting , as Mark Bracher writes, our “deepest, unconscious desires and gratifications ” while cultivating, through self-knowledge, a means of intervening in social problems caused by intolerance and prejudice.2 The authors I discuss in this book have used their writing as a therapeutic outlet, although that may not have been their intention. Out of a sense of personal tragedy or conflict, these writers have sought a literary representation that would help them to comprehend better their histories from a present perspective. They share a belief in the therapeutic use of “voice” as a means of confessing and confronting present feelings of shame, guilt, loss, grief, or anger. And they deploy the narrative strategy of voice to use human suffering in the hopes of better comprehending it. Writing is more than a defense—an asylum or refuge into which one can withdraw—it is also an armor one puts on to do battle. Coming to voice is not as simple as it sounds; and it is not the same as using voice, vocalizing, or even signifying. Voice, in both the psychoanalytic and literary encounter, is not only a means of expressing one’s pain, but it is also a means of repeating painful experiences that cry out for understanding. Freud’s observation , that an individual who cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him or her is obliged to repeat the ordeal as a contemporary event, rather than remembering it as something that belongs exclusively to 20 the past, helps to explain in part why painful experiences are often dramatized in confessional art. The struggle to remember in order to alleviate the strain of always having to forget is toilsome for both the patient and the writer. For each, language is often a labor of unburying the buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny a traumatic experience is the conviction that the denial does not work. As Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery: “Ghosts come back to haunt. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for the restoration of social order and the healing of individual victims.”3 Yet, in the protracted effort to unearth what is hidden, we often experience our psychic pain as a cry of protest against what or who violated our sense of safety. An anguished voice remits from a deep and primary source that is not ours, but is, at the same time, indistinguishable from our own. How can that be? How does wood burn without becoming fire? How can the voice within ourselves, the voice of memory or literary evocation, be different and the same as ourselves ? Certainly the emphasis on pain and expressing pain connects the writer to the work in important ways. For these writers, particularly, signification is not just about manipulating language into a poetic or discursive form; it is about how we suffer and how we seek not to suffer. It is about mitigating pain that cries out across the years for condolence. Therefore, when I use the verb to come to or to approach voice, I am suggesting that already present within a poem or narrative is a language to be embodied by the suffering self. I am also suggesting that giving voice to what is not, or will not be, easily uttered is an arduous and sometimes agonizing process. Speaking the unspeakable, unlocking the door, and opening the box are all modes of self-disclosure and self-acceptance, as well as confession. As Freud knew, confession is not the only rhetorical use of voice in...

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