I began training as an analyst in the second decade of the 21st century, in my fifth decade on the planet. By that point, I was on my third or fourth (depending on how you count) career. And for the first half of that second decade of the 21st century, I had been writing prolifically, and anonymously, about subjects only incidentally related to psychoanalysis. I knew, as I began my training, that I would write as an analyst. I knew I would have to find an authorial voice. And, I knew I would find this challenging.
Any analyst who writes can divide their audience into two groups – patients, and everyone else. I was eager to write for that second group. The first group? Well, more than anything, I wanted to protect them from my writing, especially because I knew that, whatever authorial voice I might find, it almost certainly would feature some combination of self-disclosure, confession, and even exhibitionism. I knew myself well enough to know that the hubris that informs my desire to write – the sense, as a writing teacher in college told me, that “you lucky SOB’s get to read what I have to say!” – would lead me to write many things that my patients might, actually, prefer not to hear coming from my mouth.
From 1993-2001, and again, from 2008-2012, I was a patient in a classical, 4-day-a-week, on-the-couch psychoanlysis with an old-school, relatively restrained/neutral/abstinent analyst. Try though I might to learn about him, he was un-Google-able, and best I could tell, apart from his presence with me in his office, he simply didn’t exist. I aggressively sought evidence to the contrary, consulting not just Google but various finance and real estate records, academic web sites, and so on. On one level, of course, I found this frustrating; on another, though, I came to understand it as a gift. My analyst – by way of his seeming invisibility – gave me a great gift. He allowed me to conjure him in whatever form I needed him, to control him in that way (and, to be exposed to my hopes, and to my fears, about him).
I understood, when I contemplated writing as an analyst, that to write would mean to deprive my patients of this luxury, and would, necessarily, constrain what I might be prepared to write, how I might be prepared to write it. And very quickly, I was paralyzed.
The mirror at the end of the path
There’s a Buddhist story – I can’t locate it any more, but I remember learning it long ago – about a seeker who finds, at the end of his journey, a mirror: what he’d been looking for was, of course, shown to him by the mirror. I liked this story, and I started a little confidential, password-protected blog whose name was a nod to that story’s title. In that blog, I jotted down my very early attempts at finding that voice. I wrote about some of the experiences I had with patients on the psychiatric ward on which I had an internship. I wrote about some of my courses, some of my professors.
In social work school (I trained as a social worker, before I began my training as an analyst), the primary instrument my clinical professors used to evaluate and instruct me was called a “process recording.” In that context, a process recording meant something very specific. It was a three-column document: the left column contained something approximating a transcript of a clinical interaction, or session; the middle column contained my (unspoken) observations and thoughts at that moment in the interaction; and the right column contained my feelings. I didn’t know a single student who enjoyed making these process recordings – they required substantial time and effort, and necessarily, there was a performative/confessional aspect to them, as they purported to show how I work, how I think, and to provide a sort of grist for an evaluative and instructional mill.
When I began analytic training, process recordings remained the instructional instrument of choice; now, though, the right-most two columns disappeared. In my new context, all my first supervisor cared about was the transcript itself. I had always found the transcript itself the least interesting part of the process recording, and I found it even more taxing to produce this new form of process recording. In the meantime, I had chanced on a form of writing, an authorial voice, that held some promise for me: I wrote narratives, stories, about my clinical work. And I offered one of these up to my supervisor, in lieu of the rigidly structured, purely transcriptual, process recordings she preferred. [Looking back, I’m both mortified and touched by what I wrote; it’s very purple, very overwrought. It’s also raw, honest, and open.]
“No,” she told me. “This really isn’t very helpful for us. Please go back to a plain old process recording.”
I’m agnostic as to my supervisor’s wisdom on that day. Whether she was right or wrong from a pedagogical standpoint to insist on my compliance with a more-than-century-old method of instruction, her words stung. I felt a door closing to me. The Harry Chapin ballad, “Flowers are Red,” echoed in my mind. In this song, Chapin tells the story of a little boy, on his first day of school, drawing colors all over a page, and his teacher remonstrating: “Flowers are red. Green trees are green. There’s no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.” I won’t tell you the story Chapin unfolds; listen for yourself, if you like. The point is, I felt like that boy: squelched, silenced. And my clinical writing came to a screeching halt.
I squeezed out process recording after process recording, for years. Sometimes, I was “compliant,” doing my best to reconstruct transcripts by memory after sessions. Other times, I was less so, and the transcripts were more… fantastical… representing not necessarily either what had happened or even my memory of what had happened, but, rather, what I wished had happened. Most often, of course, my process recordings were an amalgam of these things. And, over time, some of them were simply transcripts, recorded (with permission) using audio or transcribed contemporaneously by my hand. No matter what form they took, though, process recordings continued to feel terrible to me to produce.
And that password-protected blog? It atrophied. Like the little boy in the Harry Chapin song, I just conformed to my teachers’ demands, and those demands didn’t leave much space for my previous way of doing things. My fantasy that I might, one day, find a clinical voice, though, didn’t die away entirely. It lay dormant. I remained vaguely aware that I harbored hopes of writing clinically some day, but I just couldn’t bring myself either to escape the bonds of the “flowers are red” admonition, or to imagine squaring the circle of writing clearly, honestly, and, at the same time, protecting my patients from obtaining knowledge about me they might prefer not to have.
An epiphany
Recently, I had an epiphany. My epiphanies feel, paradoxically, brand-new and old hat all at once: an epiphany is what I call it when I realize something I’ve always known. In this instance, I realized that I could “square the circle” I described above – I could write clinically in ways that protected my patients – by writing anonymously. Or at least, semi-anonymously. I had, long ago, created that password-protected blog. I don’t need to protect the world, though, from my words; what I need to prevent is my patients’ associating those words with me. That’s easily enough done. And so, here we are. 🙂
