Chapter 2

Expanding the psyche¹ through the learning process

What does transformative learning look like, then, in the experience of students of the CWPD programme? The most striking feature of the material from Group 1 is the experience of opening-up to a less cognitively-driven, more spontaneous, and bodily-felt approach to learning or writing. One respondent notes a shift away from ‘a narrow attitude towards learning … as an intellectual and academic exercise’ towards a more ‘fragile process of exploring and finding one's self/voice in writing … a subtle, quiet process at times [whose] rewards are not be found in grades or marks’. This shift away from ‘narrow’ thinking is highlighted by another respondent: ‘I now have a much broader perception of education and my learning is continually updated by my surroundings and circumstances’. This implies a greater openness to contingency for learning, which is echoed by another respondent who learns the value of loosening cognitive control: ‘a type of passivity [as a learner] is empowering and not impotent’. This is implied too in another comment: ‘I know more than I think I do’. These responses indicate an increased sense of inner space for thinking, a willingness to relax cognitive control and be open to a kind of learning that comes through bodily-felt and emotional experience rather than just through conscious reason. It involves a greater bodily awareness of, or ability to reflect feelingly on, one's own learning processes.

This sense of greater openness and ability to ‘think feelingly’ is echoed in respondents' comments about changes in their writing process. Again there is an opening-up to the necessary contingency of creativity and a greater understanding of writing as a process that needs space and trust: ‘I learned to write through my blocks, to use freewriting to loosen my pen and to move on and process rather than pre-emptively censoring and scrubbing ideas’. There is increased openness to the bodily or emotional nature of the writing process: ‘I developed a kind of “ear” for what I wanted to say’, one person says; and another that ‘most of my writing is about expressing some feeling or mood, even if I don't think it is going to be’. Another finds herself needing to write beyond the ‘brick-like coastline’ of ‘words/self/other’ and to enter more fully into the felt nature of writing by ‘watercolour[ing] my expressions somehow’. Here familiar but apparently rigid (‘brick-like’) conceptualisations are challenged to give way to a more diffuse self-experience in the writing process.

With this loosening of control comes, for some people, a greater flexibility in the writing process. One says: ‘What I called “free” before wasn't really and I now recognise different levels of “free”’. Another notices that relinquishing control in the early stages of writing through ‘listening to my own voice as I write’, paradoxically gives her ‘more control over the way [the piece] finally reads’. This is echoed by others. One has developed: ‘The ability now to “go with the flow” and then stand back and appraise my writing critically’. This increased ability to be one's own critic or arbiter of whether the writing is good or bad is a significant theme, as is the understanding of blocks to, or difficulties with, the writing process and the ability to ‘deal gently with them’. For these respondents a more flexible but simultaneously more robust relationship with their writing has come into being.

For many respondents the shift towards a more spontaneous and bodily-felt self-experience brings new and more authentic conceptualisations of themselves as learners or writers. One expresses this as opening-up to a more complex learning self: ‘I began to understand that I am both a creative and an analytical thinker and that it is possible to find ways of integrating these two potentially conflicting aspects of my self’. For another the opening-up is to a more authentic and agentic sense of self as a learner beyond existing self-concepts: ‘I realised that I desperately wanted to prove that I am as academically high-achieving as I believe my father always wanted me to be and that it is impossible for me to do this’. But finding this more authentic sense of self is also quite challenging. It involves engaging with ‘dark and dangerous territory’ within herself, which is sometimes ‘enlightening and inspiring’ but can also be ‘shocking and scary … working against the creative impulse’ (see Chapter 11).

Loosening cognitive control

A similar but much more detailed picture of this shift to a more spontaneous, flexible, and bodily-felt but sometimes less comfortable experience of learning and being is provided by Group 2 students' material. An increase in cognitive flexibility is visible in many students' ability to tolerate a more spontaneous, relaxed, and intuitive writing or learning process. Here is Tess talking about the writing of her Independent Study dissertation at the end of Year 2:

the way in which I've written this has been much more intuitive than how I've written things before and I've just let go a lot more. And now I've just sort of, even th ough I've done a lot of research, it's almost like I've kind of stuffed my head full of research and then just kind of let it cook in my head somehow and then just go and … I did lots of freewriting, I'd sit down and just let it all come out and it would come out in the most strange ways sometimes ….

Her metaphor of writing as cooking implies sufficient confidence to set the process in motion and then distance herself from it – to let it go, as she puts it – and to trust that she will be able to work with whatever results, even if it is not what she expects. There is no sense here that letting go means abdicating responsibility for the process: whilst she has loosened her tight control over it, she is still generally in charge. This is against a background of imposing strict control on her writing at the start of the programme.

Rhiannon, a practised science writer, highlights a similar experience at the end of Year 1:

I am less attached to my writing, it holds less emotional relevance. At the beginning of the academic year I would pore over every word, edit profusely, and feel very emotionally attached to the written work. I am now managing to write more fluently, with far less editing, which leaves potential for my written output to increase.

Again, loosening control and gaining distance on the writing are key features. The reference to decreased emotional relevance of the writing indicates that control was serving an important function (see below). Former marketing executive Jill also uses the metaphor of cooking to describe her less controlling approach to learning:

I'm increasingly amazed by how much learning is like cooking. I take a pinch from a newspaper article, 250 g of discussions with a friend, a shake of writing exercises and mix them up in my journal, dredge them with old ideas and a sprinkling of new insights and voilá … I've produced a product. Never saw it like that before.

Here again it is the newfound freedom of the process that is striking, freedom to select and combine the ingredients spontaneously, as well as the obvious confidence that such a process requires. For Claire, a non-fiction writer, loosening control leads to a similar spontaneity for writing and learning. In Year 2 she notices herself getting:

very excited by the routes that learning takes you – one path leading to another, surprises and synchronicities. I'm finding that I'm taking up lots of opportunities to learn, especially about writing. I'm seeing plays I wouldn't usually, buying music and books I wouldn't usually and generally stretching. Even striking up conversations with strangers, listening to how they speak and the way they use language. I feel a little like a magpie at the moment, dipping into and taking my pick of just about everything, trying to synthesise…. It feels scatty and blurred at times but it does suit me ….

The metaphor of the magpie captures very well this new, more spontaneous experience: she is allowing her mind to roam around and choose whatever pleases it, even though this feels a little unnerving at times.

Developing cognitive flexibility means for some people being able to take more risks with writing. Harriet, a strong academic writer who has struggled to give her creative side more space, finds herself deciding:

to do the minimum essay [for Independent Study] and tak[ing] the risk of putting more of the writing in, I suppose. I think two years ago I wouldn't have done that. I would have assumed that I couldn't risk that much on [creative] writing. So it's given me a different way of, yes another mode of thinking I suppose….

Stella, a manager in the care sector, who begins the MA feeling very unconfident about engaging in creative writing, feels similarly strong enough by Year 2 to throw caution to the wind and experiment with a new genre for her Writing Practice project: ‘[The course] encouraged me to say what the hell, I'll write a play as that's what I want to do, even if it turns out not to be that good!’ Her reference to a piece of work not being as good as she would like needs to be seen in the context of her previous feelings of inadequacy as a learner that she says stem from her ‘struggle with a cold, unaffectionate mother, whose love was conditional on my academic success’. Loosening the compulsion to live up to high academic or literary expectations, real or imagined, is a significant theme for Group 2 students generally and often appears as a realisation that they are allowed to get things wrong. Claudia, a single mother of three returning to study after a gap, learns that: ‘I'm allowed to make mistakes. I'm allowed to change my mind. I don't suffer from that crushing shame or that need to be right like I used to’. Letting go of the need to get things right is also part of Ruth's learning:

I learnt that going wrong is part of going right! There were times when I thought I would never get beyond the second chapter, and I wrote and rewrote lots of versions. Eventually the right answer comes along, but I had to learn that writing isn't necessarily a linear process where one word comes after another, and to trust that process of keeping going when you really feel like throwing in the towel.

Claire, who identifies the main factor in starting to overcome her blocks to creative writing as ‘learning to let go of what might be right or wrong, good or bad, and just write’, elsewhere captures this metaphorically as guarding against ‘black and white thinking styles’. She goes on to say that practising this: ‘can help to develop flexibility of thought which can in turn, I would argue, lead to healing or at least a healing effect across any number of aspects of life. This is new learning for me’. When I press for clarity about this ‘healing effect’ in her life, she illustrates it by reference to her looser, less controlling approach in her relationship with her troubled sister, whose destructive behaviour towards her has been a lifelong problem:

I think it's to do with sort of problem solving, and if I think about the … whole issue with my sister. Initially all of my energy was into how can I solve this, how can this be ended and how, you know, how can I make this better? And it took me two years to realise that actually there wasn't anything that I could do and I had to … then not try basically, because everything I tried was fruitless and exhausting and all of those very negative things and draining, took away from pretty much everything in my life so I … I then had to see … it was like just sort of an opening-up of just thinking well actually maybe me completely backing off is the most creative thing I can do in this situation … that probably was my biggest lesson in realising that … you know I had to be looser in my thinking.

Claire recognises that this shift to ‘looser’ thinking is grounded in a less rigid conceptualisation of truth, which allows her to entertain different ways of seeing things. Miranda, who has spent much of her life caring for her mentally ill mother, also begins to understand truth differently. She has been ‘inhibited in my writing [about my relationship with my mother] by the idea that my truth could be wrong’ when compared with that of other family members. But she learns that:

the process of writing is an almost magical combination of at once focusing on words and their arrangement and yet releasing the content to become exactly what it feels right that it should be. It's much easier when one gives up on being true to the original truth.

The shift here is characterised by learning to rely for writing her story on what feels right to her rather than on some externally validated version of events. It implies risking a more authentically felt self-expression. And indeed this seems to be at the heart of these students' experience: greater confidence to respond to spontaneous, authentically felt self-experience. Thinking is more fluid and intuitive; there is greater trust in the psyche's own organic life; there is playfulness, fun, a more comfortable – although sometimes more challenging – engagement with bodily feeling.

Blocks to self-expression

Loosening cognitive control begs the question of why control was necessary in the first place. When I unpack the way control presents itself at the start of students' studies, I find widespread fears of authentic self-expression and exposure to scrutiny, whether by oneself or others. Whilst Miranda is a ‘natural storyteller’, she has ‘yet to find my own voice as a writer and feel that there is something I have yet to know in order to write a longer piece, a story or a novel’. This is not just a question of learning the craft, she says, but ‘of having something I want to write about that is very personal’. That she fears placing this ‘very personal something’ on the page becomes visible some months later when she notes ‘a tendency that I have to panic when exposed to scrutiny and so to dry up creatively’.

Ruth has long been aware of ‘a small internal voice tapping me on the shoulder, asking to speak’ but has shied away from ‘fac[ing] the possible content of my inhouse orator’. She has ‘a great affinity with words’, which has stood her in good stead academically, but when she tries to write creatively, she finds that ‘it's difficult to avoid [my own] truth and sometimes I'm not inclined to address matters’. Stacey, just moving out of full-time mothering, also fears self-exposure whilst at the same time: ‘I would love to be able to access the inner voice I hear laughing at my life!’ For Megan the fear is of potential readers:

I don't seem to be able to free myself up enough to write what I really want to write. I am so aware of people being able to – or think they are able to – know too much about me if I let myself go!²

There are other indications that creative writing poses a threat that sets up a conflict with the desire to do it. Tess will ‘do anything to avoid [getting started with her writing] e.g. cleaning, shopping, talking on the phone’. Jill comes to the MA because she has run into problems putting her autobiographical material into a book she is writing on women's experience of the menopause. She wonders whether this is because she fears revealing her ‘murky past’ or because she has ‘not developed the right voice yet’ or because of ‘the lack of identity you suffer during the [menopausal] years’.

Cognitive control is necessary here to keep uncomfortable self-experience out of sight. This is often achieved by adherence to dominant identities. At the start of the MA Rhiannon is comfortable with her identity of practised science writer, but engages in creative writing against huge resistance. She shows tacit awareness that science writing is possible for her because it does not involve engaging with the subjective when she notes that ‘my [science] writing has had very firm objective (as opposed to subjective) boundaries’. Claire is also tacitly aware at the outset that her strong professional identity as non-fiction writer provides her with safe, controlled boundaries that keep emotional issues at a distance. Whilst she feels comfortable with the self she presents in her non-fiction writing, the creative writing she has done ‘doesn't seem to be by me’, she says, ‘I don't recognise it’, then adds, ‘Maybe that's because I don't want to own it’. This indicates that her creative writing expresses something that is uncomfortably at odds with the way she thinks about herself. Lucy also indicates that accepting her desire to write involves taking her out of the comfort of her familiar business identity:

Categorising myself as someone who writes more than … e-mails, reports, conference papers and shopping lists feels presumptuous and awkward. For me, the label ‘writer’, or even ‘apprentice writer’, presupposes … that I have something worth saying and worth reading.

This is in the context of her ‘lack of self-belief’ that she can become a ‘creative artist’, having dropped out of her Fine Arts undergraduate degree. It hints at idealised expectations of what it means to write or create and the possibility of self-punishment if she fails to live up to her expectations, which becomes clear later when she says: ‘I am very self-critical and even if I'd got 100% on each essay would not be satisfied’. Claudia is also hampered in her attempts to fictionalise her autobiographical material by ‘my inner critic being in full flow telling me I am not clever enough or good enough to do whatever it is’, which undermines her confidence. Ruth feels similarly undermined after Course 1 because her creative writing has not lived up to her expectations: ‘it's not Shakespeare and that bothers me! Not that I want to be Shakespeare, but I don't want to write badly either. I think of most of it as mediocre’. There is no acknowledgement here that developing the writing will take time; it has to be excellent straightaway. Tess catches sight of her inner critic through the imagined reader exercise:

A dark presence, some kind of teacher, not sure if it's male or female, seems to oscillate between the two, rather stern. I want them to leave the room or change their colours – literally to ‘lighten up’. They want excellence.

There are two main themes, then, in students' fear of exposure in their creative writing. First, the possibility that it will unearth aspects of themselves that might disrupt existing self-conceptualisations and, second, the difficulty of facing up to where they actually are with their writing or learning rather than what they imagine they should be able to achieve. In the first, cognitive control defends the psychic status quo; in the second, it defends the psyche against inner attack when excellence is not achieved. In both instances cognitive control impairs cognitive flexibility and restricts the possibilities for creativity. This explains Rhiannon's reference above to her writing now holding ‘less emotional relevance’: she no longer needs to defend herself so rigidly (see Chapter 7).

Expressing repressed emotions

When psychic control is loosened, as it is to varying degrees for all Group 2 students over the two years of the programme, repressed emotions come readily to the surface. Claire experiences emotional distress as soon as she starts to write about herself in Course 1, although at first this is not visibly connected to the central issue that eventually emerges: her anger at her troubled sister. Once revealed, this becomes ‘all-consuming … finding its way as an issue into almost every page of my journal, every conversation with fellow students and every piece of creative writing’. Being able to express her anger at her sister indirectly gives her a much-needed outlet, as she has ‘been advised [that expressing it directly] is not useful’. But it also challenges her lifelong strategy of being the good, stable child. Because of the ‘huge instability’ of her sibling, she has to be the one who is ‘honest and true and you have to stick to your word and follow things through’. This ‘solid framework’ of self-control – her ‘strict parent’ self, as she later calls it – has become ‘quite rigid’ and created ‘very high expectations for myself’.

Harriet, who was already emerging from a 20-year creative block at the start of the MA, begins in Course 1 to confront her anger at her mother for instilling in her the view ‘that writing was a dangerous, male activity, incompatible with being a “good” wife and mother’, which she now believes was at the root of her block. Being able to confront this is ‘a new development for me. I'm dealing for the first time directly with my mother, and associating her with my emotional and creative blocks’. This happens through poetry, as it does also for Stella who starts to express ‘my unresolved anger with my mother’ for making her feel a failure academically. In fact, Stella releases huge anger during the two years of the MA, not only at her mother, but also at her husband, from whom she separates during her studies: ‘I feel driven to the depths of anger that I never knew I had’, she says in the final interview. Expressing her anger involves coming to terms with a less likeable side of herself: rather than the good mother/professional carer roles she has occupied all her life, which ‘validated’ her, she now recognises that she has to let them go and face up to her ‘vulnerability’ if she is to find the space she desires for self-expression.

Jill similarly confronts ‘an increasing anger I have been feeling towards my father since his death’, because of his high academic expectations and his remarrying so soon after her mother's death, that, he had hinted, was caused by Jill's birth. Like Claire, she became the ‘good’ sibling in response to a difficult sister and has never felt comfortable with anger:

My sister … and my father used to row a lot and my self-imposed role was one of mediator. I would throttle back my emotions for the greater good of peace. As I grew up I became more and more frightened of anger and angry people and yet also fascinated by them.

Tess's anger, which she also begins to notice in her poetry in Course 1, is associated, she realises, with ‘the sense of loneliness and anxiety’ she experienced at being sent to boarding school, as well as the punishments and humiliation she suffered there for not being ‘a naturally tidy or ordered child’. Unable to complain to her parents because they did not have such a privileged education, she learned to put on a ‘brave face’ that eventually ‘became a permanent way of coping’ with her fear and anger: ‘I have often felt that I impose a strict order on external things as a means of coping with a kind of internal “disorder” which I sometimes feel’.

Whilst for most people anger emerges very early on in the programme, for others it becomes available only towards the end. Through exploring her family history for Independent Study Miranda has discovered her father's infidelity, which makes her very angry: ‘I spend so much of my time being angry’, she says. Yet she doesn't like it: ‘anger is such a horrible emotion to experience’. But she recognises that:

in order to proceed with the fiction writing I have to accept that I have a right to write and I think in order to do that you have to accept that your anger is somehow legitimate and that your truth is perfectly legitimate.

And in any case, she would ‘sooner be angry than desperately sad’, which means that she wants to move away from her dominant emotion of sadness previously masked in her relations with others by a humorous persona:

I just do this funny person, I do it quite well, but … if you want to change your writing and write in anger you're going to be exposing another person who might not be so nice. So … my trick for getting on with people is to be sort of accessible, quite funny, sometimes to let yourself be put down a tiny bit and say that's OK, but it's not really.

For some students sadness or loss is the companion to anger. Miranda begins to confront the pain of her mother's mental illness when she was a child: ‘I never mourned the loss of my mother. I did not perceive her descent into madness as such at the time, though the reality was like a death’. But there is also pain at the loss of the many years of her life when she could not take control of her own life, and learning and creativity were difficult:

I'd existed, beyond a certain point in my childhood, in a sort of stunned fog, shocked by what was taking place around me. There are many places in my past that I still don't even like to visit, doors that when open reveal sad rooms, musky with regret, empty of furniture. I stumbled through my teenage years, in an accidental sort of non-trajectory that lasted, sad to say, well into my twenties.

Confronting repressed grief is a major undertaking for Ruth, which begins for her in Course 1 against huge resistance: ‘I was clearly very cross at having to open up to myself’. But the grief, she discovers, is not only for her former partner, with whom she is obsessed even though she is now in a new relationship, but also for her father, who died when she was at university without her family telling her he was ill:

writing the line [in a freewriting exercise] ‘If I was to say what was really on my mind it would be to say that I miss my love’, I could no longer hold back the force of a huge emotional outpour. Although I was well aware that the two and a half years I had spent as the partner of someone in the chronic stages of alcoholism had deeply affected me, I was still impressed by how the writing of a very simple honest sentence could evoke such a massive resurgence of overwhelming feelings connected to my history, not only with my ex-boyfriend, but also with others, such as my late father.

Engaging with these two painful relationships and the rage and grief associated with them occupies Ruth for much of her two years on the MA and eventually leads her into counselling as an extra means of support.

For some students emotional expression is less direct. Lucy encounters loss as a recurring theme in her creative writing, with absent males particularly dominant. Whilst there is an obvious connection with the fact that her father died when she was 9, she does not explore this head-on:

I noticed early on that everything I wrote about was about losing something, and once I'd noticed it, it stopped being an issue and I didn't really think about it again. So probably it was something that I could have explored further but I think I got to a point with it and thought, I don't know if I deliberately thought, but somehow it ended up not being the thing that I pursued …

This is not necessarily avoidance. Whilst she is aware that on a programme like the MA ‘you're kind of on the lookout for … some personal development issue to pursue and dig into and [the death of my father] feels like a really obvious one’, when she reflects on her feelings about this, she realises that:

I never had a dream about having a father who looked after me and things because he was always ill, so when he died it wasn't a big deal for me. I never had those dreams and I think that's very different to my brothers and sisters, and I think that could be maybe what I want to write about, because I think what I'm curious about is the fact that I'm not curious about him, it's like a double negative or something ….

She does suspect though that ‘underneath there's other stuff which I keep skirting around and avoiding’, and indeed later it is her distressing tendency to lose her identity in relationships with men that becomes the main focus of her writing, and how to feel comfortable with being a childless woman at 40. Rather than engaging directly with the loss of her father, then, Lucy's indirect approach to her dominant emotional themes, using science fiction as a frame, allows her to engage with the consequences for her present sense of identity of this loss, which she seems to experience implicitly rather than explicitly.

Liberating lost parts of the personality

A striking development for many of the students is that expressing repressed emotions liberates parts of the personality associated with them, which often emerge in the guise of unruly childish ‘sub-personalities’ (Rowan, 1990) (see Chapter 8). Claudia experiences the emergence of the unruly ‘rebel’ self she was at her Catholic school, where she was often excluded. She describes herself at that time as ‘very very bright intellectually … [wanting] … to question things, particularly religion’, which did not go down well with the nuns. She has the sort of mind, she says, that ‘find[s] strange connections’ between things and ‘embroider[s] the truth and elaborat[es] stories’, which she came to believe were ‘character defects’ that got her ‘in trouble a lot’. Because this part of her personality had to be repressed, her confidence went with it, and she now understands her use of alcohol and cigarettes as a way of keeping herself under control. Learning fictional techniques for conveying her experience is hugely liberating, because it validates her natural ways of thinking: ‘the idea that I could take my experience and fictionalise it, colouring in the bits in between, it was just like a new lease of life’. By the end of Year 1 she had written 40,000 words of an autobiographical novel and sent it off to an agent, practised being a rebel again in the ‘Writing and Groups’ course where she challenged the tutor (see Chapter 9), and contributed confidently to a discussion at a public literary event.

Stacey also experiences the re-emergence of a ‘rebellious’ or ‘transgressive’ part of herself that is associated in her memory with ‘a terrible school’ she attended as a teenager where she was ‘branded stupid’:

I just was very rebellious and I came from … there was just me and my sister and my mum, and all the time I was being told that I was a problem because I was from a one-parent family … and it just reinforced the rebellious side of my nature really.

When her children were young, she had to put up ‘a bit of a front’, be ‘a really conventional person’, but now that they are older: ‘I don't really have to conform, I don't have to go to parents' evenings and be that person. And so I do feel that I can probably come back to myself a bit more.’ Coming back to herself involves revisiting uncomfortable incidents from childhood and adolescence that have left her with a sense of guilt. But writing them down and sharing them functions as a kind of purging: ‘Through my writing I have rid myself of acts of aggression and defilement that I had carried unwittingly as my own’. This enables her to delve into an area of her psyche marked ‘restricted access’ and to use less comfortable material more spontaneously in her writing.

For many of the students the emergence of repressed emotions and hidden parts of the personality makes the psyche more risky and difficult to manage. Stacey finds that sometimes writing feels like ‘a kind of madness’ that is ‘scary as well as uncomfortable’, and she uses the metaphor of vomiting to capture it: ‘Just as when you are ill you keep a bucket beside the bed, I keep my journal and pen at the ready for I never know what will come bubbling up to the surface in the depth of the night’.

Rhiannon who is forced, by doing the creative writing and reflective essay in Course 1, to abandon her ‘passive [scientific] voice’ and ‘perfectionistic’ learning and writing methods in favour of finding out what she thinks, discovers that the part of herself that contains her ‘stagnant creativity’ is ‘still very childish’. Wilful and potentially unruly, it floods her with exciting ideas that she then finds difficult to develop into a coherent piece of academic work. Tess's angry, unruly side is similarly challenging. In the ‘Self as Source’ exercise it emerges as a crazed redhead threatening to throw herself off the local suspension bridge unless her lover leaves his wife and disabled child. The emergence of Claudia's repressed child self sends her into a manic high:

there were times when I did feel almost infallible that yes I can [complete the MA in spite of having no money] and you know if I really want something I can go out there, I can write a novel, I can paraglide …

But this ‘ecstatic’ state does not last; it is too chaotic and she takes ‘a nose dive’ emotionally. This is exacerbated by learning from the agent that her novel is not sufficiently developed for publication, which damages her confidence in her writing. Expressing repressed emotions and releasing lost parts of the personality, then, disrupts the previous configuration of the psyche kept in place by cognitive control, opens it up to greater complexity and the possibility of increased creativity, but renders is more difficult to manage.

Learning to manage the expanded psyche

In spite of the challenges many Group 2 students begin to learn how to manage their riskier, more unpredictable psyche over the course of the MA, which brings increased agency. Claire finds that releasing her anger opens up the possibility of tolerating inconsistency: of having empathy for her sister's illness whilst also feeling legitimate anger at her destructiveness. This allows her to think more flexibly, to ‘define my limits and convey those to others’. This has ‘at times … caused me some distress but there is a strengthening sense of my confidence in my ability to ride with the uncertainty that is created by me finally taking a stand and stating my position’. Being stronger in human relations enables her to be ‘easier on myself’ and to relinquish her high expectations in favour of a ‘gentler understanding of the processes we go through in our lives and of the meaning we make for ourselves’.

Tess also experiences ‘a greater sense of agency and purpose in my life’. She now understands the process of change as not just a linear movement ‘from the centre out towards enlightenment’ but a spiral involving ‘moving inwards … towards the centre, backwards into the past and sometimes downwards into a darker place of isolation and pain’. Working with this more emotionally felt and challenging sense of self helps her to understand ‘what holds me back, not only from writing but from succeeding in other areas of my life’.

Whilst Claudia's changes have also been difficult to manage: ‘just getting to know myself, you know, as this person and in this world and re-establishing all my relationships … finding new boundaries …’, she finishes the MA feeling that she ‘learned to sort of connect with my creativity’. She also feels more connected up with herself generally:

I was thinking about how I was [when I did my first degree], there was the public me and there was the private me and nobody saw the private me, not even my husband, I was another [Claudia] for him. Now I think I'm much more aligned, what you see here is very much who I am at home and who I am on my own, very much who I take out into the world.

Rhiannon begins to find ‘middle ground’ in her management of the rediscovered, unruly dimension of herself, neither too controlling nor too lax (see Chapter 8). Gradually learning to do this, she finds that she is able for the first time to make a plan for her academic writing. She can now ‘see her thinking’, she says, revealing through the visual metaphor a sense of increased space for the imagination. This more open, more reflexive sense of self brings her a deeper understanding of her subtle difficulties with learning: ‘I am more open to the dynamics of the learning situation and aware that the learning process is much more than the mere acquisition of facts. It is an on-going process involving much self- questioning and self-regeneration’. She has also ‘undergone some radical alterations in my personal life that have produced a sense of self that is newly emerging but on a much stronger, realistic footing than before’.

For some people inner conflicts are still visibly at work. Having expressed and processed a great deal of anger and loosened her tendency to be the carer, Stella feels ‘much more confident … and much clearer about what I want and don't want to do, and will and won't do’. But ‘I'm still sort of convincing myself’, she adds, ‘because … I still need that kind of vindication from outside and I'm not getting it’. ‘Vindication?’, I query. ‘Sorry not vindication, validation’ she replies. It's interesting that she says ‘vindicate’ here rather than ‘validate’. Clearly at a less conscious level she still has to justify her need to have more time for herself, to defend against inner accusations of selfishness. Stacey experiences something similar:

I can take more risks now, I've brought my children up, … and yes I think last time I was maybe talking about how I could be more myself … but I was myself when I was looking after them all day as well, just now I can journey into myself a little bit more … explore myself a bit. It's a selfish thing I suppose whereas [Celia: selfish?] well I'm spending time on myself rather than on them I suppose.

Whilst, then, there has been movement out of dominant self-concepts into a freer and more creative psychic space, for some people this is inevitably still tentative and sometimes uncomfortable.

Understanding the trajectory of change

So there is a trajectory in many Group 2 students' experience of change, from repressed emotions and parts of self often kept under control by dominant self-concepts or idealised images (Horney, 1951) (see Chapter 7), through opening-up to a broader range of emotional expression and parts of the personality, culminating in a more flexible, bodily-felt and agentic self-experience. This in turn facilitates a more spontaneous understanding of learning and writing processes, as well as relationships with others. The expanded, more complex psyche is more challenging, but there is much evidence that by the end of the two years students are beginning to find ways of containing and managing it. Whilst all Group 2 students experience this trajectory, there are of course differences. Some students’ difficulties with learning or writing are more easily addressed than others (see Chapter 11). Some have already done a fair amount of work on themselves before they start the programme. Some engage in a direct encounter with their emotional problems, whilst others work at them more obliquely through the creative life writing. Students also demonstrate different degrees of insight into the processes involved in change, although all of them show a significant movement towards a more bodily-felt engagement with their writing and learning processes.

Whilst the material generated from Group 1 students is less detailed, as I have shown there is evidence that significant numbers of them experience a similar shift to a more open, complex, reflexive and bodily-felt self-experience that in many instances facilitates increased flexibility in writing and learning processes and in life more generally, but is sometimes less comfortable than that experienced previously. However, Group 1 material demonstrates a greater frequency of negative experience of the programme, particularly in the early years (see Chapter 11). I now proceed to look in detail at how change takes place across the two years of the MA in the experience of three students from Group 2.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘psyche’ to denote the complex of mind, including both conscious and unconscious mental processes, and sense of self (see Chapter 6).

2 Megan felt more comfortable placing her material on the page once she learned about the implied author in fictional autobiography (see Chapter 8), which indicates that her fears were partly a consequence of not having this knowledge. However, she also discovers fears of placing on the page what she calls the dark side of herself, so there is more involved here than just the need for technique.