Introduction

This book and the research on which it is based have occupied me for the past eight years. During that time the programme of study that is the book's subject – the Postgraduate Diploma, subsequently MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development at Sussex University – has been discontinued in the wake of the Labour government's decision not to continue subsidising people wishing to study in higher education at a level equivalent to, or lower than, the qualifications they already hold, and the resulting dissolution of adult education departments at British universities. This was a considerable blow for an area of work – the use of creative writing as a developmental and therapeutic tool – that was just establishing itself in higher education, and very distressing for the students who were taking the programme at the time and for the tutors who had been teaching it for many years. It was also a considerable blow for me personally, came late to the academic world and spent most of my time there developing this work. My retirement in 2010 to coincide with the discontinuation of the programme left me deeply disappointed, but it made the writing of this book doubly important as a record of a powerful learning experience for many people. I hope that it will provide an insight into an approach to learning that draws on psychodynamic psychotherapy, and will encourage others to take this work forward.

From the start of my involvement in academic research I have been fascinated by the effects on students of engaging in what I originally called ‘fictional autobiography’ and am now calling ‘creative life writing’. I define this as creative writing that uses fictional and poetic techniques to capture self-experience, including physical and emotional experience, personal memories, and present and past relations with others (Hunt, 2010a). My interest in this was stimulated initially by the benefits I myself experienced from using fictional and poetic techniques to encapsulate my thinking and feeling in psychotherapy in the late 1980s. When in 1991 I started teaching creative writing at Sussex, I found that many of my students benefited in a similar way from fictionalising themselves and significant people in their lives; this happening serendipitously rather than as a result of the aims of the course. In 1994 I embarked on research into these benefits, looking at the experience of students taking my creative writing course ‘Autobiography and Imagination’, the first term of a one year Certificate in Creative Writing offered by the then Centre for Continuing Education (CCE). I concluded from that study that starting to write by fictionalising self-experience not only helped students to find a better working relationship between the creative and critical faculties in their writing process, but also had the potential for enhancing the flexibility of the psyche more generally, and that therefore this approach could be useful in a therapeutic context (Hunt, 2000).

In 1996, at the CCE's suggestion, I set up the postgraduate programme in creative writing and personal development (CWPD),¹ with an explicit focus on the use of creative life writing as a developmental and therapeutic tool. As with the Certificate course, from very early on in the life of the CWPD programme² significant numbers of students were telling me that they had undergone major changes as a result of their studies. For some people this involved what they referred to as a ‘breakthrough’ (their word) in their ability to write or study, against a background of blocks to, or difficulties with, learning or writing, with the result that they now felt able to take themselves seriously as writers or to consider embarking on a doctorate. For others it involved a ‘life-changing’ (again, their words) shift, such as being able to make the decision to leave or take a lengthy break from professional careers, in order to find more meaningful employment or life situations. Some people also found themselves making the decision to leave long-term relationships, often something they had previously felt they needed to do, but on which they had been unable to act. Whilst these are clearly different kinds of changes, the common factor underlying them is an increase in the ability to act on one's own behalf, in other words an increased sense of agency.

At the same time as I was hearing these stories, I was becoming increasingly aware of the challenges of the programme both to students and to tutors. Undergoing such major life changes meant that students often felt exposed and fragile during their studies, and the tutor team was having to learn sometimes very painful lessons about what it could and could not do safely in this challenging learning environment. My research into the effects of the Certificate course had helped me to gain some understanding of how and why creative life writing could enhance students' sense of agency, but now that I was running a programme of study specifically focused on the developmental potential of this kind of writing, I needed to understand more deeply how the programme as a whole worked to facilitate these changes, so that the learning environment could be structured and managed to best effect.

The opportunity to undertake further research arose in 2004 when I was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy, with £50,000 to undertake a project of my choice. This enabled me to set in train a new project focused on gaining a deeper understanding of the nature of the changes in students' sense of self as a result of the programme, the elements of the programme that facilitated these changes, and the challenges it posed for students and tutors, with the aim not just of informing our own teaching but of making this knowledge more broadly available to the adult learning community. This book presents the results of that research. It builds on my previous research into students' experience of the Certificate course (Hunt, 2000), but in light of critiques of that book I have broadened my primary focus on the dynamics of individual psychology to look more broadly at the teaching and learning context, thus making it more of a psycho-social project. Seeing also that, since I published my previous research, I have been immersing myself in the cognitive neuroscience of the self and consciousness, my approach here could be more accurately described as bio-psycho-social (Froggett and Richards, 2002). Such a cross-disciplinary approach might seem ambitious. However, seeing that my main concern is the self, it was impossible not to engage with this important new work, and I was encouraged by other psychodynamically based researchers who were treading the bio-psycho-social path. Alan Shuttleworth (2002), for example, describes how the findings of neuroscience forced him to ‘stretch’ his thinking about his child psychotherapy practice beyond his psycho-social grounding in object relations theory. I like his metaphor of stretching thinking; it implies transgressing the boundaries of one's own discipline to get a different perspective on the phenomena one is seeking to understand, which is precisely what I have been doing. It has been a difficult challenge but one that has enriched my thinking enormously.

So what constitutes my bio-psycho-social approach? It is probably true to say that my approach has always been psycho-social, although I did not think of it that way. I came to social research with a strong background in the psychodynamic thinking of Karen Horney (1885–1952), a leading representative of the ‘interpersonal’ school. Ironically, seeing that one of the critiques of my work is that it has focused too much on individual psychology and neglected the broader social and cultural context, interpersonal theorists such as Horney have often been disparaged (by Freudians and object relations theorists) as ‘culturalist’ or ‘sociological’ (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983: 80). In fact, whilst Horney certainly went through a ‘cultural phase’ when she moved from Germany to America in the 1930s, her ‘mature’ theory (Paris, 1994) embraces intrapsychic as well as interpersonal mechanisms. Both of these have been important for my own thinking; for example the way that, as Horney puts it, personality problems often develop in response to difficult childhood environments or challenging life experience in adolescence or adulthood, but are compounded by psychic vicious circles.

Horney's theory continues to be at the heart of my thinking, although I also draw on object relations theory,³ including the work of Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas on the creative process, and that of Donald Winnicott and Wilfrid Bion on ‘holding’ and ‘containment’ as applied to the learning environment. The work of Peter Fonagy, who develops Bowlby's attachment theory, has helped me to extend my thinking about the developmental role of feeling and emotion, and how problems in this area can inhibit learning throughout life. However, to borrow Shuttleworth's helpful taxonomy, all these might be thought of as the ‘intimately psycho-social’ dimension of my approach, which previously dominated to the exclusion of the ‘micro- and macro-social’ (Shuttleworth, 2002: 207–8). In this new research, then, the main stretching of my thinking is towards the micro-social in the form of a deeper exploration of the contribution to students' changes of the broader learning environment of the CWPD programme, in particular the effects of the collaborative, experiential group work that was at the heart of our approach. Work in social realism by Gordon Brown, amongst others, has been helpful here. In thinking more broadly about the nature of the learning taking place in the CWPD programme, I draw extensively on a large body of learning theory and practice originating in the USA known as ‘transformative learning’, which resonates strongly with the approach we developed at Sussex. As the title of this book indicates, transformative learning has become my primary way of thinking about the CWPD programme. I have also expanded my thinking to embrace a macro-social dimension, responding to the critique of ‘therapeutic education’ by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, who argue that it infantilises learners and compromises the intellectual pursuit of knowledge.

As to the ‘bio’ component of my bio-psycho-social approach, my thinking has been strongly influenced by the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, amongst others, on the central role of bodily feeling and emotion in our sense of self and the operation of reason. Iain McGilchrist's work on the relationship between the brain's hemispheres has also been fundamental, as has dynamic systems theory, which I have come to via Andrew Tershakovec's pioneering attempt to place Karen Horney's thinking in a dynamic systems framework. I have also found helpful the coming together of neuroscience, phenomenology, and embodied cognition in the work of Mark Johnson, Shaun Gallagher, and Dan Zahavi.

So there are many different strands to my bio-psycho-social approach – the intimately psycho-social, the micro- and macro-social, and the biological – and whilst I have made a point of separating them out here, in the discussions that follow they are not so easily distinguished; rather they provide, I hope, a more rounded and multi-levelled understanding of the changes students have experienced as a consequence of engaging in creative life writing in a personal development context.

The research project

The research was carried out within what I have come to think of as an embodied critical realist paradigm, drawing both on the social theory of critical realism (Sayer, 2000) and on the cognitive theory of embodied realism (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Whilst these ontological theories originate in different traditions, there are some strong similarities between them (Nellhaus, 2004). Both assume that there is a world independent of our understanding of it, of which we can have stable knowledge. Both also see that knowledge as mediated by the concepts and theories we use to make sense of the world, but for critical realism these concepts and theories arise out of social discourses, whilst for embodied realism they arise first and foremost out of the human body's on-going interaction with the environment. However, critical realist theorising has recently shifted towards embodiment, with reality being conceptualised as ‘stratified’, i.e. consisting of a series of layers including the socio-cultural, the psychological, and the biological (Bhaskar and Danermark, 2006). This has enabled me to stretch critical realism's fundamental concern with the relationship between social structure and individual agency to embrace the psychological and biological realms as well. I have similarly stretched critical realism's key concept of emergence, which indicates the way that ‘particular combinations of things, processes and practices in social life frequently give rise to new emergent properties’ (Carter and New, 2004: 7), to include the psychological and the biological. Both of these are key ontological themes in the findings of my research.

There is also a strong similarity in the epistemological thinking of critical and embodied realism. Critical realism argues that, whilst our theories will always be fallible, through our research we will progressively develop better interpretations of reality that are not so much true in any absolute sense as ‘practically adequate’ (Sayer, 2000: 40); that is, adequate to explain the way the world works in practice. Embodied realism also looks for ‘converging evidence’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 89) of how the world works, for example by bringing into relation the findings from first-person phenomenological research and cognitive neuroscience (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Thus an embodied critical realism with a stratified ontology fits well with my bio-psycho-social conceptual framework and my quest to understand not only psychic mechanisms involved in individual change but also mechanisms at work in the learning environment out of which that change emerges.

My preference for a form of realism stems from my long-term conviction, based on my own experience and my immersion in Karen Horney's ideas, that there is something innately real about the experience of self and that it is possible to feel more or less real; this is contrary to the dominant constructivist and poststructuralist view that the self is purely an effect of language. Horney's idea that there is a ‘real self’ at the heart of the psyche, which is the basis for the development of values and a sense of agency (Horney, 1951), is admittedly unclear – it sometimes sounds like an entity and sometimes like a bodily-felt process. But in light of the new thinking about self and consciousness in the cognitive and neurosciences, where the self is being understood as first and foremost an innate, bodily-felt process and only secondarily as a product of language, Horney's ideas take on new meaning (see Chapter 6).

Within the broad paradigm of embodied critical realism, I have used an eclectic methodology. I have explored my research questions both intensively and extensively, on the critical realist view that ‘Extensive research shows us mainly how extensive certain phenomena and patterns are in a population, while intensive research is primarily concerned with what makes things happen in specific cases’ (Sayer, 2000: 21). The extensive dimension of the research involved generating retrospective material via a questionnaire from students who took the CWPD programme in its various forms between 1996 and 2002 (56 respondents). I refer to these as Group 1. The intensive dimension involved generating material contemporaneously via questionnaires and interviews from 15 students taking the two-year part-time Master's during 2004–06. I refer to these as Group 2. I was also able to draw on all the work for assessment from this latter group, including their creative writing. Both groups were diverse in age and background (see Chapter 1), but predominantly female. The intensive dimension also included an interview with three tutors of the programme: Christine Cohen Park, Cheryl Moskowitz, and Sarah Salway.

The interviews were interactive (Sayer, 2000: 21), meaning an approach in which the interviewer does not attempt to minimise her presence, on the critical realist assumption that the research context is an open, or quasi-closed (see Part III), system that cannot be isolated. For example, I shared my own personal experience when appropriate, and the students and I sometimes engaged in collaborative interpretation of their experience, so that the interviews became a ‘transitional space’ for change (Merrill and West, 2009). This is consonant with a psychodynamic approach that encourages people to engage more closely with thoughts and feelings that may be hidden from the conscious mind (Leiper and Maltby, 2004: 13). It needs to be seen in the context of a personal development programme where students were consciously seeking insight into themselves, with many seeing the research as an additional opportunity for this. Obviously, then, the research changed somewhat the learning experience under investigation – more so for some participants than for others, according to my findings – by creating another level of reflection and another layer of support or ‘holding’ (see Part III). However, seeing that the kinds of changes visible amongst Group 2 students are also visible amongst significant numbers of Group 1 students who had minimal contact with the research, I would argue that the learning process is essentially similar for both groups, although enhanced by the research for some Group 2 students. This is not to suggest that all students who took the programme experienced the same effects as those under discussion here.

Material from Group 1 was categorised cross-sectionally through free, tree, and conceptual levels of coding (Bazeley, 2007). This categorisation provided a template for processing material from Group 2, which was analysed separately for each student and then cross-sectionally across all the material from this group. In-depth case studies were developed from the material of three students from this group to illustrate the experience of change in the context of different conditions: different combinations of courses, different reasons for studying, and different bio-psycho-social factors at work. As there were no students in Group 2 for whom the experience of the CWPD programme was not ultimately beneficial, I have drawn on the experience of several Group 1 students for exploring negative instances (see Chapter 11). All names have been changed.

My analysis of the data was informed by interpretative phenomenology (IPA). Phenomenology explores the lived experience of individual human beings, putting the emphasis on what experience feels like to those individuals (Todres, 2007), whilst the interpretative or hermeneutic dimension enables the researcher to reflect on the experience of a number of different individuals, attempting to understand commonalities and differences and to conceptualise them. IPA has been particularly useful in enabling me to explore students' experience of their learning and thinking processes not only through their literal descriptions of them, whether spoken or written, but also through what can be inferred about these processes from the metaphors and symbols that occur spontaneously in their speaking and writing (Smith et al., 2009) and in their creative life writing. In embodied realism, metaphor is seen as not just as a feature of literary language, but as a central mode of cognition at work in language generally (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Analysis of these metaphors can, therefore, help to understand structures of thinking and feeling that are less conscious. Seeing that, in a critical realist context, the researcher is not only interested in what participants tell her, but also in what she can learn about mechanisms that might lie beneath conscious experience, an approach that sets out to elicit and explore less conscious material makes sense. However, it does raise questions about the ethics of exploring and interpreting participants' deeply personal experience (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). In pursuing this approach I have endeavoured from the outset to make clear the personal nature of the research through the research protocol, and in writing up the material I have worked closely with those Group 2 students who opted to see drafts of chapters in progress (almost all of them, in fact). The research was approved by the University's research ethics committee.

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 introduces the Creative Writing and Personal Development programme, its structure and courses, and gives details of key writing exercises and pedagogical techniques referred to in later chapters. I also relate here how I came to see the programme within the general framework of transformative learning and the consequences of this for the research. Part I focuses on students' experience of change as a result of the CWPD programme, with Chapter 2 providing an overview of what I am calling the expansion of the psyche, where the term ‘psyche’ denotes the complex of mind, including conscious and unconscious processes, and sense of self. This is followed by three individual case studies focusing on different kinds of learning about the self: sense of self as writer (Chapter 3), sense of self as learner (Chapter 4), and the sense of self in time in chronic illness (Chapter 5).

Part II seeks to understand the nature of these changes through a bio-psycho-social exploration of the dynamic system of the psyche (Chapter 6) and of its vicissitudes and their consequences for learning and creativity (Chapter 7). The concept of ‘reflexivity’ is at the heart of my concerns here and Chapter 6 discusses it at length. As a starting point for the reader, reflexivity can be thought of as a mechanism of consciousness that enables knowledge of the world and of oneself to be acquired through a relaxed kind of intentionality and at a low level of consciousness rather than through more conscious and directed thinking. I see the work of the CWPD programme as providing a range of opportunities for ‘practicing’ reflexivity.

In Part III I discuss the three most significant elements in the learning environment that can be seen to work together to enhance students' reflexivity. These include the creative life writing exercises (Chapter 8), the student-led and tutorled experiential groups (Chapter 9), and critical reflection on experience through course diaries, learning journals, and end-of-course essays and papers, with the aid of conceptual material from course readings (Chapter 10). I explore these three elements through a critical realist conceptualisation of the learning environment as ‘laminar’ or layered, suggesting that individual agency emerges from the CWPD learning environment when the different layers work together to challenge students and the learning groups to be more open and in process whilst simultaneously creating ‘holding’ for this to happen.

Part IV explores the implications of the research for adult learning. Chapter 11 looks at the challenges, both for students and for tutors, of a programme of study in which the learner's sense of self is the main focus of learning. I argue here that, in spite of the intrinsic difficulties of this approach to teaching and learning, the learning environment can be rendered safe-enough, although the work needs greater resources than more standard approaches to learning. In Chapter 12 I explore the similarities and differences between the CWPD programme and psychotherapy and suggest that if transformative learning involves a fundamental change in the functioning of the psyche, then it might reasonably be seen as a form of therapeutic education.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the contribution of a large number of people. First and foremost I am indebted to the students who took part in the research, particularly the 15 students whose progress through the MA I followed with questionnaires and interviews between 2004 and 2006. Most of them have read chapters in progress and I have much appreciated their thoughtful comments, as well as their tolerance of the length of time the research has taken to come to fruition. Sincere thanks are also due to the three tutors of the programme who participated in the project. Christine Cohen Park is a fiction writer, with extensive experience of working with creative writing and personal development at universities in Britain and Canada. Cheryl Moskowitz is a poet, fiction writer, and dramatist, who has been using creative writing developmentally in a wide variety of settings in education and healthcare for many years. Sarah Salway is a fiction writer, with long experience of teaching creative writing in higher education. I have much valued their wisdom in exploring the research questions and their thoughtful comments on chapters in progress.

Another person whose contribution must be acknowledged is Sarah Jackson, who assisted me with the research during the first six months, organising and collating the data, and undertaking a preliminary categorisation in collaboration with me. I could not have begun the project without her and benefitted enormously from the deep thinking she brought to the task. I am equally indebted to Jeannie Wright and Les Todres, who recommended the book proposal, and to those who commented on chapters in progress, including colleagues Phyllis Creme, Jack Danielian, and Linden West, and members of the Creative Writing Research Group at Sussex. My ideas for this book were very much enhanced by the two papers Linden and I wrote together during the period of the research (Hunt and West, 2006, 2009). They were also enhanced by working with Pauline Cooper, Sarah Jackson, Michael Maltby, and Sophie Nicholls during their own researches. Sophie's thesis has particularly influenced my thinking.

The research would not have been undertaken at all without the generous financial support of the Higher Education Academy and the British Academy, and the backing of the then Centre for Continuing Education at Sussex University. Acknowledgement is also due to Sage publications for permission to reprint material from Lyle Yorks and Elizabeth Kasl, ‘I know more than I can say: a taxonomy for using expressive ways of knowing to foster transformative learning’, Journal of Transformative Education 2006, 4: 43–64.

More personally, I want to thank my husband Randolph for tolerating my long sojourn in the ‘book burrow’. Hopefully we will get to see a little more of each other now the book is finished. The book is dedicated to my dear friend and fellow Horneyan Bernard Paris, Emeritus Professor of English at Gainesville University, Florida, who has kept me company through the years I have been developing my ideas and taught me how to find clarity in my thinking and writing. I am deeply grateful to him for all his support. Needless to say, none of the above-named is responsible for the views contained here.

Notes

1 I define personal development as any process of beneficial self-reflective change an individual undergoes as a result of life experience or of a specific activity such as education, therapy, or the arts (cf. Hunt and Sampson, 1998: 200).

2 I use ‘CWPD programme’ when referring to the Postgraduate Diploma and MA together, but also refer separately to the Diploma and the MA.

3 Object relations theory seeks to understand the way people and experiences are internalized into the psyche and the role they play there as psychic ‘objects’.