CHAPTER ONE

 

 

The reveries
of a solitary scribbler

John E. Gedo

 

 

 

 

 

Isuspect it is the sheer volume of my psychoanalytic publications that elicited the invitation to contribute an essay to this symposium. I was fortunate enough to earn my psychoanalytic qualifications at a relatively early age, so that I have had almost four full decades of opportunity to practise the craft of writing in psychoanalysis. My career could well be characterized by the mocking bon mot once used to deprecate Edward Gibbon, “still scribbling….” How many pages have I published? (How many trees have I caused to be destroyed?) I have not kept count, but I suspect that, among living colleagues, none is guilty of greater volubility. It is not for me to claim that my output has been weighty, but it certainly occupies more than my fair share of shelf-space. Consequently, I feel justified to approach our topic from a very personal vantage point.

Nothing angers me more than overhearing detractors who dismiss my contributions because, according to them, I “know how to write”. (The implication is that this skill is an illegitimate trick through which hollow ideas are made to seem solid.) Not that I am alone in suffering such attacks: the American analyst whose work I most respect, Robert Gardner (see Gardner, 1983, 1984, 1995), is frequently put in his place by his writings being called “poetry”. I read them as cogent essays in epistemology, stated with the clarity and economy sadly lacking in most psychoanalytic texts. W. B. Yeats has reminded us that one cannot separate the dancer from the dance—neither can the writer's concepts be separated from the form in which they are communicated. Over 90 years ago, Freud rightly asserted that good writing is the consequence of clear thinking about one's subject matter (Freud, 1901b, p. 101). Nobody is born with a talent for scientific discourse.

On apprenticeship

By now, almost everyone knows the New York story about the lost Ausländer who asks an old peddler how to get to Carnegie Hall. “Son”, the wise man replies, “practice! practice! practice!” Writing is no different from playing the violin (or basketball)— the skill must be acquired by practice. The youthful Balzac threw away the manuscripts of more than half a dozen novels before he broke into print—some two thousand pages of mere rehearsal; the psychoanalytic writer can scarcely hope to master his craft with greater ease.

In this regard, the education of most psychoanalysts—by no means only those who enter the field from medicine or psychiatry—tends to be deficient, for it seldom involves much serious challenge to produce written work that is to undergo stringent criticism by qualified Judges. I have also been extremely fortunate in receiving opportunities of this challenging kind: in secondary school, by successively having to master communicating in three different languages (as my family moved in stages from Central Europe to North America); in my undergraduate years, by being offered rigorous courses in English composition, British and French literature, and more history than hard science; and even in medical school, where I was permitted to spend much of my last year writing for a students' yearbook and creating a play satirizing the faculty. It was Freud's panache as an expositor that attracted me to psychoanalysis, and I never doubted that joining the profession would permit me to continue writing.

When young people interested in becoming littérateurs ask for advice about how best to achieve this ambition, they are usually told that they should read as much good literature as they can. (Of course, it is not sufficient to read for content alone: Macbeth is not a murder mystery, nor is any of Freud's case histories merely a narration intended to highlight an individual's personal drama.) I have the impression that would-be psychoanalytic authors all too often neglect to follow worthy literary models. (Is this neglect of attentive reading particularly prevalent in North America, where television threatens to push the printed word into obsolescence? Perhaps so—but, Heute Los Angeles, Morgen die ganze Welt1….) At any rate, my future as a prolific writer of psychoanalysis was prefigured when I matriculated at the Chicago Institute and found that I was inclined to read more psychoanalysis than anyone I encountered. For decades, I read most of the principal journals (in English) from cover to cover, as soon as they appeared. I did not find most of this material particularly valuable qua contributions to psychoanalysis, but thinking through why this was so, particularly in terms of the way the papers were organized, was enormously instructive.

The value of these exercises was soon validated by my experience as a reader of manuscripts submitted for publication to various journals, particularly the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and The Annual of Psychoanalysis. These publications use at least three readers to evaluate every manuscript and ask them to submit detailed reports that specify the reasons for their recommendations. These reports and the Editor's letter to the author about the disposition of the submission are then shared with each reader. I believe this is an excellent method for checking the reliability of the referees. I have now participated in well over a hundred evaluations performed in this manner and was gratified to discover that in the vast majority of instances the readers were in unanimous agreement. (I tend to reject more papers than my fellow referees, mostly because I value originality, in addition to the essential virtues expected by everyone. I can remember only one paper I endorsed because of its conceptual novelty that was ultimately turned down; others thought it was overly speculative.) At any rate, with practice I have gradually learned to evaluate psychoanalytic writings more and more expedltlously: nowadays, I find it possible to write reviews of most analytic books after a single reading, without bothering to take notes.

I mention this gain in efficiency because I believe it shows that with sufficient study of the writings of others, one may master the proper organization of psychoanalytic publications. Needless to say, writing a book is a more complex enterprise than is the production of an essay, so that a would-be author of monographs had best prepare by writing careful book reviews. Before I became a regular contributor to the analytic literature, I managed to get myself appointed as Book Review Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; for about five years, I regularly wrote brief reviews of some 10 volumes annually for this journal. Needless to say, to keep up this pace it was imperative to grasp the author's intention and methods quickly and to assess the adequacy of the book's structure as well as the validity of its argument. I have also learned a great deal from writing formal surveys of the entire analytic literature about certain topics (see Gedo, 1970, 1972) and from systematic reviews of the life work of certain analytic authors (see Gedo, 1968; 1973; 1981, ch. 11; 1986, ch. 3–8). I cannot claim that I have succeeded in avoiding all the pitfalls I thought my predecessors had fallen into, but I have certainly tried to do so. In summary, there are no short-cuts to writing psychoanalysis covrane il faut: it requires hard work and adequate preparation.

On quality

Of course, one may train oneself to write adequately and still produce only trivia: in this regard, writing in psychoanalysis does not differ from writing in general. Many are called, but few are chosen. In my Judgement, at least half of the published analytic literature is devoid of merit. On the basis of my editorial work for a number of Journals, I am also convinced that our publications do not overlook worthy manuscripts—on the contrary, they tend to compromise their declared standards in order to fill their allotment of space. All over the world, psychoanalytic Journals and publishing houses proliferate faster than do the scholarly/scientific capabilities of our discipline. The inevitable result is the printing of blather.

Among the numerous causes for the publication of well-written trivia, the one I would pinpoint as most prevalent is the failure of many authors to familiarize themselves with previous contributions on their subject. Of course, with the geometric expansion of our written production, the task of adequately surveying the literature has become ever harder. We have probably reached the point of needing a computerized data base to accomplish this important job thoroughly. A few psychoanalytic libraries (again, fortunately for me, including the one at the Chicago Institute) have computerized their own holdings, but none of them owns a complete set of the whole corpus of psychoanalysis, particularly of the materials published in languages other than its own. If psychoanalysis aspires to reach a literary standard comparable to that of other scholarly fields—from accounting to zoology—we must urgently establish a world-wide computer network linking all of our libraries.

It should also be stated explicitly that the failure to take into account significant prior work often results not from the difficulty of finding these references, but from a cavalier dismissal of the value of contributions by adherents of schools of thought different from the author's. The tendency to cite only those publications that stem from one's own intellectual circle has been one of the most important intermediate steps leading to the fragmentation of psychoanalysis into factions that do not communicate with each other. In recent years, I have even noted a trend to ignore ideological opponents deliberately, as a political manoeuvre to smother their potential influence. If my impression is valid, this development is an alarming departure from the psychoanalytic (and scientific) ideal to search for Truth and humbly to submit one's efforts to reach It for reasoned comparison with those of others. Of course, it has always been difficult to live up to these ideals; perhaps because of the current fashion to cast doubt on the very concept of Truth, they seem no longer to be shared by all of us. If every conviction were really determined by narcissistic considerations, as deconstructionists imply, how would psychoanalytic discourse differ from a political campaign?

At the same time, it must be admitted that various traditions within psychoanalysis have had such a long history of autochthonous development that it is scarcely feasible to correlate their respective positions on any particular issue with each other. Even if this lamentable state of affairs has not quite supervened as yet, the effort to compare one's thesis to those of contributors from an alien tradition may be more trouble than it is worth. As one example among many one could mention, let me recall a Franco-American psychoanalytic Rencontre in Paris, about a dozen years ago: the French audience was utterly bewildered by a paper by an adherent of ego psychology; the American participants were scandalized by the cavalier manner in which most French presenters attempted to support their contentions. My own presentation (Gedo, 1981, ch. 10), a clinical thesis based on developmental considerations, was perceived by an intelligent French discussant as a tyrannical effort to put a theoretical strait-jacket on the analyst's free exercise of some function I did not understand. Mamma mia!

At any rate, it is always a difficult balancing act to give proper consideration to the relevant literature without going too far afield. Cogent writings in psychoanalysis must show an awareness of the current conceptual structure of our entire intellectual domain—a standard ever more difficult to meet as a result of the centrifugal forces fracturing the field. Even if we lower our expectations and demand only thorough mastery of the author's specific psychoanalytic tradition, most of our publications fall short of seeing the sub-field in question whole. As a result, much of our literature is busy reinventing the wheel, claiming originality for pouring old wine into new bottles, and oversimplifying human behaviour by espousing some fashionable pars pro toto2 fallacy. Of course, we should let every flower bloom, despite the sad fact that most plants in our garden are weeds.

On necessity and solitude

Most psychoanalysts never publish at all or, at best, write only an occasional paper; the list of writers in our ranks is surprisingly limited. (Of course, in this regard, psychoanalysis is no different from any of the other “health professions”: battling disease is not conducive to the vita contemplativa.) Our failure, thus far, to find a secure place as an academic discipline within the established university system has deprived all but a handful of exceptions among us of the opportunity to devote our professional life to scholarship. As private practitioners, we are obliged to subsidize our own scholarly activities, and most of us lack the resources to do this without impairing our standard of living. (Needless to say, the potential market for serious psychoanalytic writings is too restricted to make such scholarly work profitable.) I cannot say that I have been impoverished because I devoted fewer hours to remunerative work than my colleagues, but I have been chagrined by the stigmata of their greater prosperity, and I attempted to redress the balance by demanding higher fees than most. These are unavoidable complications, and they doubtless deflect many potential contributors from the path of writing psychoanalysis.

Even more discouraging is the solitude necessary for the task of the writer—a lack of actual human contact that psychoanalysts (whose choice of profession betrays a strong preference for dyadic relationships) may find particularly opprobrious. (For more detailed discussion of my view on the psychological vicissitudes that affect creativity, see Gedo, 1983, 1996.) To put this another way, to write psychoanalysis, one must obtain the cooperation of one's entire family. (As Anna Freud once told me, both she and her mother “devoted their lives” to make it possible for her father to produce his oeuvre.) I know several gifted colleagues who have been unwilling to extract such sacrifices from reluctant family members. To echo Yeats once again, they opted for perfection in life over perfection in work. I have never been confronted with such a painful choice, for my wife has been immersed in scholarly activities for almost as long as myself (see M. Gedo, 1980, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1994).

All in all, to write psychoanalysis requires vaulting over so many hurdles that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that this track will only be followed with perseverance by that small group of colleagues who by writing respond to an inner necessity. (In this regard, it is well to remember that there has long existed a great tradition of medical authorship, from Galen through Maimonldes and Rabelais, to Anton Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Freud, Jung, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Thomas, Oliver Sacks, and countless others. And it is possible to emulate these great predecessors simply by writing psychoanalysis….) I have the impression that the most productive authors in the psychoanalytic domain have been “writers first”—individuals who stumbled into the clinical arena more or less against the grain. Take a figure such as James Strachey, whose magnum opus was the Standard Edition in English of the entire Freudian oeuvre: this analyst was a member in good standing of the Bloomsbury group, related to such eminent littérateurs as Lytton Strachey, who, in turn, revolutionized the art of biography by infusing it with psychological insight. Or take Ernest Jones, whose massive Life of Freud and sparkling autobiography have outlasted his other works (Jones, 1953, 1957, 1959).

On genre and method

At various stages of my psychoanalytic development, I have been drawn to writing projects of very different kinds, in large part because I knew that they called upon those skills, abilities, and experiences that I had at my disposal at the time. Today, I would be utterly unable (and decidedly unwilling) to engage in the painstaking preliminary research required to produce the work on the intellectual history of psychoanalysis that was my stock-in-trade as a psychoanalytic author during the early years of my writing career. (I collected most of these papers in a volume co-edited by Pollock—Gedo & Pollock, 1976, ch. 1, 3–5, 7–8, 11–12, 15.) Those labours are best performed by persons with more energy and ambition than I am now able to command—not to speak of the physical demands of long hours of attentive reading, note-taking, searching for references, and so on. I am now better equipped to write spontaneous reveries while I sit in my swivel-chair and look out on the distant horizon over the waters of our inland sea. But it has taken a lifetime of steady publishing to embolden me to follow wherever my pen might lead me, in the conviction that editors and readers will be satisfied with the result. Of late, I have not hesitated to present myself as a psychoanalytic Jeremiah—or Cassandra (see Gedo, 1984, ch. 10–12, 14; 1991, ch. 12–13). In emulation of Rossini's Sins of my Old Age, I am even planning to write a set of Memoirs, full of spleen. (Perhaps that project will no longer constitute “writing in psychoanalysis”, but it is the most challenging assignment I have ever given myself as an author, because its success will depend entirely on its literary qualities.)

It is not surprising that one is best qualified to write about psychoanalytic problems about which one has pondered for years, even decades. Rushing one's premières pensèes into print seldom yields fruitful results; allowing them slowly to marinate has the additional advantage of permitting one to determine the proper focus on the issue and to digest at leisure whatever other contributors might have to say on the subject. I often find that, when I want to start writing about some topic, I am overcome by a conviction that I am unready to tackle it. I have learned never to disregard such a message from the depths. It generally does not cause me to abandon my plans, but I now always wait until I feel certain that I have a clear thesis and I know how to present it. It is only then that it pays me to start writing. A blank sheet in a typewriter has never elicited a paper from a would-be author who is unprepared, and the purchase of a personal computer is not likely to solve this contretemps magically.

In my own case, I have become convinced that a sense of being ready to write about a topic means that I have precon-sciously organized whatever I can say about it so that, when I begin the actual composition, I can rely on producing a coherent manuscript without first making explicit to myself what I intend to present. In other words, I focus exclusively on creating the sentence I need to express a given idea; when that sentence is complete, I invariably find that the next idea necessary for my exposition will automatically present itself. (Of course, in preparing a first draft, I do not concern myself with details of punctuation, word order, or finding le mot juste. Matters of that kind can gradually be taken care of while I revise the manuscript and—if it is accepted for publication—at the stage of copy-editing or checking the printer's proofs.) I know that working in this manner would not suit everyone, but for me it has been an extremely efficient method; much of the time, my initial drafts of individual essays require little or no revision. Obviously, giving a monograph the best organization possible is a more difficult challenge, and I have reshuffled the manuscripts of my books more than once. [This was the case with my first two books (Gedo & Goldberg, 1973; Gedo, 1979) as well as my most recent (Gedo, 1996). In contrast, a book based on a set of lectures informally delivered as a visiting scholar in Jerusalem (Gedo, 1988) required little revision.] On occasion, the critiques of editors or friendly colleagues have suggested solutions for problems of organization I had been unable to overcome on my own.

Over the years, I have dabbled in every genre of psychoanalytic writing, and I have found some of them much more congenial than others. I suspect that my experience is fairly typical: most of us find it maximally challenging to write a meaningful, reliable, and convincing case history. As an author, I take greatest pride in having published extensive psychoanalytic case histories in greater numbers than anyone else, sometimes at considerable length. (The most detailed are contained in Gedo, 1979, ch. 4, 6, 8; 1984, ch. 4, 5; Gedo & Gehrie, 1993, ch. 2.) It is very difficult to provide sufficient observational detail to allow the reader to follow one's reasoning in reaching one's interpretations, without prolixity or—even worse!—lapses into irrelevance. It is all too easy to present unsubstantiated inferences in lieu of clinical data—particularly because we lack consensus about what has been substantiated in psychoanalysis. (Thus the case reports of our ideological opponents always read like a string of arbitrary assertions without empirical referents—a potpourri of fictive entities.) It is best to omit the construct language of psychoanalysis from case reports, but describing the course of a psychoanalytic encounter in the plain vernacular takes narrative skill of a high order. It is particularly difficult to present such material in a condensed form: the more detail we eliminate, the more crucial choices must be made about what constitutes the heart of the story. Freud's case histories were sometimes attacked because they had the impact of novellas—of course, it is precisely their formal excellence that has earned them classical status. Alas, the writing of short stories is an art supremely difficult to master.

In my experience, the only genre that presents a comparable challenge is work in the interdisciplinary arena. In order to produce something of relevance to both disciplines involved, not only must the author learn up-to-date bodies of information in each; what is even more daunting, the unique epistemic methods of psychoanalysis have to be made to mesh smoothly with those appropriate for the other field concerned. Failure to address this methodological problem has defeated most efforts in this domain. Inevitably, good results often require consultation with experts in the other discipline or even explicit collaboration with them (see Baron & Pletsch, 1985, ch. 3–10, 16; Moraitis & Pollock, 1987, ch. 18). I have sometimes ventured into exercises in psychoanalytic biography (mostly in the service of exploring creativity—see Gedo, 1983, 1996; Gedo & Gedo, 1992), but I have seldom dared to tackle subjects clearly within the boundaries of the humanities or social sciences. I must confess, however, that I have fantasies of spending my retirement writing psychoanalytically about the operas of Mozart …

Envoi

Psychoanalysts often behave as if the expansion of our discipline were equivalent to progress. In my Judgement, this illusion is equivalent to the belief that one has automatically made a profit by selling commodities after a bout of inflation. The steady growth of our membership has inevitably (and justly) brought demands for democratization in its wake; the triumph of such egalitarian ideals has made it difficult to make unfavourable qualitative judgements about the writings of our peers. As a consequence, the over-all standards of our current literature are considerably below those prevalent when I entered the field in the 1950s. Obviously, I agree with my fellow Chicagoan, Mies van der Rohe, that often “Less is more”.

NOTES

1. Heute Los Angeles, Morgen die ganze Welt: Today Los Angeles, tomorrow the whole world.

2. Pars pro toto: a part for the whole.

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