Chapter 8

Developing reflexivity through creative life writing

Since my research began there has been an increasing amount of work on the role of fiction and autobiography in transformative learning. Christine Jarvis, for example, focuses on fiction's ‘power to engender empathy’, as well as its ‘ability to enable us to stand back from our own situations [through] distancing techniques’ (Jarvis, 2012: 487). Elsewhere she talks about fiction as offering ‘the kinds of “disorienting dilemmas” that Mezirow and others have identified as triggers that start the transformative process’ (Jarvis, 2006: 76). These ideas resonate strongly with my own findings, as does Rebecca Ruppert Johnson's view that autobiographical writing can help us to ‘trust our intuition … and allow selfrefl ective processes to increase flow and resonance’ for learning (Ruppert Johnson, 2003: 242). Closely related to the experiential approach of the CWPD programme, as will become obvious from this chapter, is John Dirkx's mythopoetic and imaginal approach to learning, where participants are encouraged to become aware of images that arise spontaneously in the mind from immersion in the learning environment. They then use freewriting to explore the images, and the resulting writing is reflected on for themes that emerge (Dirkx, 2008).

Two kinds of writing exercises

In thinking about the role of creative life writing in students' experience of change, I have come to see the exercises they undertake in Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development) as falling into two main types, with the first working more significantly with core consciousness and the second with extended consciousness. In 2004 when Group 2 students were studying, the first type included the web of words, freewriting, recalling words or sayings from childhood and using them to create a rhythmic or rhyming poem, and conveying the feel or mood of a remembered place using long Proustian sentences (see Chapter 1). In previous writings I have referred to these as ‘semiotic’ exercises (Hunt, 2004a; 2010a), following Julia Kristeva's use of the ‘Semiotic’ to denote the prelinguistic bodily felt experience of early childhood which, she argues, is always present in linguistic meaning-making in dialogue with the structural elements of language, such as grammar and syntax, which constitute the ‘Symbolic’ (Kristeva, 1984).¹

The second type of exercise focuses on developing imaginative engagements or dialogues between fictional characters and narrators created out of oneself or significant people in one's life. In 2004 these included writing from old photographs, the ‘self as source’, ‘creating the future self’, and ‘imagining the reader in the writing process’. I have previously called these exercises ‘dialogic’, following Mikhail Bakhtin's use of this term to denote fiction writing that gives characters and narrators a voice of their own and allows a dialogue between them as far as possible on equal terms (Bakhtin, 1984). As I said in Chapter 6, Bakhtin's notion of ‘dialogue’ has strong similarities to reflexivity in my understanding of this term, so these exercises could also be called ‘reflexive’ (see below).

Subverting left hemisphere control

For many of the students the semiotic exercises are centrally important to what psychotherapist Christopher Bollas calls the ‘cracking-up’ of the psyche, the dismantling of fixed ways of thinking and being through free association (Bollas, 1995: 221–56) and the loosening of cognitive control.² Freewriting is revealed to be one of the most effective for this purpose, challenging conscious intentions with its requirement of letting go of the rules of grammar and syntax and making space for what everyday language keeps at bay. As we have seen in Susanna's story, the initial freewriting exercise on the theme of ‘beginnings’ subverts her conscious intentions for ‘an elegant dance of prose’ by evoking a spontaneous expression of rage at her situation. As Stacey says of this subversive exercise: it is ‘as if the writer inside has taken command of our fingers and our will is being bypassed’. This echoes Simon's discovery that his inner ‘writer’ has its own intentions, which are quite at odds with those of his ‘author-self’. Not surprisingly, quite a few students resist freewriting at first. Ruth procrastinates about the home exercise until the last minute, then, having done it, rages about the pointlessness of it and the ‘complete and utter bollocks’ she has written. Later she reflects that: ‘I was clearly very cross at having to open up to myself…, of taking my hand out of a by now very obvious mental dam’. But allowing this to happen is an important first step in accessing the source of her creative block: the unresolved pain and rage at her losses.

Similarly effective in subverting cognitive control is the exercise that involves recalling everyday words or sayings from childhood and using them in a rhythmic and/or rhyming poem. Maria's experience of ‘listening to’ Flemish words from her childhood and the difficult memories of her relationship with her mother that accompany them is a good example of the impact of this exercise: how it enables her to bring the feel of her past self into the present and to experience her lost sensuality and repressed anger. Stella's poem is written in what she calls her ‘cockney/posh vernacular … interspersed with a song or two, a poem, the weather forecast and football scores’. It captures for her the sound or tone of her early environment, including her mother's voice:

As with Maria, Stella's recovery of the feel of her childhood brings her into more direct contact with her anger at her mother. Harriet also finds that: ‘Once I start looking at my childhood and expressing it through language, my mother emerges more fully because it is her language that dominates my childhood, and my memories of it’. In her poem ‘Yan, Tan, Tethera, Methera, Pimp’ – the ancient way of counting sheep in her ancestral Cumbria – she speaks ‘the northern “a's”, hard as unripe apples' and listens ‘for the curlew’, but concludes that the ‘language is no longer my own’. And yet this is the language she uses to write her poetry, which leads her to ponder whether ‘the fact that I had to use [my mother's] language cause[d] my [20 year writing] block?’ Reconnecting with her anger at her mother is like entering a ‘toxic sea’, but it has to be done, she says, if she is to lay claim to her own voice.

The subversive effect of these exercises comes in part from drawing the past into the present of the writing, where it is possible to ‘think’ the feeling, but it also comes from the use of imagery and metaphor, literary devices that provide an oblique angle on past experience rather than a head-on encounter, making it more tolerable (Cox and Theilgaard, 1987). In some instances particular genres transgress usual ways of thinking and feeling. As we have seen in Maria's story, spontaneously moving into fairy-tale in her poem from the child's point of view shifts her into a world where the good/bad dichotomy of her childhood environment can be blurred, which frees her to ‘transgress’ the familiar boundaries of her self-identity. A similar subversive effect is visible in Megan's struggle with the requirements of poetic form. From peer feedback on her poem, ‘Speak Properly’, which focuses on ‘a mother so obsessed with [her child] speaking properly she misses the joys [it] is experiencing’, she learns that the rhythm is lost at the end because it is ‘told’ (i.e. reported) and not ‘shown’ (i.e. conveyed feelingly through imagery or dramatization) (Booth, 1991; see Hunt, 2000: 92). Through discussion with her reading group she realises that she doesn't actually know how she wants to end the poem, but accepting the not-knowing allows her to feel her way into a new and unexpected ending with ‘a little of rebellion about it’ that, she says, is directed as much against her own perfectionism as against her mother's:

Thus having to sustain the rhythm and ‘show’ the emotion subverts the rules of the internalised mother, allowing the creative, rebellious self to speak (cf. Hunt, 2000: 18).

Capturing the mood of a remembered place using long Proustian sentences is similarly subversive for Lucy, enabling her to access a more authentic sense of herself beneath her familiar professional identity. When she reads her piece of writing about her native Cornwall, she finds that: ‘There is something in the feel of its elongated and crowded sentences and feisty energy that feels like me’. She goes on to say that:

It could be that having spent years writing predominately in a business context my current mode of writing owes more to having to get a message across succinctly to a slightly bored audience than to anything else. And that what this exercise did so powerfully was jump me out of this learned way of capturing my thoughts, providing an opportunity to gain insight into what my true voice could sound like.

The value of the Proust exercise for Claire is that ‘I can give myself permission “to go on”, to “show off” and not to “come to the point” [which] was a novelty for me’. Thus, being required by the course to do the exercise enables her to let herself go in ways her rule-bound psyche would not normally allow.

The semiotic exercises, then, are a powerful means of subverting familiar patterns of thinking and feeling, and increasing awareness of what lies beneath; they are a source of ‘disorienting dilemmas’, in Mezirow's sense. Freewriting, by switching off left hemisphere functions of language, disrupts linear thinking and the tendency to remain with familiar, often unexamined ways of being. It tricks the psyche into allowing hidden thoughts and feelings to emerge, often in the form of metaphors or images, and meaning to be made from bottom-up rather than top-down. Something similar happens in the poetry and poetic prose exercises: putting the emphasis on sound, rhythm, and mood as starting points effects a shift away from known categories towards the felt but not-yet-known, and the requirement to fulfil the rhythm and show the emotion involves staying with the feeling that wants to express itself.

The self in language

What these exercises highlight is the power of everyday language to constrain thinking and feeling and the power of poetic or free associative language to free it up. As I said earlier, by enabling us to impose patterns on experience language provides us with a powerful tool, but it can also obscure ‘the more intricate order’ of our experience beyond those patterns (Gendlin, 1991: 21). Gendlin encourages an approach to language that seeks to access what lies beyond the patterns by attending to the ‘felt sense’, a concept that echoes Damasio's descriptions of the experience of core consciousness. Felt sense is the pre-reflective dimension of meaning-making that comes to us first and foremost as felt images (Johnson's moments of bodily-felt awareness); for example, the way we can walk into a room and sense that people in it have been arguing. Gendlin calls this tacit knowing a ‘wholistic, implicit bodily sense of a complex situation’ (1996: 58). The term ‘wholistic’ is particularly relevant here in light of the ‘global’ nature of the brain's mapping in the protoself that gives rise to a holistic bodily-felt sense of self (Damasio, 2000), and of the holistic functioning of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist, 2009).

Gendlin's most apt example is of the poet in the process of creating a poem, who re-reads the line she has written and knows in an intuitive, bodily-felt way that it has not yet captured what she is trying to say, but does not yet know what will. There is a blank (a ‘…’), a felt space of experience not yet articulated. In order to find the word or phrase that is appropriate to this blank, the poet must keep the space of not knowing open by ‘listening’ to it. Only by doing this will it become possible to open the felt sense, differentiate between its different components, and ‘carry forward’ into the line of the poem the meaning that emerges (Gendlin, 1991: 47–8). A felt sense, Gendlin says, is not an emotion; whilst the feeling of an emotion is readily recognisable, a felt sense is not yet recognisable. But if we reflect on a felt sense, we find that it contains not only emotions but also thoughts, perceptions, memories or desires (Gendlin, 1996: 59).

Gendlin's description of the engagement with the felt sense captures very effectively students' experience of the semiotic exercises at the start of Course 1. The felt sense is experienced when they let go of their familiar ways of being in language and immerse themselves in the feel of the present moment. This shift of attention, which evokes Marion Milner's ‘internal gesture’ (see Chapter 6), involves a loosening of intention, of will, accepting a degree of passivity rather than being the active determining force, although intention remains in holding the psychic space open for whatever comes. Milner captures this perfectly with her metaphor of the benevolent policeman:

I must neither push my thought nor let it drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching, for it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be kept free for whatever was coming.

(Milner, 1952: 102)

Elsewhere she describes this stance as ‘ordered freedom’, involving ‘reciprocity’ between the agency that holds the space open and the sensory impressions that spontaneously appear within it (Milner, 1971: 71–6). This is quite different from day-dreaming, where ‘thought is just playing with itself’; rather there is an expressive, active relationship between what she calls ‘mind and body’ (ibid.), which can be understood as the relationship between the bodily agency of the core self in the right hemisphere and the consciously ordering self-agency of the autobiographical ‘I’ in the left. Indeed, Milner's benevolent stance is echoed by McGilchrist's description of the kind of will associated with the right hemisphere as ‘caring’, which he contrasts with the controlling will of the left hemisphere. McGilchrist also uses the term ‘reciprocity’ as an equivalent of the ‘betweenness’ he identifies as characteristic of right hemisphere functioning. It involves ‘patient openness to whatever is’, in order that it can be ‘taken further’ by the left hemisphere (McGilchrist, 2009: 171–3, 194), which echoes Gendlin's ‘carrying forward’.

When students move on to write a poem or prose piece, bringing more directed thought to bear on the felt sense, this begins to open it up and carry it forward into words. Reflecting on the writing and the writing process via their reading groups and in their learning journals and reflective essays provides another level of carrying forward, which helps to consolidate the opening-up (see Chapters 9 and 10). I suggest that it is these various stages of bringing the ‘more intricate order of experience’ beyond fixed patterns into the light (Gendlin, 1991) and carrying it forward into thought and action that presses students to loosen their dominant self-identities. This view is supported by laboratory research into the effects of felt sense techniques, where participants' experience often involves a ‘loosening or even disappearance of the feeling of individual identity’ (Petitmengin, 2007: 69). Engaging with the felt sense, then, through freewriting and poetry and poetic prose, facilitates the suspension of tacit self-concepts and immersion in the bodily-felt sense of self. This not only makes more of the psyche available but also opens up the possibility of change.

The self in time

Gallagher and Zahavi suggest that we experience time in two different but complementary ways. The first is what they call the ‘dynamic now’, which includes ‘the retained just-past and the protended just-about-to-occur’. This is not a ‘knife-edge present, but a duration-block, having forward and rearward ends, a bow and a stern’. This very short-term but constantly repeated experience of time, estimated at between 0.5 and 3 seconds, provides coherence to our sense of being a body in the world and manifests itself in a sense of ‘flow’ (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008: 82–4; Thompson, 2007: 334). This is Damasio's core consciousness with a sense of self. The second experience of time is characterised by:

a kind of temporal stretch. The past continually serves as the horizon and background of our present experience, and when absorbed in action, our focus, the centre of our concern, is not on the present, but on the future goals that we intend or project.

(Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008: 86)

This is Ricoeur's ‘narrated time, a time structured and articulated by the symbolic mediations of [familial, social and cultural] narratives'; it is Damasio's extended self of higher consciousness or the narrative self (ibid.: 86, 200–2; Ricoeur, 1988: 244). As in Damasio's self-schema, narrated time emerges out of the experience of the ‘dynamic now’, but can also come to obscure the experience of ourselves in the flow of time. I would suggest that engaging in the semiotic exercises with their emphasis on the felt sense and writing in the present tense enables students to experience more closely the feel of themselves in the ‘dynamic now’. Capturing the experience of the exercises in the course diary or learning journal when it is still fresh also emphasises the ‘dynamic now’, as does the experiential nature of the weekly student-led groups (see Chapters 9 and 10). This experiential work is supported by course readings, such as Miroslaw Holub's The Dimension of the Present Moment (1990), which explores the idea that poetry works primarily with the ‘now phase of consciousness’, with poets, even those writing apparently free verse, instinctively making use of the 3-second ‘experience parcels’ of the present moment.³

This emphasis on the bodily-felt movement of the ‘dynamic now’ seems particularly important in view of what I have referred to in Chapter 7 as the stopping of time accompanying the shift away from core consciousness which, in light of the above, could be understood as the obscuring of the experience of ourselves in the flow of time. This is most visible in Susanna's sense of having no future and perseverating on the past, but it is also there in others. Claudia, for example, who, in response to a tutor's comment that her piece of writing does not stay with the present, becomes aware that the past:

is where the ground feels more solid beneath my feet. I know the past. I can talk about the things outside, and behind me, all day long, but this piece revealed to me my very real discomfort of being in the present. … I think this reluctance to inhabit the present or the future comes from a deep-seated insecurity. I have believed my future to be uncertain because my present felt unstable, a house of cards that could be destroyed by one wrong move, so the only safe place was the past.

As we have seen, it is the right hemisphere of the brain that provides the sense of movement in time, whilst the left hemisphere is more focused on fixed points in time (McGilchrist, 2009: 76–7). So where left hemisphere functioning has become dominant, attention is likely either to be hyperreflexively focused on the past, for example because of the need to defend oneself against painful feelings; or, in instances where life solutions have taken hold, on maintaining an idealised mental model of the future self-in-the-world (Tershakovec, 2007: 181–2). In this context Maria's comment that her experience of engaging in the semiotic exercises has helped her to ‘transcend’ time, as Proust did (see Chapter 4), can be understood as meaning that they have enabled her to transcend the stasis of left hemisphere attention by reconnecting with the temporality of the right. This idea of transcending time via the right hemisphere is present in McGilchrist's discussion of music, a key right hemisphere function: ‘Music takes place in time. Yet music also has the capacity to make us stand outside time’, he says, but then qualifies it by saying that ‘music does not so much free time from temporality as bring out an aspect that is always present within time, its intersection with a moment which partakes of eternity’ (McGilchrist, 2009: 77). This sounds very much like the experience of ongoingness provided by the bodily core self, and this reconnection with the sense of being in process is a central dimension of students' experience of change.

The idea that the self is a process is, of course, central to Damasio's model, but it is present also in Julia Kristeva's notion of the ‘subject-in-process’ between the Semiotic and the Symbolic (Nicholls, 2006), where the term ‘subject’ carries two different meanings: the first person subject of consciousness who is also subject to language and society (Kristeva, 1984). According to Kristeva, where our selfconceptualisations have become fixed in language, stopping time and movement, reading and writing poetry can set us in motion again. It returns us to the earliest phase of life when our sense of self was more immediately in the living present, not yet dependent on self-objectification. This earliest stage is characterised by a gestural and rhythmic form of relating to primary carers – clapping, rocking, babbling – an engagement that may have given rise to the ‘temporal arts’ as a whole, including poetry and music (Dissanajake, 2001). It is a time when the child's experience is dominated by the right hemisphere, so that its way of making meaning is primarily spatio-temporal and bodily, the language functions of the left hemisphere not yet having developed (Kane, 2004). In other words, the child is still immersed in the bodily-felt sense of self in the ‘dynamic now’.

Research in cognitive neuroscience supports Kristeva's view of poetry as providing access to a more process-oriented sense of self. It used to be thought that language was confined to the left hemisphere, but it has now become clear that, whilst the left brain ‘possesses the complete lexicon and rules of syntax’ (ibid.: 22) and is responsible for linear and clear-cut meanings, the right hemisphere has ‘a number of very subtle but intriguing “linguistic” functions’, including the processing of images and symbols, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, inference and allusion, personification, prosody, assonance and alliteration. All of these are central features of poetry or poetic language, and indeed of creative writing as a whole. Particularly interesting in relation to the semiotic exercises is that the right brain processes ‘familiar expressions’ such as those dominant in early childhood, such as nursery rhymes, songs, and jingles (ibid.: 44), precisely what students are encouraged to access in the childhood words exercise. Also, many of the right hemisphere linguistic functions feature ambiguity or ‘double-voiced’ language (Bakhtin, 1981), so that rather than the either/or (black and white) thinking of the left hemisphere, right hemisphere language generates ‘betweenness’.

The intense focus, then, on poetry and poetic language in the semiotic exercises can be seen to stimulate the right hemisphere and the functions that are associated with it, such as the holistic bodily sense of ongoingness in time and space, engagement with subtle and tacit dimensions of feeling, and the expression of the emotions. It sets the psyche in motion again, whilst at the same time providing a degree of ‘holding’ for this challenging process through the cognitive frames that are an intrinsic part of poetic writing and a left hemisphere function (Kane, 2004: 51) (see also Chapters 9 and 10). What, then, do the ‘dialogic exercises’ contribute to this picture?

Imagining a larger space for the self in time

When Group 2 students were studying, the semiotic exercises occupied the first two sessions of Course 1 and the dialogic exercises the remaining two. The ‘future self’ exercise in Session 3, ‘Past, Present and Future Selves’, carries forward the focus on temporality, with students writing about themselves in the future in relation to an imagined new person in their lives (see Chapter 1). As we have seen in Chapter 5, this is a key exercise for Susanna, bringing a sense of space and movement back into her psyche frozen by trauma. Claire's experience is similar. The requirement to imagine the future ‘at once gave me an image of standing, poised, at a point on life's continuum with a view to the past and a vision of the future’. This broad, temporal-spatial perspective enables her to imagine a positive future for herself and her troubled sister (see Chapter 2). She imagines her 40th birthday celebration at home with her parents, her sister, and her sister's daughter, and most significantly her own (imagined future) partner and their exuberant daughter Izzy. The detail of the writing is sometimes opaque – Claire has not yet learned to take account of the reader's needs – but what comes across is the joyful intensity of the relationship between the narrator and her daughter, who evokes Claire's playful side, interested in everything. Her relationship with her sister is also playful and loving, indicating that the latter has now achieved a degree of stability. And there is a subtle hint that another child is on its way. Reflecting on this piece, Claire says that:

I had meditated on my deepest fears for the future and written them out of my life. Its negative depicts my bleakest outlook; I had indirectly focused on what I am most terrified of. And yet the positive felt joyous to write.

The sense of ‘empowerment’ this exercise brings spurs Claire on to ‘make two swift changes in my life’, one involving the decision to have an operation she had repeatedly been putting off. Like Susanna, being given permission imaginatively to transcend her familiar sense of identity enables her to experience what it is she legitimately desires from life, and the impact of this breaks open the psyche, leading to increased agency and action. At the core of this experience is Milner's reflexive shifting of attention from narrow to wide, as is clear from Claire's reflection on it: ‘because I wrote the … piece and could visualise – it was so fantastic to visualise – and I saw myself having had the operation done and I thought I can't put it off any longer…’.

The owning of legitimate desires is the outcome of this exercise for others too. Harriet envisions herself ‘as a free woman [free of spouse, offspring, job, home, writing ambitions] totally in control of my life … but not totally controlled by my mother's voice’. This desire to jettison everything that constrains her seems extreme, a reflection perhaps of the black/white, freedom/control dichotomy that I have highlighted before (it is significant that total freedom here means being totally in her own control), but is not surprising in view of the long years of internal repression. What seems key in these imaginings of the future is being given permission imaginatively to step outside of what one should feel according to inner dictates or social conventions and to experience what one actually feels. Of course what one actually feels may be extreme or unrealisable, but bringing actual needs and desires more clearly into view means that present dilemmas can be thought about differently. In all three examples new thinking and reflection lead to decision-making and action that forge new life directions. Thus there is a significant step towards self-agency rooted in spontaneous bodily feeling.

The ‘future self’ exercise is similar to the semiotic exercises in that it can facilitate breaking out of embedded self-concepts and gaining access to authentic feeling and emotion hidden beneath, but the approach is different: rather than focusing on the feel of the ‘dynamic now’, as in the semiotic exercises, it involves imagining and learning to manage a larger, more fluid space for the self in time, as reflected in Claire's striking image of being able to view past, present, and future simultaneously. Attention is pulled away from current preoccupations or from the task of hyperreflexively defending the split psyche, to form a broad temporal-spatial frame. It is an imaginative distancing that opens up mental space for ‘seeing’ differently with the mind's eye, but which also begins the process of learning to hold the space open for creativity to occur. A key feature of this process is the development of a narrative stance.

Self-agency and finding a narrative stance

A narrator in fiction can be a character who takes part in the action of the story (autodiegetic or homodiegetic)⁴ or a voice that tells the story from outside of the action (heterodiegetic). In an autobiographical context both of these positions involve writers in creative splitting of the self or what Christopher Bollas calls ‘generative narcissism’ (Bollas, 1995: 155). This is different from the splitting that results from Horney's ‘alienation’ from self, which is the consequence of trauma or on-going anxiety. It can be understood as the beginnings of reflexivity, an ‘intrapsychic rapport’ (ibid.) that develops between the autobiographical ‘I’ and the growing awareness of, and trust in, core consciousness. This is a challenging task, particularly where the psyche is led by top-down control, which is often at the core of students' difficulties with creative writing (Hunt, 2000: 86–91). Stella's struggle to create an autodiegetic narrator out of herself in the future self exercise is a good example. In her first attempt she is too bound up in her current ‘psychic drama’⁵ to be able to allow creative splitting, but her second attempt is more successful:

I started to build up my own character and was better able to distance myself from the [difficult present] emotions. At last I had started to use myself as a source and to project the emotions into the future. Perhaps this was the beginning of a greater self-awareness ….

This is a key moment for Stella, in which she is able to fictionalise herself for the first time. Her reference to drawing on herself as a ‘source’ (Moskowitz, 1998) captures the ‘generative narcissism’ involved in creative splitting, with its connotation of a rich store of bodily-felt material that her writer-self can use to create characters. It is also implied by her sense of being able to ‘[get] inside the characters’ she is creating. Similarly, distancing herself from her difficult emotions seems not to indicate that she is blocking them out, rather that she is aware of them and able to use them creatively rather than being overwhelmed by them. It implies a less controlling and more managing stance, a more reflexive, bodily-based agency as opposed to hyperreflexively keeping her vulnerable emotions at bay through her dominant persona of professional carer. It involves relaxing control, trusting the holistic spatiality and temporality of the core self and allowing her ‘self-on-the-page’ to develop a life of its own.

Developing a narrative stance that facilitates management rather than control of the ‘space of composition’ (Clark, 1997) is a central feature of all the dialogic exercises. But it is most clearly visible in the ‘Self as Source’ exercise,⁶ which involves creating two self-characters out of different dimensions of the personality and bringing them together in a story where they exchange something of mutual value (see Chapter 1). For Rhiannon this exercise provides, she says, the breakthrough that has not occurred up to this point (Session 3 of Course 1). She has strongly resisted self-expression through the semiotic exercises, although there has been some psychic loosening. Her starting focus for the exercise is what she sees as her split roles of ‘good mother’ and ‘bad mother’, out of which she creates, through collage and metaphor, her two characters. She is helped in this by the idea of working in ‘the negative space in these experiences’, on the analogy of the space left on a canvas when the visual artist draws an object: ‘This is how I now see the roles we play out in life. These roles fill the positive space but we also have at our disposal as writers the negative roles that we choose not to play out’. Working with the idea of the writing process as a space of possibility beyond her usual way of thinking about herself enables Rhiannon to project herself into that space and, like Stella, to fictionalise herself for the first time.

Moving on to write the story, Rhiannon feels the need for a narrator ‘to breathe more life into the characters’, which also suggests to her the possibility of ‘a narratee’, a character or presence in the text who ‘hears’ the narrator (Nelles, 1993: 22). She is also ‘aware of wanting to produce feelings of unease within the reader’. This she certainly achieves in the writing that emerges. Her autodiegetic male narrator, Clive, is the cocky, upbeat host of a virtual reality game show called ‘Wombwomen’, in which the audience, whom Clive is addressing, can select options for the encounter between Rhiannon's two mother characters, ‘Mrs. Mothermemore’ and ‘Mrs. Mothermeless’. These two women have been ‘cast adrift from the world of reality by their polarised and extreme views of the world’, the former being over-solicitous to her offspring and the latter neglectful (in fact they again evoke the control/freedom dichotomy I highlighted above). Whilst the ‘differences between them are stark’, what they have in common is that their traits – ‘insecurity and self-gratification’, respectively – lead them to ‘perpetrate the ultimate of crimes’, the murdering of their children. When I ask Rhiannon how she came up with the idea of the game show, she says:

I wrote a couple of pieces, it didn't work very well, it didn't flow very well, it wasn't fast enough pace for me, I thought how can I put pace on it, or I could put a narrator to it … It was a whole stumbling process of, you know … and I actually was driving home from school and I thought: I know, I could make it into a video game …, that's how it would really work because they are extremes and that's where you find extremes, in these weird video games. And yes so that's where it all came from. But that's where the process also came from for me of being able to write out a plan because I could see my thinking, my thinking was really sort of coming out then.

Rhiannon's new ability to tolerate a chaotic space of creativity is obvious here: she can allow the writing process to be fluid, in transition, so that a structure can emerge spontaneously. From her metaphor of ‘see[ing] my thinking’ (see Chapter 2) it is also obvious that she is able to distance herself creatively from the material and visualise it, in a similar way to Claire in the ‘future self’ exercise. Attention is broad and there is ‘a patient openness to whatever is’, in McGilchrist's words; it implies the ability to hold mental space open for the imagination to get to work. Here is an extract from the finished piece:

Hi, my name's Clive and I'm here today to update all you hard working Global World folk on a few of our ‘about to be released’ games. It certainly is an exciting time to be working in the virtual reality game business. More particularly, exciting times working at Global World, the home of the interactive video game, games that help you live the reality. I've got some brilliantly clever overheads for you to interact with, giving you the opportunity to play some of our exciting new software as we move through the morning's programme, sat there in your interactive, top of the range Global World seats. Well, hold on to your hats and we'll get stuck in.

Two things leap out here: first, the narrator's cocky self-assurance and, second, the imagined storyworld⁷ opened up by the presence of the audience as narratee. This is achieved – intuitively rather than by design – through deixis, the way language directs the reader's attention to different locations in time and space; it has been called the ‘pointing’ function of language (Stockwell, 2002: 41). In the above piece the key deictic features are Clive as the ‘internal focaliser’ (Bal, 1985),⁸ who is ‘here today’, and the audience, ‘all you hard working Global World folk [over there]’ whom Clive is addressing, with imagined space opening up between them. As readers, our attention is shifted deictically (Zubin and Hewitt, 1995) back and forth between Clive with his slightly unnerving pitch and the audience who are being invited to make choices in the messy lives of Mrs. Mothermemore and Mrs. Mothermeless, their partners, and offspring. To facilitate this, Rhiannon has had to do two things. First, she has had to create a narrator strong enough to act as focaliser. This is in itself a considerable achievement seeing that this assertive male significantly contravenes Rhiannon's usual sense of herself: there is a slightly malicious, almost misogynistic edge to Clive's monologue, as if he is barely able to contain his anger against mothers. Second, she has had to find a simultaneously stable and flexible, that is reflexive, intentional stance as the ‘governing consciousness’⁹ of the narrative space in order to allow her narrator freedom to act.

That this piece was a breakthrough for Rhiannon derives, I would suggest, not only from her being able for the first time to use in her writing the more unruly (angry), previously less acceptable part of herself that went underground as a result of the oppressive mothering she experienced as a child, but also from beginning to trust the bodily agency of core consciousness as a flexible grounding for the creative process that enables her to ‘hold’ the space of the storyworld and, by extension, the space for the imagination more generally. This is supported by what she says at the end of Year 1:

I really do now give much more voice to the other voices that are inside my head … but before I didn't know were there. … if you said how many voices in your head, how many ‘yous’ are there, well there's one and this is the one you see. But there's not, you know there's lots, and I say that and I don't feel fragmented, I feel more whole.

Rhiannon's sense of being able to give voice to the many different aspects of herself whilst feeling more whole is striking in the context of her previous sense of being confined to one dominant sense of self.

Practising reflexivity in the text

In his discussion of the relationship between structure and agency in critical realist research, Scott says that: ‘an undue focus on structures has a tendency to sideline agency, and in particular, the key moment of change, the meeting point between structural forms and agential actions’ (2010: 131). Extending the relationship between structure and agency to the bio-psycho-social world of the psyche, I would suggest that the above examples constitute key moments of change, where increased agential action is achieved – at least in part (see also Chapters 9 and 10) – through students' immersion in the demands of the cognitive structural forms of the dialogic exercises.

I say ‘demands’ because, once writers are transported into, and become immersed in, the storyworld, the cognitive structures at work there are subtly directive of the psyche (Gerrig, 1993).¹⁰ I highlighted earlier how the cognitive requirements of poetry or poetic prose compel writers to ‘show’ feeling and emotion, that is, to create emotional movement in the text. Movement in time and space is similarly an intrinsic part of the narrative storyworld, with deictic shifts constantly taking place between the time-space locations of narrators and characters involved in the action, as the above examples show. There are also, it has been suggested, two other time-space levels in fictional narrative: the more abstract time-space of the plot, and the abstract time-space of the worldview or overarching theme. These three levels are simultaneously present and there is constant movement between them (Keunen, 2001: 11–38). This is visible, for example, in Claire's ‘future self’ piece, where the requirement to create a scenario portraying a relationship with a new person in her life simultaneously involves her in devising the action of characters in a specific locale (level 1), constructing a plot within which the action takes place (level 2), and creating an overarching space for the expression of her deepest desires (level 3). Making this multi-levelled, holistic time-space world intelligible to the reader demands that she learns to manage all three levels simultaneously, and to move deictically back and forth between them, even if not fully consciously.

In other words, the structures of the time-space world of the text put subtle pressure on students to develop a relaxed intentional stance that both anchors the time-space of the autofictional storyworld and gives the characters and narrators who embody their different senses of self with their different feelings and emotions the freedom to act within it. In the process, I would suggest, students learn to trust the bodily-felt sense of agency that this involves, and this generates a bodily-felt pattern or ‘image schema’ (Johnson, 2007: 136) for managing the opened-up psyche in their lives more generally and being more authorial in the re-construction of the narratives in which they are embedded. I call this ‘practising reflexivity in the text’ (Hunt, 2004a; Hunt and Sampson, 2006) and see it as a method for generating reciprocity between the brain's hemispheres.¹¹ Apart from the instances I have discussed above, the development of this relaxed intentional stance over the two years of the MA is visible in many of the other Group 2 students, including all three of those featured in the case studies, albeit in different ways. For Maria it is there in her sense of becoming a narrator/storyteller who ‘holds’ her family's history; for Simon it is implicit in his metaphor of the rancher who manages the unruly prairie of the imagination; for Susanna it manifests in what she calls her new-found ‘passivity’ as a learner and group facilitator, which enables her to ‘hold’ the learning space for herself and others.

This development bears a strong relation to the process of thinking feelings or ‘mentalised affectivity’ in psychotherapy, where clients engage in a ‘pretend mode of functioning’ in the relationship with the therapist, thus promoting ‘fantasy and imagination in the way that [they] regulate [their] affects’ (Fonagy et al., 2002: 439). In the CWPD programme the dialogic writing exercises can similarly be seen as a pretend mode of functioning, which promotes fantasy and imagination for learning to manage reflexively the more dynamic and complex psyche opened up by the semiotic exercises. Whilst there is no therapist here to ‘hold’ this playful but challenging process, the cognitive frames of the exercises, as well as other dimensions of the learning environment (see Chapters 9 and 10), provide a degree of ‘holding’ which, when the process works well, renders the learning environment ‘safe-enough’ for this reflexivity work to take place. The contribution of the collaborative, experiential groups to this process is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes

  1 Kristeva's distinction between the Semiotic and the Symbolic has strong similarities with Damasio's distinction between core and extended consciousness (Nicholls, 2006). There is also a strong similarity between both of these theories and McGilchrist's view of the relationship between right and left hemispheres.

  2 Some students find the dialogic exercises more powerful, although there is evidence that the semiotic exercises loosen up the psyche, thus preparing the ground for changes that take place through the dialogic.

  3 Holub draws on Turner and Pöppel (1983).

  4 Autodiegetic is used where the narrator is the main protagonist, and homodiegetic where the narrator is one of a number of characters (Genette, 1980). The term ‘diegesis’ derives from Plato and has come to mean ‘the world of the story’ (Porter Abbott, 2002: 68).

  5 Stella is in the midst of a very painful relationship break-up at this point.

  6 It is also visible in other dialogic exercises, such as ‘imagining the reader’ (see Hunt, 2004b).

  7 The term ‘storyworld’ is used by David Herman to ‘suggest something of the worldcreating power of narrative’, which he feels is not sufficiently implied by the more standard term ‘discourse’. Storyworlds are ‘[mental] models built up on the basis of cues contained in narrative discourse’ (Herman, 2002: 14, 17). This is a very useful way of thinking about what is happening cognitively in Rhiannon's story.

  8 The term ‘focalisation’ has come to replace ‘point of view’ in narrative theory under the influence of Genette's distinction between ‘who sees’ in the narrative and ‘who speaks’ (Jahn, 2007). In Genette's view the narrator cannot be a focaliser unless he or she is also a character, that is, inside the storyworld (auto- or homodiegetic) (Genette, 1980). However, in Mieke Bal's re-working of Genette's ideas a narrator who is outside of the storyworld, that is, heterodiegetic, can also be a focaliser. Thus an auto- or homodiegetic narrator is an ‘internal focaliser’ and a heterodiegetic narrator is an ‘external focaliser’ (Bal, 1985). Bal's approach supports assumptions I have long been making about cognitive processes in creative life writing.

  9 This is a term used to describe the ‘implied author’ in the literary text, which is regarded by some (e.g. Booth, 1991: 73) as the author's ‘second self’ and therefore a personal presence in the text, and by others (e.g. Rimmon-Kenan, 1996: 88) as an impersonal presence. However, there seems to be general agreement that the implied author can be distinguished from the narrator and the characters (Herman et al., 2005: 240), although in heterodiegetic narration this is sometimes difficult (Stockwell, 2002: 42).

10 As they are, of course, of the reader's psyche, which is Gerrig's main concern.

11 Siegel suggests that it is formulating a linear self-narrative that facilitates reciprocity between the hemispheres (Siegel, 2007: 309), but I would argue that the development of a narrative stance and the accompanying sense of feeling whole are more important.