Judith Harris – Signifying Pain Constructing and Healing The Self through Writing
preface
This collection is about the writing process and about writers who have used their literary expression as a means of signifying their pain and, through that signification, have found a better way to construct and heal themselves.
Some of our greatest literature—from Keats’s odes to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry—have been, in essence, attempts to use literary expression as a form of self-renovation and therapy. Writing through pain is an exigent process, which more often than not, offers profound relief for the writer as well as the larger community.
We share a common bond, whether we call it empathy, or compassion, or simple identification with another’s radiant sadness.
This book confirms that literature is not merely a systematic discourse, but involves the underwriting of the whole person in all of his or her emotional complexity.
These chapters deal not only with literary representations of psychic
pain, but also with the pedagogical ramifications of using and teaching personal writing in academic classes.
Such a prospectus for writing about pain and its therapeutic effects on both the writer and his or her social world involves turning to authoritative critics who have addressed the mutual dependencies of literature and psychoanalysis.
Therefore, the works of Freud and Lacan are indispensable to this book, as are the theoretical perspectives of numerous clinicians, critical readers, and teachers of writing.
Although I did not intend to unite these chapters, I have found that the authors themselves are linked by their willingness to expose themselves to the disorder of everyday life to make from it some meaningful order in a calculated art form.
And yet it would be naïve not to acknowledge that writing about painful
experiences is at least one way of repairing the self by reconstructing personal traumas or crises to better contend with them.
In a post-Freudian age in which the “talking cure” has begotten a “writing cure,” more writers analogize personal pain and political horror in an attempt to record and renovate the self through a shared language of suffering.
In accounts by writers, we learn how arduous a task it is to draw strength from introspection and how one must be willing to admit the dark
power within that works for good or for ill. This results in alchemy of the
deepest and most intense sort—alchemy achieved by the hammering away
of the inmost solid block of soul into an airy thinness, a gold vapor.
Writer and psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison reflects upon suffering the highs and lows of manic-depression in An Unquiet Mind: “Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne’s bell tolling softly that ‘Thou must die,’ one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.”
Indeed, psychic suffering is a heavy burden because it refuses the future, corresponding with stillness at the center of being, although it is a terrible stillness.
The literary work is an anti-burden because it is able to traverse boundaries with a weightlessness of the always forward-looking: the word, the melody, and the ineluctable step into air. Language is a body that mourns and is simultaneously mourned; it is what we trust in most, but never completely
. Always approximate, language will never quite burn a hole in the cloth; it is only day-heat as opposed to the conflagration of fire.
This is a good thing, although it may occur only sporadically, or briefly, for the writer who tries to induce it.
Because psychic affliction often involves a withdrawal from the objects of the world, a dissatisfaction with ordinary things, writing helps writers pay attention to objects outside of their own suffering. Attention dissolves incertitude.
The crucial moment is not the moment of insight that comes from the thinker, but from that which is thought about.
Contemplating things that offer themselves up to a certain movement of mind, and incantation, can be therapeutic as well as restorative.
We say things more than once when we want to keep them alive.
A healing process in which the artist’s testimony endeavors to reconnect fragments of a patient’s buried history will ultimately help to unify the divergent body of literary expression included in “painful” literature.
How literary artists have used painful material raised by the unconscious
for more prudent self-comprehension can be instructive to all writers and teachers of writing. Our students are not strangers to painful experiences.
Psychoanalytic composition theorist Marian M. MacCurdy quotes the contemporary poet Lucille Clifton talking to a room full of educators and clinicians:
“You need to know that every pair of eyes facing you in the classroom has probably seen something that you could not endure”
Pain is a communal experience. One finds its attributes in the solid forms of nature.
Like the wind in winter, it leaves its dents in the snow, redistributing its weight, altering us in ways that are identifiable but ungoverned.
What we make of pain through our own signatures is what makes pain useful to others.
Many more shared precepts seem to link the chapters in this book.
Both poets and patients in psychoanalysis construct self-descriptive narratives narratives that often originate in childhood.
Also, because many of the chapters deal with writers who have been in one way or another traumatized or oppressed, it is reasonable to suggest that an issuing of the poetic self (derived from the social realm) is more difficult for the subjugated or politically disenfranchised.
Hence the Nobel Prize–winning poet from the West Indies, Derek
Walcott, his African-American contemporary Michael S. Harper, and confessional women poets such as Sexton and McCarriston, have a special problem of indirection and difference; they can express themselves only in opposition to (while being subjected by) the hegemonic culture, father, psychiatrist, authority, whose language they must borrow to make themselves not only visible but also understandable.
.Sylvia Plath, too, appropriates the authoritative language of patriarchy to transform her domestic realm into mythic allegory, capturing the reality of a woman’s “imprisonment” to find the best means of liberating her.
In doing so, she creates a world within her poetry in which the condition of female wildness and madness, aloof from male governing, becomes acceptable if not desirable.
The writers included here share the desire within each of us to overcome
our isolation and to see and be seen by the other in a relation of authentic
connectedness.
The desire for mutual recognition, as especially expressed by Walcott in Another Life is the foundation of our social being and is as fundamental
to our sense of who we are.
Writers are not only dependent on personal histories, but also on a specific epoch or moment in social history and the legacies of nation and speech.
Without such an accounting of collective suffering and endurance, we lose our moral vision and risk slipping into solopsistic relativism.
The best writing begins with an inescapable relationship to the universal and society.
There is always an eager exchange between internal comprehension and outer phenomena.
Balancing this exchange often involved what Coleridge always contended was the test of the imaginative writer’s ability—melding together the divisions of our world and our hearts.
Contemporary poetry, particularly under the influence of the modernist
poet Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, derives much of its power and impetus from psychiatric themes incorporated into personal narratives.
As Lowell himself demonstrated, one may write privately and intimately and still give resonance to public concerns.
Both literature and psychoanalysis can provide insights into human behavior and what structures it, opening up an awareness of what constructs desire in the psychic and political realms of human experience.
Understanding that we are often limited in our ability to control some prejudicial conduct or manner, much less correct it, may be the first step in improving our existing social institutions—as well as refining our definitions of work, friendship, and community.
Postmodern challenges to meaning, self-presence, identity, and congruity have cast a skeptical shadow over the very idea of analysis
whether it is psychodynamic or literary, at its core.
Is the signifier a historical, eternal event or is the signifier simply what we will it to be?
Are we somehow so narcissistically invested in the text that we are unable to read through our own projections and idealizations that tend to conceal the author’s meaning or intention?
These writers seem to go beyond that limitation in two important ways.
First, they suggest that poets and creative writers move readers because they share and elaborate on unconscious fantasies that would be difficult or dangerous to act out in reality.
Second, they depict the mastery or resolution of their own conflicts by making the writing process itself self-unified: joining aspects of the various self, childhood with adulthood, suppression with mastery, victimization with revenge, cruelty with compassion, love with hatred.
Although we may agree that the self, as a concept, is fragmented or dislocated, this does not necessarily exclude the fact that this self can speak through a narrative that is revealing of what is most human, even when what is most human is disheartening or disturbing.
Poetic or artistic genesis, when infused with melancholic and mercurial
moods, can become a powerful crucible for imagination and experience.
The limitation of mortality as a borderline between pain and mercy is not
only the raw seamwork of anguished writing, but also its suture.
With its emphasis on the unconscious and on what one does not yet
know about one’s self until it is uttered or written down, psychoanalysis offers a view of the writing subject
in process. Rather than seeing the writer as someone who is chameleonlike and changing with each protean discourse he adopts, the more holistic approach of psychoanalysis enables us to view the individual as a core being whose identity is fluid, mercurial, but selfconstant.
The writer unravels the mystery of being through the drama of writing whether that writing is overtly “imaginative” or frankly testimonial.
This process can be an instructive venture within academic writing praxis.
Still, confessional writing, like the psychoanalytic encounter, is a complicated interplay of subject and object positions.
From a Lacanian view, any speech act marks a continual dissociation and disunification of integrated identity.
The human subject is always contingent, always ontologically insecure. One alternates between the level of emergent ideas and the stepping back in order to observe those ideas, through and for the Other. For Lacan, the function of self-reflection, which he discusses in relation to childhood, is used to “establish a relation between the organism and its reality.”
Yet reality is not separable from the illusory identifications we impose upon it to make sense of our world.
We are seen as we seek to see others: as whole and representative of an identity that is as elusive as any reflection, such as when we peer closely into another person’s eyes and see our convex likenesses imprisoned there.
Identity, Lacan suggests, is an infinitely regressive and self-perpetuating
mirage, which we base on how we imagine others see us.
Hence, we are often at the mercy of outward representations with which we personally identify, yet we are unconscious of doing that.
Personal writing can be a means of creating a stable identity and regaining ego strength lost in crisis or infirmity.
In Lowell’s poem “Thanksgiving’s Over,” the narrator, feeling guilt at having his wife committed, recognizes that he is not only complicit in her imprisonment, but that it is his as well. He cannot escape her purview from which he ultimately judges himself:
And the bars Still caged her window—half a foot from mine, It mirrored mine:
My window’s window.
Throughout the discussions of these writers, particularly that of Gilman’s
and Walcott’s works, we find similar expressions of confinement—in which
inward reflection is the only view outward, and the window or gaze is an
endless, but always enclosed, circuit of receding projections.
The window only gains its definition as a window through the consciousness of the artist who designates it a window, rather than being merely a cut through the wall.
For the writer and for the patient, there is always a question of the view of the viewer: the difference between seeing and looking.
Seeing a view is always intentional.
Consciousness must pierce through the obdurate surface of things as they are, singular and separate, to begin to integrate those dissimilar parts into a unity that means something both to the writer and to his or her reader.
It is then that the act of writing—particularly when writing is about pain—can facilitate a careful process of self-construction and renewal. ~Judith Harris, Signifying pain Constructing and Healing The Self through Writing Page xi-xv
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