Why Writing is a Form of Personal Therapy by Ian Haight, author of Magnolia and Lotus
Ian Haight was a co-organizer and translator for the UN’s global poetry readings held annually in Pusan, Korea, from 2002-4. He has been awarded 5 translation grants from the Daesan Foundation, Korea Literature Translation Institute, and Baroboin Buddhist Foundation for the translation, editing, promotion, and publication of Korean literature. Ian is the editor of Zen Questions and Answers from Korea (2010), and along with T’ae-yŏng Hŏ, the translator ofBorderland Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun Hŏ (2009) both from White Pine Press. Ian’s translations, essays, poems, and interviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Chronicle, Barrow Street and Hyundae Buddhist News, among many other publications.
For more information, please visit ianhaight.com.
His latest book is Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim
Why Writing is a Form
of Personal Therapy
When writers or readers
think of writing as personal therapy the quick image is of a writer pouring his
or her own heart out onto the page, expunging all the pain, guilt, or emotional
blockage that otherwise could not be released. As a therapeutic process, the
writer works through these emotional or psychological issues and so comes to
live in peace with them, if not resolve them. The writer may enter into this
kind of therapeutic process fully aware of the engagement with issues through
writing, and may have a sense that the purpose is to somehow be made whole, or
to survive. This is what feels obvious with the idea of writing as a form of
personal therapy, but is there something more, something not so obvious?
In the
1970s Harold Bloom, a prominent literary critic, wrote a book titled The
Anxiety of Influence. The book presents a theory based on the ideas of
Sigmund Freud. According to Bloom’s use of Freud, writers are people who
experience a kind of awe when reading. This awe is so powerful it causes a
writer to want to re-create the things which inspired the awe, but this of
course is impossible because no writer can write what inspired the awe (can I
write “Leaves of Grass?” No, only Walt Whitman did that.). This dilemma creates
a kind of anxiety in writers, and so it causes a writer to write—to attempt to
re-create the writing which inspired the awe even though it is impossible to do
so. Writing in this sense is a kind of
neurosis, but could it also be a kind of therapy?
The idea that writing is
a form of neurosis is one that’s been hotly challenged by writers. As artists, writers want to believe they are
fully in control of or in some sense originate the aesthetic decisions they are
making. Writers decide who characters are, what will happen to characters, where
characters live, and what words characters will say. Bloom would argue that in
some sense this is true, but the decisions about plotting, character, language,
etc. are filtered through a kind of neurosis structure that is motivating the
person to write in the first place. In this sense, the whole purpose of writing
for the artist is to create a compensation for what the artist cannot truly
create: the writer-artist writes to create a personal trope of, say, Blood
Meridian because he or she could not ever create, word for word, Blood
Meridian. An artist-writer, however, internalizes and then tropes whatever
was so awe-inspiring about Blood Meridian, and does this repeatedly to
create a personalized work of writing.
Writing in this sense isn’t necessarily a form of therapy, because
according to Freud and Bloom, writing is a neurotic act that will endlessly
repeat.
Entering
therapy to cease writing might seem silly and certainly isn’t something Harold Bloom
would want to encourage. According to his theory, some of the best writing
humankind has created is the result of this anxiety-influence-repression-neurosis.
I would suggest that the need or desire to write can in fact go away, and
through writing one can deal with the kind of neurosis structures that Bloom
claims motivates writing. If we examine Bloom’s own examples, this appears to
be true. The Victorian poet Robert Browning, according to Bloom and many
others, clearly wrote under a repressed influence of Romantic poet Perce Shelly.
Later, as many other critics have said, Browning was able to overcome this
influence. How did this happen? Because he wrote the poem “Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came,” a poem he wrote after repeatedly writing under the influence
of Shelly. After that poem, Browning never again wrote under the influence of
Shelly.
Looking
at Browning, writing, in a deep psychological sense, is a form of therapy.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we write to engage the things we fear or
desire—or perhaps a combination of the two. The things we fear or desire may be
the awe that comes from incredibly good writing, or it may be from something we
experienced outside a book. It could be growing up in poverty that makes one
desire to write books solely for the purpose of money. Whatever the origin of
the motivation, it also appears true that as a form of therapy, writing can be a
help to resolving our innermost fears and desires.
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