Insights, Epiphanies, and Working Through: on Healing, Self-Healing, and Creativity in the Writer and The Analyst

Abstract

The author discusses similarities and differences between the way that writers and psychoanalysts go about their respective tasks. He raises questions about the role of creativity and its sources in both these vocations. He illustrates his points by relating a brief clinical vignette from his work with a patient who was a writer, and by sharing the description of a creative story he wrote many years before becoming an analyst. After presenting a story by James Joyce as also illustrative of these themes, the author concludes by comparing and contrasting the inner experiences of the writer and the analyst.