Posted by badhaircut on February 9, 2005, at 7:01:31
There's a discussion in today's London Guardian between a psychoanalyst and a poet about the links between writing and therapy. The author/poet Blake Morrison ("As If" and "Things My Mother Never Told Me") said writers often sneer at the idea of writing-as-therapy. But his personal experiences proved to him otherwise:
Just before reading a poem, a student in his poetry class said, "'By the way, I should tell you that I had the bath running and the razor on the side, and I was about to do myself in when I suddenly thought, no, I'll go and write a poem instead' – a remark that completely disarmed our literary-critical analysis of his poem, needless to say, but which also made me realize that using writing as self-expression can, sometimes, be literally life-saving."
The analyst is Susie Orbach – Princess Di's therapist and also an author ("Fat Is a Feminist Issue").
The discussion is free (for now) at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,6000,1409042,00.html
poster:badhaircut
thread:455312
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050118/msgs/455312.html