Straddling Two Worlds: The writer and the psychoanalytic psychotherapist (original) (raw)

The autobiographer tells her story for many reasons, including the wish to communicate to others what it is like to be in her shoes. The psychoanalytic psychotherapist on the other hand, keeps her story to herself in order to make a space for the therapy. This is an ideal only. In practice, therapists reveal things about themselves directly and indirectly but it is important that such direct revelations not occur gratuitously and not without reference to their meaning for the person in therapy. In December 2008 I presented a paper to an audience of psychoanalytic colleagues on the topic of narcissism, autobiography and what happens when the therapist writes a memoir. The fall out from this presentation – marked polarisation of views on whether or not I had violated professional boundaries – is still under debate. In this paper I aim to explore the complexity of my audience’s response in the context of the autobiographical elements that may have triggered it, particularly my references within the paper to childhood sexual abuse. Incest is not merely an intrapsychic experience, nor simply a narrative construction. Historically and up to the present day, it continues to be problematic in the telling, as incest narratives are deemed unreliable. There is uncertainty about what actually happened and also difficulty in securing an empathic audience. To this extent, the power of incest lies in the persistent belief that incest happens to other people – the poor, the coloured, the unworthy – not to us. To talk about incest therefore as an event in the life of the therapist is to add a dimension that goes beyond a mere breach in the rules against therapist self-disclosure, into the realm of taboo. This resonates within the history of the psychoanalytic professional family, Freud’s efforts to set clear guidelines and the inevitable transgressions and boundary violations that have followed. When the therapist is also a writer of autobiography and her writing enters the public sphere and is therefore potentially accessible by her patients, an added dimension enters the work, especially in the telling of incest, which I consider in light of further developments both in the therapeutic field and also in autobiographical theory. This paper addresses the collision of these two worlds, of autobiography and therapy, in the telling of incest, when the witness, is both writer and therapist and there follows an immediate call to be silent.