Healing Pain through Writing

Review of Judith Harris, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. Paperback ISBN 0791456846, xv, 304 pages, $27.95. This book is part of the SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture, edited by Henry Sussman.

For decades I have carried out my own writing to heal, journal writing, in times of angst when I needed not a confidante but a reflective catharsis. This personal writing has yielded a record that has, with re-reading, alerted me to painful cycles that were in need of change. As I approached Judith Harris’ Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, I was already one of the converted. Needing no particular convincing, I took up the book while vacationing on the Amalfi coast. I was buoyed by heart-stopping views of the Bay of Salerno and the surrounding mountains, a garden elegant with roses and calla lilies, visits from a curious cat, and the distant notes of a flute. In this healing atmosphere, I began to read about Plath, Gilman, Keats, Kenyon and others, and their poetic journeys through pain.

Harris’ premise is that poetry writing is like psychoanalysis in that it can facilitate both healing and a way of constructing a self. The written word is the material and the act of writing is akin to the process of psychotherapy that involves uncovering unconscious material as well as resistance to that process. Dr. Harris has assembled a series of essays into chapters that consist of “literary representations of psychic pain” and discussions of “pedagogical ramifications of using and teaching personal writing in academic classes.” Harris says she did not intend to link the chapters but explains that the authors she cites 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” (p. xi). The book embraces two tensions: the academic in relation to the personal world and Harris’ own journey — both academic and personal — through psychoanalysis.

Harris says that “(T)o heal, the poet or patient must learn to be present to the painful material she would ordinarily avoid” (p. 181). She challenges herself to do the same by including a chapter and afterword that describe her personal struggles with pain. About the process, she says, “Writers who write about states of mind, as well as being, do not avoid their own pain, but seek to signify it for others, as they do for themselves, and survive it” (p. 36).

Harris’ personal story is very important to the book and to her work with students writing about pain. She is a woman and writer who has experienced her own journey through mental illness and who has fought breast cancer. Still, it seems she had difficulty exposing herself because, when in Chapter 13 she reveals some of her history of pain, she asks the reader not to consider the story of her mental illness to be confessional writing but rather a frank discussion of depressive anxiety. She defines confessional writing as a type of talking cure and a way of clearing repressed or traumatic material. I sense her struggle as she exempts her writing from that sphere, even as she discloses pain-filled parts of her life.

Harris has organized her book into three sections. Part I, titled “Speaking Pain: Women, Psycho-

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 analysis, and Writing,” includes essays on the healing effects of writing about pain in which she focusses on some women’s resistance to psychoanalysis as it embodies patriarchal, oppressive figures. Harris says that the authors she discusses have “used writing as a therapeutic outlet, although that may not have been their intention.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath, who are featured in Chapters 2 and 4, were attempting to get out from under the shadow of patriarchal figures in their lives. Harris says that Plath was determined to “mine the quarry of her unconscious and get to the root of her anguish.” As Harris noted, “not all personal writing is healing or assimilating for the psyche” (p. 12). It seems that this was true for Plath who, despite knowing well how to signify pain, and despite her attempts to heal through both psycho-

analysis and writing, succumbed to suicide. Yet in her attempts to heal herself, she left behind a rich validating legacy for her readers.

As for Gilman, her health improved when she broke free of the isolation of her bedroom, to which she had been assigned as a cure for her depression. But was it the content of her writing or the act of freeing herself to do what she needed to do, that relieved the depression? Harris says that Gilman “was forthcoming about the therapeutic effects of her writing ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’“ (p. 8) and was one of the first to consider her writing to be therapeutic. Gilman’s resolve to break free of her bedroom was probably galvanized through her writing.

Harris also writes about the case of Freud’s patient, Dora, whom some say Freud pressured into accepting his interpretation. In discussing Dora, Gilman, and Plath, Harris is sensitive to the criticisms about psychoanalysis from the women themselves and from contemporary writers.

She proceeds with her analyses through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian theory into Part II, “Soul-Making: Conflict and the Construction of Identity.” This is an exploration of aspects of the construction of the self. Harris discusses the use of language as mask to give voice to something the poet could not express as herself and the notion of a mirror image as a model for self-identity. She discusses John Keats’ adaptation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche and the cultural issues evident in the poetry of Michael Harper. She delves into the poetry of Jane Kenyon wherein Kenyon expresses her belief in the comforting presence of God as death approaches. She explores the dimensions and layering of Kenyon’s poetic voice as the poet grapples with the falling light of her own life.

In Part III, Harris switches her focus to her work as a teacher of creative writing and explores the theory and practice of this work. She says that her guiding principle for collecting the essays has been personal, not theoretical. She wants to discover what it is that links her isolated experience to that of others and she wants to reconcile her “history as a former patient with my [sic] work as a reader of Freud.” She says she used her study of psychoanalytic theory to rise above her own condition. She notes her changing relationship to psychoanalysis over time, defending psychoanalysis in the end, saying that despite errors along the way it has opened dialogue for examining cultural and political issues. She says, “Social problems have psychological roots and all intervention begins with examining those roots” (p. 251). Her linking of social aspects with psychological trauma is essential, since trauma is the product of a social world that supports and promotes notions of power of a few over many.

Dr. Harris is a thoughtful and insightful scholar of literature and psychoanalysis, and relates her thoughts on the intersection of them with eloquence. She also has a personal story to tell that supports and furthers her thesis with an immediacy that academic writing, alone, cannot always accomplish.

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