Workshops were taken up by dance, mime and theatre groups in New York in the 1960s and were used at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1960s and 1970s when actors, directors and writers would meet to talk, to experiment, and to improvise. These were not rehearsals of already written scripts, but loosely organised, intense meetings where nothing precise had to happen. This, I guess, was almost the opposite of education. There was no information to be conveyed, nothing which had to be put into the participants, only ‘ideas’ which might be discovered in a collective experiment.
‘Workshops’ — groups of people who meet in the hope of discovering something which might be of use — can be a powerful tool for emotional contact and learning, and can be adapted in many ways. Writing is a particularly good use for workshop time because despite their individuality writers have a lot in common and, in the end, all writers write to be heard by others.
You get to be a better writer not only by making more beautiful sentences, but by going deeper into your experience and finding a unique form for it. It is there, at the most fundamental level, that all human experience is similar and where you link up with others.
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In writing at the moment, there seems to be a demand for instruction. Recently, in New York, where I hadn’t been for five years, I visited the bookshops and headed for the ‘writing’ section. Up to ten years ago there would only have been a handful of writing guides, confined to the reference section, not far from the etiquette books. Now there was an entire shelf of them. There was writing from the body, heart, soul, unconscious, and, it seemed, from all the other parts of the anatomy, suitable or not.
In the 1970s my father would study the writing guides that were available — he was a keen self-improver, and loved ‘wisdom’ and ‘guidance’. He came from a big family and, I assume, had to compete for attention. I read these guides too, though mostly the writers I’d look to for tips would be Somerset Maugham (A Writer’s Notebook) and Henry Miller (‘Reflections on Writing’ from The Wisdom of the Heart). There was also a little book of thirty-five pages by Ray Bradbury, published by Capra Press in 1974 (though I believe it was written in the mid-1950s), called Zen and the Art of Writing, which I still keep on my desk, with my father’s signature inside, and the date, 19 August 1974.
The other book my father and I enjoyed was Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery, mostly because we were interested in sport and how its psychology might be applied to creativity. I remember my mother’s puzzlement over our fascination with a book about archery. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she’d say. ‘A couple of Robin Hoods?’
Collecting and reading these books is, for me, a way of finding inspiration and of wasting time when I could be writing, or of being close to my father, depending on how I’m feeling.
Most of them say similar things. They recommend free writing — free association by hand, you could call it — as a way of outwitting internalised censorship. This is an echo of Freud’s most important request to his patients, which was that they say whatever came into their mind, however trivial, abhorrent or stupid. His only demand was that they speak as fully as possible, particularly if they found a thought trivial, abhorrent or stupid. This abandonment of consecutive or linear thought, the privileging of incoherence and verbal breakdown, in order to mine the realm of dreams and desire, became, for the surrealists, a style, and was the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. It is still the basis of most therapies and ‘talking’ cures. From a Freudian point of view articulacy is not a virtue; one should be suspicious of those who claim to know what they mean. It’s not that people aren’t intelligent, it’s that they deliberately, and with intelligence, hide the truth from themselves, and what is hidden dominates their lives. The hidden, which is raw, is of more use than the cooked.
Freud’s first biographer, Ernest Jones, makes an intriguing claim for the origin of the idea of free association. He says that Freud may have been inspired by an essay written in 1823 by Ludwig Borne — one of Freud’s favourite authors when young — with the excellent title of ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’.
Borne states: ‘Here follows the practical prescription I promised! Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head … and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have welled up in you. That is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.’
Such prescriptions reveal the proximity of writing to therapy, which is one of the things it can be used for. Certainly, at the moment, therapy seems to be the only progress myth there is to believe in. Therapy can help us endure and enjoy more; many teachers, healthcare workers and GPs are using writing in schools, prisons and hospitals in the way painting, drama, dance and music have been utilised in the past.
For me, writing is nourishing and a necessity, a place to commune with myself, to meditate and to be solitary without being lonely: ‘a third space’, as Winnicott calls it, between oneself and the world. For Winnicott, children’s fantasy often involves aggression; playing is an expression of, and mastering of, the anxiety involved in this. The child requires it as a kind of self-restoration. I recall one of my sons saying, after a day out, ‘but I haven’t played today!’ and he settled down, alone, with his cars, and played and talked to himself, until he was ready to be with others. Writers, too, can get irascible if they haven’t put in a few hours with themselves at their desk.
Most human enterprises are more or less therapeutic — ultimately good for us in intended ways. It’s hard to think of anything that couldn’t be counted as therapy, if therapy is seen as the attempt to replace one state of mind with another, preferred state. For adults, to play is to ‘do’ something with one’s anxieties, integrating them into the self, as opposed to leaving them frozen where they remain a dead area within the mind. In that sense writing is a release, which means not to think of those anxieties so much. No wonder writing is in demand as a vocation.
However, despite Freud’s liking for Borne, there are vital differences between therapy and literature. Writing cannot replace what is unique in therapy; in fact it may enforce a dangerous solitude or narcissism. The desire to write can be a problem if it fosters a fantasy of self-sufficiency, omnipotence and withdrawal. At least in a workshop there’s contact with others.
The Freudian patient’s monologue takes place in the presence of another, a trained witness, an ideal listener who never speaks of herself, and whom one is paying. This is not self-analysis but an alliance which helps the patient through the locked doors of the mind that otherwise would remain unopened. In the absence of this, writing as therapy might become merely circular or obsessional; there’s no other way out of the maze of ourselves. The therapist talks back to you in ways you can’t talk to yourself.