Writing Analytically: The Story Is Never the Story
A course for psychoanalytic candidates and clinicians, taught by Chelsea Wagner, LCSW
In writing, as in psychoanalysis, the work happens in return: returning to what confuses us, what won't let go, what haunts, what is hungry and still needs something from us. Revision is not just polishing. It is a way of coming back to psychic material until it begins to show us what we could not see the first time.
This course begins from the premise that writing is not simply a way to record analytic work after the fact; instead, writing is one of the ways analytic work continues. How often have you written something up for supervision and only then thought, ah, that's what was happening, or, oh, I should have said something else entirely? When we write about patients, we often begin to see what was enacted, what we felt but did not yet know we felt, what we knew but could not yet think.
In this sense, writing becomes a second analytic space: a place where experience can be held, symbolized, revised, and slowly transformed. The writer, like the analyst, begins to see the story under the story.
In this course, we read memoirists such as Laymon, Yuknavitch, Ensler, Karr, Nelson, and Zauner alongside analytic writers such as Ogden, Seligman, Richman, and Naiburg. We study how writing can move experience from dissociation toward representation, from enactment toward symbolization, from private confusion toward communicable form. We look for the mother inside the food, the body inside the sentence, the patient inside the reverie, the analyst inside the clinical note.
And don't worry: this is not a writing course for writers. It is not about polish, publication, or writing the notes your supervisor wants. But you will write. Each participant brings one small piece of writing to revise over the length of the course, and we do writing prompts in class. The aim is to discover what the writing knows. This course teaches writing not as explanation, but as analytic return: a way of staying with the clinical encounter until the story under the story begins to speak.
Format
- Six sessions, in person or online
- For psychoanalytic candidates and clinicians; no writing experience needed
- Taught for candidates at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute, and offered to the wider clinical community
Bring this course to your program
I'm glad to teach this course for psychoanalytic institutes, training programs, and clinical groups.