Write On!

An Advice Column for Writers: Fetching & Name Your Concept

By Suzi Naiburg
Belmont, MA, USA

Editors’ Note:  We hope to make Write On! a regular column in the eNews.   Suzi Naiburg, author of the forthcoming book,  Structure and Spontaneity of Clinical Prose:  A Writer’s Guide for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists (Routledge, 2013), has been helping clinicians get over writer’s block and get to the business of writing for several years.  In this column she will offer tips and small writing exercises to get the creative juices flowing.   These can be tried in any language!  

Here are two warm-up exercises for you to try that were debuted at my IARPP webinar and New York workshop. After you’ve stretched and limbered up with these, you may find that you feel a little more playful and daring than you did before.

The two exercises are meant to be done in quick succession and in the order they are presented, because the creative momentum you generate from the first could ignite the second. Do each one quickly, without thinking too much. Like brainstorming, don’t censor yourself or edit what you write. Just let the words spill out and see what happens. The faster you go, the more likely you will be to surprise yourself.

1.  Fetching

Robert Frost praises a writer who forms an “unmade word” or “takes a word from where it lies and moves it to another place” to create a phrase by the practice he calls “fetching” (Collected Poems, Prose, & Play, 1995, p. 695).

Start by picking a therapeutic process, feeling, or attribute (as your stem word)  that applies to you or one of your patients and pair it with an unusual modifier, fetching a word from where it usually lies and moving it to another place. To help spark your creativity, try generating a few phrases using the same stem. Then shift to another stem and see what happens.  For example:

              Empathy + furious = furious empathy
              Empathy + outrageous = outrageous empathy
              Kindness + wicked = wicked kindness
              Transferences + tender = tender transferences.

2. Name Your Concept

Analytic writers use language in a variety of ways to name concepts and give titles to their papers and books.  Some use words that strike an evocative chord immediately; others create words that gain resonance over time. Some use wit; others use everyday language to create new meanings. Below is a short list. I’m sure you can think of more.

“Unthought known” (Bollas)
“Unfelt known” (David Wallin)
“Relational k(not)” (Barbara Pizer)
“Obstacle—relations” (Adam Philips)
“Basic Fault” (Balint)
“Damaged Bonds” (Eigen)

In this exercise, you’ll be naming a concept in the same spirit of play you developed in the first exercise, using the practice of fetching in the process.

a. Start by bringing to mind your clinical work with one of your patients and think about some aspect of your patient’s life or your work that you want to illustrate. I immediately think of a patient “who leaves the party too early.”

b. With the phenomenon in mind that you want to illustrate, create a phrase to describe it or help your readers understand it by fetching words from another place. “Premature rejection” popped into my mind.

c. Now bump your thinking up another notch to a slightly higher level of abstraction and name an idea or concept that might account for what you see. If you can keep your playful spirit alive while fetching words from another place, you might come up with another arresting phrase.

In my example, I see my patient taking steps to create rejection as she walks out of the dating scene before she’s actually in it. From premature rejection, my mind jumped to the idea of narcissistic self-injury. If I stopped to think about how I got there, I might have flashed through narcissistic vulnerability and narcissistic injury, but I wasn’t conscious of making those steps. And I don’t want to insist that my associations have to be logical or linear or that the phrase that I coin has to make sense in a conventional way. If I did, I might not discover anything new!

You could also use your own life as material for reflection. What phrases describe matters of psychological significance?  For example--sibling absence, inadvertent betrayal, young jealousy. What happens if you bump your thinking up one more notch to a higher level of abstraction? What pops out? A striking phrase that might apply to someone else as well?

One of the best times to try these exercises is when you’re just waking up, taking a walk, or relaxing, because your associations are usually freer and more unconventional in these self-states. One of my workshop participants dubbed her early morning epiphanies “pillow thoughts.”

In the next issue of the eNEWS, the editors would like to publish a selection of IARPP members’ responses to these exercises—pillow thoughts and otherwise—so please send yours in both your first language and in English to sallyrudoy@gmail.com by October 1, 2012.

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