Abstract
For me an essential part of writing has been playing with ideas and words. Writing is the playground of the imagination. Over the years I have written articles playing with efforts to understand the process and therapeutic action of play in the analysis of children and adults (Ablon, 2000, 2001, 2014). These explorations started very early in my life.
Like many children, I spent enjoyable hours playing with my toys. I sent pirates on adventures and soldiers into epic battles. Figures reenacted tense meetings between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In my play there were surprising turns of events. I found that playing with words as in all play took me to surprising places. As Einstein said, “combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought” (Hadamard, 1945, p. 144). Much later I learned that the element of surprise for the analyst and the patient provides conviction, which is not there when the analyst is too far ahead of the patient in shaping or interpreting material.
As far back as I can remember this powerful interest in play also extended to playing with words and eventually writing. As I wrote I discovered surprising things about the explorations of Vasco da Gama, and the present state of Nigeria. This also applied to creative writing. I recall a sonnet I tried to write according to my sense of Shakespeare. One couplet turned out to be, “I planned in secret how to kill another, only to find that I had killed my brother.” At the time there was a spark of discovery and recognition. In high school after a painful break up with a girlfriend I wrote a poem for English class about a girl being like a cold. It was a success in class, but I discovered my anger and the long miserable course of heartbreak.
Through writing I discovered different parts of myself. Assignments in high school involved writing some fiction in the style and voice of writers such Hemingway, Jane Austen, or Faulkner. When I wrote a professional article about home visiting, I felt like a commando. When I wrote an article about a new theory of depression, I felt like an explorer. When I wrote an article arguing for the value of analysis during pregnancy, I felt like I was presenting a case in court.
In my scientific writing I like to provide clinical process in addition to theoretical considerations. The clinical material allows my reader to play with the actual words involved in the analysis. In this way the reader can to some extent make up their own mind. The reader can play with the choice of words, sound, rhythm, metaphor, and deeper resonances. In discussions of what I write this stimulates new discoveries. In our analytic work it is as important how we say it as what we say. It is not only the content of what is said that is mutative but the timing, tone, feeling, word choice, rhythm, meter, metaphor, and the many nuances of word play. Writing and doing analysis are braided together. They involve many similar characteristics such as choice of words, metaphor, symbol, imagery, and rhythm.
As time passed it became clearer to me that I wrote to try to understand and master difficult, even traumatic experiences. I wrote a paper about the analysis of an adolescent patient who was silent for almost four years, a very stressful experience in many ways (Ablon, 2024). Language and writing bring order out of chaos. In my poetry free-write group I suddenly began writing about medical school and medical internship. The material poured forth with a rekindling and attempt to master overwhelming experiences. This evolved into my third book of poems, Night Call (Ablon, 2011).
We memorialize in language. It became increasingly clear to me that I wrote to recapture and to grieve powerful experiences with people in my life and painful losses. This is true in life, writing, and powerful experiences as an analyst. It is an effort at restitution. I came to grips with this in the poem (p. 58): Dr. S. Drives Us Back Today he has taught us How to interview the heart, how to ask it: Are you full of sadness? Are you broken? Have the scars not healed? How did this happen to you? And were you broken before that? And before that? We sit in the back of his Impala, the three of us blown like embers. At the red light of warm October, his white hair Sighs like a sail becalmed. From my place in the middle, My knees touching the seat I ask,
“Do we have
To grieve
Every day?”
“Yes, Ablon,
Everyday”
One of my esteemed senior colleagues, Gerald Adler, asked if he could print the poem, frame it and hang it in his office. I felt my scientific writing and poetry had been of some use in the world. The Japanese poet Enn Matsushita (2020) puts it well, “If you leave something for your grandchildren, it can’t be just things. It should be your thoughts, how you lived your life” (p. 70). For me these grandchildren include family, friends, colleagues, and patients.
We memorialize in language. Do I write for immortality? When I am dead, I will never know if someone might be moved by a paper or a poem. I was often told how my brief paper, “Doubt” (Ablon, 2008) was used in many courses and brought up when I lectured and taught courses. When I worked on my paper about the silent patient, I discovered the work of Sacha Nacht (1964) who wrote about silence as an integrative factor. Although largely unknown today his writings were very helpful to me. I Imagine in some remote stack in a library someone will come across papers or poems I have written and find them meaningful. Along with an unconscious fantasy of immortality, consciously I resonate more with Ted Kooser (2024), who writes in his poem “Legacy”: I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you, to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written, to remember my people as if they’d been yours— to flesh out in evocative detail my parents, my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts— knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me to remember them, the poems I’ve written will have to go it alone. I owe my people so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not immortality—a few more good years in the light
Writing is thrilling and healing. In my writing I hope to flesh out in evocative detail my patients. In those papers as well as this piece I have tried to persuade you, and I hope they will enjoy “a few more good years in the light.”
