Potential Mascot

Why face confrontation when you can curl up like a ball and bounce down a rocky mountainside instead?
Adaptation is a beautiful thing.

Read more about the Venezuelan pebble toad here.

Tip o' the hat to Doctor Professor.

A "Cure" for Writing

In my last post, “Where the Problem Fixes You,” I wrote about an article that examined the potential benefits of depression. One of the claims in the article (and the study on which it’s based) is that writing promotes quicker resolution of depressive symptoms by allowing the writer to gain objectivity, insight, and control through the abreactive process of writing about one's troubles. This idea (commonly known as the “writing cure”) is not quite as new the adaptationist theories in which it plays a role.

The writing cure is a variant of the “talking cure,” a concept generally regarded as the basis of psychoanalysis. The term was coined, not by Freud, but by Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.” in the case histories), who was a young patient of Freud’s colleague, Josef Breuer. In 1880, Bertha and Breuer discovered together that regular discussions about her condition had the effect of reducing the severity of her symptoms. Through words, the limbic intelligence of the “underbrain” acquired the possibility of negotiation outside the self. In the analyst’s office, speech became the vehicle through which unconscious pressures could be shifted into consciousness, where they could then be examined, dealt with, and eventually mastered. Bertha Pappenheim dubbed this “the talking cure” or, in jest, “chimney sweeping.”

D. H. Lawrence might’ve come close to articulating the writing cure in 1913 when he famously wrote to a friend that “one sheds ones sicknesses in books — repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be a master of them.” To shed sickness in a book confers a purpose on sickness that it might otherwise lack, and that’s certainly remarkable. But I’d prefer to argue that the first person to write about the writing cure might well have been Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press had been publishing Freud’s papers since 1924, but Woolf herself reserved several years to pour scorn on the man before reading him in earnest (and meeting him!) in 1939, the same year she wrote the autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past.” In a much-discussed passage of the essay, Woolf describes how the experience of writing To the Lighthouse allayed her obsessive fixation on her mother’s death; she writes,

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

However deceptively cut-and-dried Woolf’s account might be here, this is the basic machinery of the writing cure. It makes some sense that people who write a lot are more likely to stumble upon a particular kind of writing that helps them — at least temporarily — alleviate pain. And yet, why is it that some of the strongest testimonies to the palliative effects of writing tend to come from writers who ultimately commit suicide? If writing is such a cure, why does it fail consistently enough to have earned its own term? It’s possible (in fact, likely) that participants in writing-cure studies and those who choose to write for a living are birds of a very different feather; but I’m going to go ahead and sit on that point for a minute.

James Kaufman, who coined the term “Sylvia Plath Effect,” coauthored a 2006 article in the Review of General Psychology titled “Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?” (note: link goes straight to a PDF file), which cites twenty-some studies on the way to the assertion that “writers are, generally, more likely to be mentally ill and die young than others in the arts,” with poets essentially blowing the curve with “higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and mortality than other writers.” (The New York Times covered the same topic in 2004, in an article titled “Going Early into That Good Night.”) Belief in the therapeutic power of writing, in light of such strong evidence against it, seems to come packaged with the notion that the majority of poets (and many writers) do it wrong.

Kaufman and Sexton, the authors of the 2006 article, argue that the key elements of writing-cure writing, done right, are expressivity and narrative; that is, in order to feel better, the writer needs to make an emotional investment and tell a coherent story. Language-level details might also help to clarify what’s ticking behind allegedly palliative writing. Linguistic-analysis software allows researchers to examine connections between the frequency with which a writer uses certain categories of words and the health benefits that the writer may or may not report (or demonstrate) after having written. (Categories of words, for example, might include “cognitive” words (“because,” “reason,” “result”), big words, self-references, interrogatives, positive and negative emotions, etc.) Linguistic analysis allows psychologists to make some pretty remarkable observations. For example:

Another finding is that writers who shift in their use of the first person singular (e.g., I, me, my) to third person (e.g., we, us, them) are better off than those who continue to use the first person singular (Stirman & Pennebaker, 2001). This suggests that a shift in perspective is an important element and is consistent with the idea of storytelling. The picture that emerges is that the healthy writer is telling an evolving story and using emotion while doing it. . . . Conversely, a shift toward usage of the first-person singular may indicate a change in mental health. An analysis of the works of Kurt Cobain, John Cheever, and Cole Porter revealed that as their fame increased, all three writers used more first-person singular in both their creative work (song lyrics and stories) and in their private diaries and journals (Schaller, 1997). As this increase took place, so did an increase in self-destructive behaviors (e.g., excessive drinking) and depression (and for Cobain, an eventual suicide).

A version of the widely used text-analysis software designed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis is available to play with online, for free (if you don’t mind contributing to their corpus with your sample) at http://www.liwc.net. (The current version counts words that refer to sex, eating, or religion, too.) For what it’s worth, I’d offer that the delightful blog Dear Thyroid is a perfect example of what therapeutic-writing exercises can offer, and if I weren’t averse to pasting in stuff that doesn’t belong to me, I’d run some of that stuff through LIWC just to see what it says.

Certainly, there is no lack of evidence or research supporting the argument that certain types of writing are beneficial to mental health, even if the longevity and universal applicability of those benefits might be debatable. The Scientific American article I wrote about last time suggested that depression, in itself, is an evolutionary advantage that should perhaps not be thought of (or treated) as a mental disorder. A week ago, the New York Times ran an article about the anxious mind that seemed to resonate with the ideas described in the Scientific American piece; as Robin Marantz Henig relates,

“Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety . . . “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

In view of all of these things, here’s what I think about all of this, finally: Depression probably offers a greater benefit to writing than writing does to depression. Contrary to the arguments expressed in the articles I wrote about in my previous post, analytical rumination may be better for your writing than it is for you. For Virginia Woolf, it was “the shock-receiving capacity” that made her a writer; it didn’t make her a happy person, it didn’t make her well-adjusted, but it did (by her account) make her see things more clearly, and she was able to bring that clarity of vision to her work. A high threshold for “shock” is perhaps the only way to explain how she could weather the eleven turbulent years (beginning, for her, at age thirteen) that brought the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother. I think it’s safe to suggest, with regard to extreme emotional disturbance, that the endgame of analytical rumination may be to say, essentially, “This insoluble problem is an integral part of who I am; and to the extent that I am happy with that, the trauma has a reason for being, and I accept it.” Such is adaptation.

Two weeks ago, over the text “near-unspeakable questions,” I linked to a four-word question in “A Sketch of the Past” that I think about a lot, and which appears in the below excerpt:

If to be aware of the insecurity of life, to remember something gone, to feel now and then, overwhelmingly, . . . a passionate fumbling fellowship—if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, by fits and starts —if, if, if—. But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St. Ives, the rush and tumble of family life?. . . . would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and skeptical of the family—? Perhaps to have remained in the family, believing in it, accepting it, as we should, without those two deaths, would have given us greater scope, greater variety, and certainly greater confidence. On the other hand, I can put another question: Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously, and giving us a job which they would not have thought it worthwhile to give—say, the Booths or the Milmans. . . . So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality.

The “near-unspeakable” question is a matter of examining consequences and asking whether one would (albeit impossibly) substitute that Thing so terrible that one wishes it never happened, that Thing that forges a person, for something easier, for a life taken less seriously. Perhaps to catch oneself unwilling to substitute that trauma for the blithe “rush and tumble” is to catch oneself confessing preference for the trauma (and the hard-won wisdom that comes with it). It might mean thinking such admittedly complicated and disturbing things as, for example, “It is good that I was abused,” “It is good that I have lost my loved ones,” or, paraphrasing Mizuta Masahide, “It is good that my house has burned down. Now I can see the moon.”