A lot has been written in contemporary psychoanalysis about the need to free ourselves from strict theory and technique in favor of the process of the moment to moment experience of two people intimately engaged in the collaborative construction of relationship and of meaning, primarily for the patient’s benefit. I was pleasantly struck to find the same ideas about uncertainty, spontaneity, surprise, and surrender in the process of one author’s writing.
Listen to what George Saunders, author of the critically acclaimed and New York Times best-selling novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), tells Jeffrey Brown on the Newshour Bookshelf (March 28, 2017) about the process of writing: “The holiest state is to be a little confused by what you are doing and you are guided by the energy that the story is actually giving you as it is revised. That’s kind of tricky because it means you have to abandon your ideas about organization or thematics and really submit [surrender] to the story… and hopefully it will result in some new mode of beauty.”
I thought it aptly put. (He is a wordsmith after all.)
By the way, Saunders additionally said in the same interview that he was inspired by Lincoln who had somehow been able to “transform... sorrow into a kind of expanding empathy for everybody” and whose “response to fear or hardship was expansiveness instead of shrinkage.” Were that we all were so heroic.
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