ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his book On Private Madness, Andre Green (1986) ruminates on why he writes. Apart from the obvious reasons that he gleaned from his own analysis, Green states that fundamentally he has no choice: his writing is driven by his own sublimated urges. In my case, the answer is much less clear. While those who know me intimately will af®rm that I use intellectual pursuits, especially reading, in a sublimating manner, my relationship with writing is much more tortured. It seems that I write to seek answers, but the act of writing is so fraught with resistance that it would appear that I have a strong aversion to whatever truths I might ®nd. Ironically, I ®nd my work as analyst and professor performative and vivifying. It is only in the totally solitary act of writing, in which my mirror image gazes back at me from the screen of my computer, that I face an inner emptiness that paralyzes me.
