ABSTRACT
Anxiety that investigating the "psychic placenta" which metabolises fleeting ideas and filters emotion would render it insufficient, failing to nourish the "baby" or to rid the womb of its waste products. If writing provides access to happenings beyond our own experience, it also provides intimate access to an author's mind. Good writing is embedded in reading good books. As Susan Sontag claimed "to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading". So if writing grants freedom to sky-glide, it carries dangers beyond suddenly falling flat on one's face. As suggested, writing offers a form of verbal processing that may draw on early carer–child reflective–digestive work. Writing straddles a continuum from intimate contemplation in a personal journal to something intended for select social media or indiscriminate distribution.
