ABSTRACT
In first-person writing, just as in psychoanalysis, the subject tries to construct a narrative that comes as close as possible to matching who they think they are or would like to be. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas suggests that the future—future selves and states of mind—arise through a process of evocation. In psychoanalytic terms, the individual knows of its existence primarily in relation to the other. Adam Philips suggests: "Psychoanalysis as theory and therapy, can never be useful—despite Sigmund Freud's commitment to the progressivism of Science—as a way of putting us closer to the Truth". Psychoanalysis, Malcolm Bowie writes, "is overwhelmingly concerned with the production and transformation of meaning. In human terms, the remembered self and the imagined self are equally flawed and equally true. Dorothea Brande's book Becoming a Writer sheds light on the writing process but, more importantly, on what it is to be a writer.
